Blender 2.79 Release Notes

The Blender Foundation and online developer community are proud to present Blender 2.79!

In this release:

Cycles: Built-in Denoising, Shadow catcher, Principled shader, AMD OpenCL optimizations.

Grease Pencil: New frame interpolation tools, per-layer onion skinning.

Alembic: Improvements to compatibility, stability and support.

User Interface: Initial support for reusable custom configurations, automatic DPI scaling.

Twenty Three new and several updated add-ons.

And: 100s of bug fixes and other improvements!

This corrective release does not add any new feature. It brings a huge amount of fixes (over 200, from real bugs to potential security issues). And some performance enhancements, mostly in threaded code (e.g. in mesh normal and tangent space computation, in SubSurf modifier).

It aims at making Blender 2.79 even more robust and reliable while most of the development effort is focused on the next version, Blender 2.8.

This corrective release only fixes a few serious bugs/regressions introduced in 2.79a fixes.





Compatibility Warning

Due to various issues with drivers for AMD GCN 1.0 architecture, those cards are no longer supported for Cycles rendering

When using add-ons in Blender 2.79 that take advantage of the new data-block pointer properties, the resulting .blend files can't be opened in earlier versions of Blender. Attempting to open such .blend files in Blender 2.78c and earlier may crash.

Some Interface Themes may need to be reloaded to work properly.

The text color contained in a layout.box() is now defined in User Preferences >> Themes >> User Interface >> Box section

is now defined in section Rig compatibility: Changes to bbone easing break forward compatibility (i.e. rigs using this feature saved in 2.79 won't behave correctly when loaded in older versions, see D2796). Changes to IK snapping may affect rigs that use non-uniform IK scaling. (rigs created in the 2.78 builds.)

During the 2.78 series: IK snapping was partly broken. This has been fixed for Blender 2.79 Rigs created in Blender 2.78 may not be compatible with 2.79. Rigs created in Blender 2.77 may still work.

When using the add-on Rigify, please note: Compatibility is broken for this release. There's no guarantee rigs created in previous Blender versions will work correctly. Rigs created in Blender 2.78 may not be compatible with 2.79. Rigs created in Blender 2.77 may still work. Save your work before attempting upgrading your rigs.







Denoising built into the renderer.

Principled BSDF shader to render a wide variety of materials.

Shadow catcher to composite CGI elements in real-life footage.

Faster AMD OpenCL rendering and feature parity with NVidia CUDA.

Filmic color management for better handling of high dynamic range.





Application templates to define a reusable configuration.

Automatic scaling for high DPI displays on Windows on Linux.

Reorganized sequencer and UV editor panels.

Custom shortcuts for keyframing and drivers.





New tools for interpolating between grease pencil frames.

Per-layer onion skinning, add blank frame tool, and UI improvements.





Alembic import and export has been greatly improved, both in compatibility and stability.

New supported features include export of linked dupli-groups, sub-frame sampling, face-varying vertex colors, child hairs and empties.





New surface deform modifier, to transfer motion from another mesh.

Improved displace and mirror modifiers.

Various small new tools and options.





Pose library reordering and keying for selected bones only.

Better undo for frame changes.

Various small new tools and options.





Video encoding settings have been simplified, along with the addition of a Constant Rate Factor (CRF) mode.

Blender render and GLSL viewport support for object info, layer weight and Fresnel shading nodes.





Custom properties pointing to data-blocks like objects or materials.

Render engine add-ons can now add custom render passes.

Inserting custom items in right click menus.





New : Dynamic Sky, Archipack, Magic UV, Mesh Edit Tools, Skinify, Display Tools, Brush Menus, Btrace, Is Key Free, Turnaround Camera, Auto Mirror, Camera Rigs, Snap Utils Line, Add Advanced Objects, Export Paper Model, Kinoraw Tools, Stored Views, Render Clay, Auto Tracker, Refine Tracking Solution, Materials Library VX, Mesh Tissue, Cell Fracture Crack It.

: Dynamic Sky, Archipack, Magic UV, Mesh Edit Tools, Skinify, Display Tools, Brush Menus, Btrace, Is Key Free, Turnaround Camera, Auto Mirror, Camera Rigs, Snap Utils Line, Add Advanced Objects, Export Paper Model, Kinoraw Tools, Stored Views, Render Clay, Auto Tracker, Refine Tracking Solution, Materials Library VX, Mesh Tissue, Cell Fracture Crack It. Updated : Collada, POV-Ray, OBJ, Rigify, Ant Landscape, Add Curve Extra Objects, Viewport Pie Menus, Blender ID, Node Wrangler.

: Collada, POV-Ray, OBJ, Rigify, Ant Landscape, Add Curve Extra Objects, Viewport Pie Menus, Blender ID, Node Wrangler. Various fixes and improvements across the board.





As for every Blender release, hundreds of bugs were fixed, thanks to the hardworking Blender developers.



