Blender 2.79b

* Cycles Rendering
- Cycles now includes support for rendering volume textures, fire and smoke, deformation motion blur, baking textures from cycles materials, more texture interpolation modes and a dedicated UV layer node.
* Animation
- More easing equations added to the IPO editor for better animation control, locking time to other windows is again possible, auto snapping is now independent from display type.
- The user interface now offers more feedback, especially on errors, updates driver expressions automatically on editing, includes more icons and offers more editing tools.
- New tools also include lasso selection support, non-linked duplication for strips, and setting preview range based on selected strips.
* Modelling
- The new per-face normals feature allows blender to display and export sharp edges correctly without geometry duplication.
- In addition, selection tools offer more options.
* Sculpting/Painting
- New features include a HSL color wheel for color selection and tools to handle homogenous density in dynamic topology sculpting.
- Dyntopo and matcap display for sculpt mode have also had performance optimizations.
* Game Engine
- UI to deactivate logic bricks, multi-threaded animations, shadows-only materials and more action layers are among the new features for the game engine
* Freestyle NPR Rendering
- Freestyle has been upgraded with textured stroke support. Textured stroke support makes it possible to apply patterns to the lines and simulate rough surfaces or different kinds of brush tips for the strokes themselves.
- Line sorting also gives artists more control over the order of line drawing
* User Interface
- Interface features include new icons for texture painting, resizeable preview widgets and draggable popups.
* More Features
- More control for curve bevelling, explicit shadow cast control for blender internal materials, new distortion model for motion tracking and better handles for mask editors.
* Feature Videos
- Look at many of the above features in the Blender Developer Sneak Peeks - a video podcast series that showcases important milestones in the development of every Blender release.
* Addons
* Bug Fixes

* Cycles Rendering
- Cycles now has initial support for volume rendering including emission, absorption and scattering. Volume rendering can be used to render effects like fire, smoke, mist, absorption in glass, and many other effects that can't be represented by surface meshes alone. CPU rendering performance was improved, particularly for hair, textures and Open Shading Language.
* Motion Tracker
- Trackers can now be weighted, to keep the result stable as feature disappear or become difficult to track. The plane track workflow was improved to be easier to control. Automatic feature detection was made more robust using a new detector algorithm.
* User Interface
- The toolbar now has tabs to organize tools in categories. Multiple buttons can now be edited at once, for example for XYZ axes or color channels. Transform tools now have a mode to enter expressions and units. Other changes were done to improve lists, header menus, tooltips, buttons, menus and more.
* Modeling
- The Laplacian Deform modifier was added to pose a mesh while preserving geometric details of the surface, and a new wireframe modifier allows you transform your mesh into a wireframe representation. The boolean modifier now supports ngons, and there are improvements to the bevel, screw and triangulate modifiers. The bevel tool now offers more control over the bevel profile and results, and the knife tool was improved as well.
* Threaded Dependency Graph
- An important change that happened under the hood is the threaded dependency graph. This means that object modifiers and constraints, among other things, can now be computed with multiple threads taking advantage of multicore processors. This will be most noticeable with scenes that have many objects, or multiple objects with heavy modifiers. This is the first step in making the dependency graph in Blender more powerful.
* Game Development
- The Blender game engine now supports discrete level of detail for meshes. For game developers, support for working with Photoshop PSD files has been added. A new view navigation walk mode has been added, which has a control scheme as typically found in first person shooter games. This can be useful for game developers to navigate levels as if in a game.
* Freestyle NPR Rendering
- The Freestyle Python API is an essential part that makes it a highly programmable NPR rendering engine. This API has been reorganized.
* More Features
- Many small changes and features were done all over Blender. Some notable new feature are normalized display for FCurves, derivative map baking, baking to vertex colors, better visualization of masks and control over mask filling, gravity option for sculpting, negative texture values to support vector displacement and a Lamp Data shading node to create more customized NPR shaders.
* Feature Videos
- For a visual demonstration of some of the new features in this release, check out the feature videos created during the development of this release.
* Addons
- Several addons have been added and updated, including Node Wrangler (aka Node Efficiency Tools) and a new Sketchfab Exporter addon
* Bug Fixes
- In addition to the new features, over 560 bugs that existed in previous releases have been fixed.

* Modeling
- Improved bridge tool to bridge multiple loops at once, subdivision, surface blending and bridging face regions. New grid-fill tool filling a grid from edge loops, X mirror and projected proportional editing, snap to symmetry, face split option for dissolve, vertex connect cut across faces.
* Cycles Render
- Rendering performance has been improved on CPU and GPU and support for new GPUs was added. A new Mist render pass is available, Ray visibility is now supported for all light sources, and new Nodes have been added. Hair rendering on the GPU has been enabled as well.
* Physics
- Smoke has improved rendering quality avoid blockiness, and subframe simulation support to handle fast moving emitters. Particles can now be emitted from faces generated by modifiers that were not in the original mesh.
* Motion Tracker
- Some new features and smaller improvements to existing ones were done for motion tracking.
* Usability
- Improved weight painting tools, mask modifier for sequencer strips, 2D image paint more consistent with 3D painting, better key shortcuts display, quick enabling and disabling of multiple layers or visibility, auto indent for multi-line Python statements
* Python Security
- Auto-running Python scripts can now be controlled more securely.
* Addons
- New addons are Texture Atlas to bake shadow and lightmaps for an entire scene, and Edit Linked Library, for quick editing of linked assets.
* Bug fixes
- In addition to the new features, over 280 bugs that existed in previous releases have been fixed.

# Freestyle
* Freestyle is a new non-photorealistic (NPR) rendering engine integrated
# Paint System
* The stroke system and brush texture access has been unified and as a result there are many more tools now shared across paint modes.
# Motion Tracker
* Camera and object motion solver motion are much more accurate and faster because the Ceres library is used now for the bundle adjustment step. In addition the tripod solver is finally fixed and has become usable for longer footage.
# Compositing
* Added border for compositor viewer node, which restricts what is to be composited for faster previews. Also border rendering and cropping are finally working as expected.
# 3D Printing
* An addon to help with 3d printing is now bundled as well as a new ruler tool and mesh-analysis display attributes such as thickness, sharp-areas and distortion.
# Node Editor
* Node Groups editing is less cluttered and more consistent with other nodes. Multiple node editor windows can be used independently.
# Cycles Render
* A Subsurface Scattering shader is now available, to create materials such as Wax, Marble or Skin.
# Python Nodes
* The API now supports custom node types. Nodes can be defined and registered in python scripts like other UI classes.
# Tools
* New mesh modeling tools: Individual Face Inset, Poke Face and Knife Project. Faster image display in the image and movie clip editors. Better support for UTF-8 text in the text and console editors, and various improvements to other editors.
# Addons
* New addons are the node efficiency tools and VRML2 export.
# Bug fixes