Blender 2.79b

Blender 2.48 includes all the work done on the Blender Game Engine and the Apricot Open Game "Yo Frankie!", with much better functioning game logic editing, character animation, and Blender Material based real-time shaders. And as last minute surprise a Bullet physics update with Softbody support.

We also included a lot of new development in this release; Windows 64 bits support, Grease Pencil for sketching annotations, Sun/Sky/Atmosphere rendering, new modifiers, and an improved text editor with Python API support. And last but not least, an enormous list of open bug reports were handled.

* SSS now works with panorama render.
* Removed artifacts with negative lights when using SSS
* Disabled SSS for preview rendering, so it didn't slow down other preview render at all.
* Fixed error in "Transform Constraint" with planar constraints when the plane was perpendicular to the viewport.
* Fixed the vector blur error in "Ztransp" that produce black lines (on edges) appeared, which didn't get blurred away.
* Fixed an error in the Particle System that cause bad results for command line renders, especially when rendering first frame of animation.
* Fixed Verse crashing in 64 bits Linux.
* Math node now has reflective behavior.
* Multires meshes with UV's and vertex colors would crash in many cases.
* Importing 3DS files with lamps failed.
* DXF Importer updated, includes stable support for 3d objects and blocks hierarchy.
* FBX Exporter updated, includes fixes for better compatibility with other applications and support for exporting animation with armature deformed meshes and objects.
* Collada support updated for better armature support.
* Bundled python modules were not included in 2.44 by accident, making some scripts fail in 2.44 that worked in 2.43 (Windows Only, when Python was not installed)
* Fixed bug in the shadow calculation that cause errors where specularity would ignore shadows.
* Changes to the insert keyframes method for determining when to replace existing keyframes with new ones. Now, it shouldn't create so many keyframes stacked on top of each other.
* Blender would crash if boolean operations were done on objects wich resulted in an empty mesh. This was due to accessing invalid memory.
* Remove the options "make local" in the Outliner. It didnt work properly and produced errors in the linked data.
* Edgesplit crashes are fixed, the problem was that "bridge" vertices (which connect two or more faces that don't share edges) were not being included in the maximum final vertex count calculation (used for memory allocation, hence the crashes).
* Fixed Multires Editmode memory leak. Typo in Multires Editmode integration meant that far too much memory was getting allocated for a pointer array (more than 10 times as much).

Blender 2.44 was intended to be an upgrade release, mainly for plenty of bug fixes, but the developers took the effort adding at least a few interesting new features.

This version now is fully 64 bits compatible, new modifiers were added, a couple of composite nodes were added, and a revamp of the old mesh primitives was done. But most relevant to mention is Blender 2.44's new long-awaited but unexpected feature: subsurface scattering (SSS) support!

The upcoming 2.44 release is an upgrade for 2.43, with mostly two months of fixing reported problems and a couple of nice new features, of which two are worth mentioning now:

* 64 bits safe code and files
* SSS subsurface scatter render