The Blender Foundation finally announced the stable release for Blender 2.77 this weekend.

The new release features:

• Cycles Rendering has better Subsurface Scattering, GPU support for Smoke/Fire and Point Density, and a few other features and optimizations.
• User Interface has faster OpenGL rendering and better Anti-Aliasing, and other improvements
• Modeling now has an edit-mode boolean tool, better decimate modifier, selection tools
• Sequencer has a Gaussian Blur effect speedup, and other strip and modifier improvements
• Sculpting/Painting has better extruding and weight painting tools
• Animation has a new constraint interpolation method, and improvements in graph editor, dope sheet, armatures and motion paths
• Grease pencil now has stroke sculpting, and several other workflow improvements
• Library handling has been improved to better manage missing and deleted datablocks
• Game Engine has a few new small features
• A new Add-on supports packing .blend files and their dependencies, some other IO Add-on was improved, and Python was upgraded
• OpenVDB caching is now supported for smoke/volumetric simulations, multithreading is now massively
• supported, and also 2D stabilization node, Image editor, Cubemap and spotlights were improved
• Support for Windows XP was removed, and the SCons build system too.
• And, as usual, a massive bug fixing!
• Read more at its features page.

Blender 2.77 Splash

How to Install Blender 2.77 in Ubuntu:

Blender 2.77 can be installed via either the official Linux binary, or a third-party PPA for better Ubuntu integration.

1. See this how-to to install blender via official Linux binary. Need to remove the previous installation first.

2. To install Blender 2.77 from PPA.

1.) Open terminal from App Launcher, or via Ctrl+Alt+T keys. When it opens, paste below command and hit run:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:thomas-schiex/blender

2.) Then upgrade Blender by launching Software Updater.

Or install it by running the commands one by one in terminal:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install blender

Blender, a professional free and open-source 3D graphics software, has reached the 2.76b release. The ‘b’ release brings a few bugfixes to the 2.76 release which was released a month ago.

For Blender 2.76 new features see HERE, and the 2.76b fixed:

• Crash generating previews
• crash with metas & particles
• Select linked crash with wire seam edges

Install / Upgrade Blender via PPA:

Besides installing from the official binary manually, you can install Blender and receive future updates using a PPA repository.

Thomas Schiex is maintaining a PPA with latest Blender packages, support for Ubuntu 15.10 and Ubuntu 14.04 so far. Follow below steps to add PPA and install/upgrade Blender.

1. Add PPA.

NOTE: As an unofficial PPA, you may first check the PPA page for the current Blender packages and supported Ubuntu editions.

Open terminal from Unity Dash, App Launcher, or via Ctrl+Alt+T shortcut key. When it opens, run below command to add PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:thomas-schiex/blender

Type your password when it asks (type in mind and hit enter, there’s no display when typing password).

2. If you have a previous installed via Ubuntu Software Center or PPA, launch Software Updater and upgrade Blender after checking for updates.

Or, install it via Software Center (check updates needed), Synaptic Package Manager, or via commands:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install blender

 
This simple tutorial is going to show you how to install the Blender 2.70 in Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 12.10 via PPA repository.

At the moment, Blender 2.70 is at its second release candidate. New features include initial support for volumetrics in Cycles, and faster rendering of hair and textures. The motion tracker now supports weighted tracks and has improved planar tracking. For mesh modeling there are new Laplacian deform and wireframe modifiers, along with more control in the bevel tool. The game engine now supports object levels of detail.

The first results from the new user interface project are also in this release, with dozens of changes to make the interface more consistent and powerful. This is also the first release of the multithreaded dependency graph, which makes modifier and constraint evaluation faster in scenes with multiple objects. See the release note.

Install Blender 2.70

The IRIE Shinsuke’s PPA contains the 2.70 RC builds for all current support Ubuntu releases. You’ll be able to upgrade to the Blender 2.70 stable version via this PPA when it’s released.

To do so, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, run the commands below one by one to add the PPA, update system and install or upgrade the software.

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:irie/blender

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install blender

That’s it. Enjoy!

Blender 2.69, the latest stable release of the popular 3D creation software finally is available for Ubuntu & Linux Mint via PPA one week after Blender 2.69 was official announced.

What’s New in Blender 2.69:

Modeling:

A new hidden wire display option was added to help with retopology. Mesh Bisect is a new tool to cut meshes in half. The Bridge, Edgenet fill, Grid fill and Symmetrize tools were improved. New curve and lattice editing tools were added too.

Cycles Rendering:

Hair rendering was improved with a new Hair shader and reorganized settings. Subsurface scattering uses a new sampling algorithm and now supports bump mapping and texture blurring. Sky rendering now uses a more accurate sky model. New blackbody, vector transform and HSV nodes were added. The non-progressive integrator was renamed to Branched Path Integrator, and is now available for GPU rendering.

Motion Tracker:

The Motion tracker now supports plane tracking, which can be used to replace billboards, screens and other flat things in footage.

More Features:

Lists in the user interface can now be resized, sorted and filtered. Further there are small improvements for vertex parenting, empty objects, the shrinkwrap modifier, mask editing, armatures, f-curves and drivers.

Addons:

FBX Import support has been added and FBX/OBJ can now export split normals (without the need for the edge split modifier).

Bug Fixes:

In addition to the new features, over 270 bugs that existed in previous releases have been fixed.

Install or Upgrade Blender 2.69:

The PPA has updated for Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy, Ubuntu 13.04 Raring, Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal, Ubuntu 12.04 Precise, Linux Mint 13/14/15/16.

PPA now works for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 14.10 and Linux Mint 17 / 17.1.

To get started, press Ctrl+Alt+T on your keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run commands below one by one:

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:thomas-schiex/blender

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install blender

NOTE that the packages doesn’t include pre-compiled CUDA kernel. If you want to use the Cycles renderer with CUDA support, you have to install the CUDA toolkit on your system to do runtime compilation of the CUDA kernel:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-cuda-toolkit

blender 2.69 in ubuntu 13.10