Blender 2.79 released
Yet again I&#x27;m amazed by blenders progress. I&#x27;ve been a &#x27;hobby 3d artist&#x27; for the past decade and find it incredibly useful in my full time job (front end dev). Blender to me is a shining example of an open source project that seems to constantly improve and give the proprietary apps like 3ds max and maya a run for their money.<p>While the learning curve for blender can be fairly steep, once you get over that hump, it&#x27;s an absolute joy to use. A lot of people struggle with the UI, but once you &#x27;get it&#x27;, it becomes an incredibly fluid and well thought out interface. It still has it&#x27;s quirks, but as far as 3D packages go, the UI is actually really great.<p>This update adds lots of things that I have been waiting for. Shadow catchers with cycles has always been possible, but it required a fairly obtuse method to get there. The denoiser for cycles as well in an incredibly nice feature and works incredibly well. The PBR shader is also a real joy to use. Coupled with a decent set of textures, PBR shaders make shading a seriously fun activity. Although it&#x27;s nothing new (in the industry) it&#x27;s really nice to have it in blender.<p>A real asset to any designers toolkit.