Blender 2.74 + Portable

• Several improvements for BVH like making it watertight, solving several precision issues and reducing noise

Optimizations:
• Black world backgrounds are now removed from the shader graph, resulting in great speed improvements
• Various (and great!) memory optimizations

Nodes:
• New Pointiness attribute for the Geometry node
• Control texture space of one object by another

User Interface

• New Viewport Compositing brings Ambient Occlusion and Depth of Field right into the Viewport!
• View-depth can now be picked using an Eyedropper

Outliner:
• An Orphaned Data-blocks Mode was added for data-block management
• Deleting of entire object hierarchies
• Drag&Drop objects to groups

• The Node Editor can now show text-blocks in frames
• Customizable camera safe areas

Modeling

• Custom normals with transfer data rings.png
• Support for Custom Normals was added
• Transferring data layers between meshes is now possible thanks to a new Mesh Data Transfer operator and modifier

Tools:
• UV handling for Edge- and Vertex Slide was improved
• Inverse-square blending for proportional-edit-mode
• "Fit Camera View" now works for orthographic cameras as well
• A "Split Concave Faces" tool to ensure a convex geometry was added

Particles

• Hair dynamics and editing tools were improved massively:
• Support for hair collission with meshes
• Simulation now happens using volumetric calculations for more realistic results
• Strand bending uses a more realistic approach
• Controlling of child hair shapes using curve widgets
• New "Spiral" kink mode to generate spirals at hair ends
• Toggle buttons for render and viewport visibility were added to the particle settings in the Properties Editor

Sculpting/Painting

Brushes/Strokes:
• Improvements to rake and random mapping
• Line strokes now support constrains to 45 degree increments

Texture Painting:
• Support for dithering for painting on byte images
• A new tool "Cavity Mask" was added that creates masks based on mesh cavities or hills

Freestyle NPR Rendering

• A great memory consumption optimization in stroke rendering was done

Animation

Grease Pencil:
• New Editing tools like copy & paste strokes, duplicating active layer, ...
• Enable eraser on the fly while drawing with "Continuous Drawing"
• Various UI tweaks such as color swatches for Stroke and Fill colors
• Grease Pencil data layers are now shown in the Outliner

• Improvements to the action management to reduce the cases where unused actions are deleted
• Pasting keyframes can now be done flipped
• Using a new "Follow" option, the animation editors can now follow the time indicator

Game Engine

Physics:
• The first contact point of colliding can now be accessed from Python
• Usability improvements

• New option "Lock Z Velocity" to avoid micro-jumping

Add-ons

• A new Auto Tile Size Add-on helps setting up the fastest tile size for Cycles rendering
• Import images as planes now works for Cycles as well
• POV-Ray Renderer now supports volumetric rendering
• FBX and OBJ now support custom normals import
• New Python API functions

More Features

• There are a lot more features that are new in Blender 2.74, so make sure to check them out!

Feature Videos

• Have a look at some of the above mentioned features in the demo videos made by the Blender community. Here you will also find the Developer Sneak Peak series - a video podcast series that showcases important milestones in the development of every Blender release.

Bug Fixes

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