How to Install Blender 2.74 in Ubuntu 14.04/Linux Mint 17

A new stable release of the professional free and open-source 3D graphics software, Blender 2.74, was announced by the Blender Foundation and the online developer community a few days ago at the end of March.

Here are the release highlights according to the release note:

• Cycles got several precision, noise, speed, memory improvements, new Pointiness attribute.
• Viewport has new cool compositing features, outliner now manages orphan datablocks better.
• Modeling now allows custom normals, and transferring data layers between meshes!
• Massive improvements to hair dynamics and editing tools: a big step forward with more to come…
• A new tool “Cavity Mask” was added to sculpting/painting, along with other improvements.
• Great memory consumption optimization in Freestyle NPR stroke rendering.
• Grease pencil and Game engine improvements, and more

For a complete list of changes, refers to blender website.

Install / Upgrade to Blender 2.74 in Ubuntu:

For Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 14.10, Linux Mint 17, you can either install Blender 2.74 from the official Linux binary (portable) or install it from a third-party PPA.

To install Blender from the official package:

1. Download Blender at: www.blender.org/download
2. Install the required library libsdl1.2debian from Ubuntu Software Center.
3. Unpack Blender archive and run executable from in result folder to launch the program.

To install blender from PPA:

Open terminal from the Dash or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard. When it opens, run below commands one by one:

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

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install blender

This installs Blender as well as an App Launcher in your system.