Blender Conference Closes, Version 2.3 Released

Qbertino writes "The 3-day Blender Conference 2003 has closed as of last Sunday. It was a successful one, with the front line of open source 3D people attending, such as Eskil Steenberg introducing his Verse Virtual Collaboration Server and giving talks and insights into the low-level details of Verse and programs accompanying it, such as his high-end full-range color-correction tool Nil, Loq Airou, the 3D Sketchpad and Connector, a Server monitor/server-app-debugger for Verse. All with over the top OpenGL-accelerated user interfaces. An impressive set of avant garde software engineering indeed. GPLd, of course. Almost one and a half hours of exceptional blender artwork and animations were presented, along with the nominated Suzanne Awards 2003 entries. Results can be seen here." Read on for some more details from the conference.

Qbertino continues: "The cool stuff and cool people I've met are so numerous I get dizzy even trying to sum them up. Notable for all should be the conference release of Blender, Version 2.3. A major release with, among other improvements and updates, a serious redo on essential parts of the interface. At last: No more cliff-wall learning 'curve.' Blender n00bs rejoice! An interesting piece of conference buzz was the entire development team of Newtek/Lightwave defecting and founding their own company with a flagship 3D Subsurf modeler called 'modo'. It sports an interface arguably influenced by Blender and advertised as the hottest GUI-thing since sliced bread. Talk about ripping of the OSS community and not giving credit where credit due ... We were ranting about this, but Ton Roosendahl of Blender fame himself was pleased to see his baby inspiring the industry. We'll beat them all with 3.0 anyway. :-) Get the new original here. And go easy on those servers ... err ... forget it."

Comments

"arguably influenced"? No way.

[vaccum pony]

O.K. I'll argue. Pre-2.3 Blender UI = SUCK. Modo announced a few months ago along with screenshots. "arguably influenced"? No way. When I used to create plug-ins for Lightwave (4.0 - 5.5 era LW), I used to bitch about the UI considerably. I was hardly the only one. Those fine programmers are now free to break away from the LW conventions. The images you linked to show Modo sporting UI organization along the lines of 3ds max and Maya and Lightwave. Where is the Blender-like UI organization? It's not there. No one bothered to mock-up Blender's UI because it simply isn't worth it. The Luxology crowd is NOT ripping off the OSS community. In fact, one could argue that Blender is ripping off the innovations of YEARS and YEARS of commercial 3D application development. Of course, I wouldn't go so far as to say that (since god knows the commercial 3D app companies rip each other off). Get off the party whine. Oops, I meant Line.