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Blender Conference Closes, Version 2.3 Released
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."
Here are a couple of animations
Stuff by EnV
and
Mindfields by @ndy
Would have been real nice if the Blender guys had put links in the news page. Check out the forums at elysiun for the quality of work that some of the Blender artists are producing. Also check out what Landis is doing.
Cheers from a happy but untalented Blenderhead.
Zambuka
Coming from a fellow web designer and former 3D computer graphic art student, the simple answer is that 3D is far more complicated than 2D web pages. That 3rd dimension adds so much more to work with and think about. Add to that the fact that you are working with 3 dimensions (4, if you animate) on a 2 dimensional display, and the situation becomes even more convoluted. It is not like sculpting, where you can hold the object and intuitively work with it.
That said, the simplist 3D package I have found is Bryce. Mostly geared towards landscapes, but you can create simple objects. This would probably be your best bet for an "INCREDIBLY simple" 3D package. However, be forwarned that there is still a bit of a learning curve to 3D in general...
The online documentation was no help, either, namely because there is none.
Did you bother to check out the quickstart part of the blender3d.org? You don't like the tutorials there? Checking out the oldsite tutorials won't harm you either.. I remember learning tons of stuff from the community written ones, this was something like 1.6 version at that time.
By the way, your post sounds a bit too much like troll.. There's no way you couldn't see that bar in the top of the window where you've got "File" etc.. Or then you just stared at it and screamed "fuck this doesn't look like 3dsmax at all!" and killed it through task manager..
Thanks for your time,
-rzei
Wow verse finally hit slashdot...
So what is verse?
Verse is a network protocol that is designed to let any apps talk to each other in real-time over a IP network. So if one app changes the data all other apps gets the changes sent to them in real-time. This means that multiple apps, people and developers can collaborate. its all Free BSD and portable.
Verse support can be given both existing and new applications.
It has been around for quite some time. I and i friend was hired to write verse a few years back. (at II) it is one of few apps written from the ground up as open source and the people who wrote it got funded to do it.
Verse used to be on source forge but is now living on at blender.org
Loq Airou, Nil salentinn, and connector are very recently added apps and you can find some screen shots here and here
Ton (head of the blender foundation) wants to base Blender 3 on verse technology.
E
If you're wanting non-curved shapes (architectural models especially) I do believe sketchup might be what you're after. The interface is even better than they say it is.
The link is to a 2 year old verse site. The new releases can be found at: http://www.blender.org/modules/verse/
Blender is open source at its best; highly polished, cross-platform.
Yes, it is.
It's a pity that this slashdot news story was not properly verified by the editors as Blender 2.3 is not yet released. The submitter was really referring to the recently released preview of Blender 2.3 which people will be finding it slightly buggy whilst now expecting it to be a final release.
This would be a shame because since Blender was bought by the community and became open source, it's development has accelerated and moved in a direction that, as with all open source software, is highly influenced by the needs of it's community.
One of the main criticisms of Blender was that it's power was masked by an unintuitive interface that was very inconsistent. Most features were designed to be activated by the keyboard, as opposed to through the GUI, and that confused most people new to Blender who were unfamiliar with the keyboard shortcuts.
So the Blender community set about a rethink of the user interface. The proposal is well thought out, well planned, and well documented. And from what I have seen of the 2.3 preview release, the final 2.3 release will be a brilliant piece of software.
Really, the commercial 3d development studio vendors should start getting worried.
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