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

Re:Finally.

[t0qer]

I use truespace, I hear a lot of people say that has a "unneccesarily obtuse and convoluted interface." For some reason it just sat right with me.

Same thing when it came to blender. After understanding the keyboard shortcuts I was able to create objects, animate them, and add in particle effects.

UI design is wholy dependant on the programmers abilities and their knowledge of UI design. I don't think 3D manipulation and rendering of objects in realtime has any real "defined" widget set yet. Because there is no "Law" for designing UI for the 3D we usually end up with all these whacky interfaces. You just have to hope your userbase's minds can hum along with it.