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Blender 2.35 Released

Posted by timothy on from the still-free dept.

meestaplu writes "After several months of development work, Blender 2.35, the latest version of an open source professional 3D modeling, rendering, and animation program has been released. The new version adds a full undo system, better mesh modeling, curve deformations, and many bugfixes. The program boasts an active user community at Elysiun.com, where new users are sure to find the help they need. Development happens at Blender.org."

29 comments

  1. Curve deformations? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    A.K.A. "biting shiny metal asses"? Oh, wait, you said Blender...

  2. Donations by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Ya know, I'd love to give some money to this project, but I could never figure out which button actually submitted the donation.

  3. full undo? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Finally....

    Now if only there was a way to switch it between windowed and fullscreen mode... from within blender. Well, actually, running it in windowed mode then letting the kde kwin window manager manage fullscreen works, but windowed mode should be the default.

    I work all the time with GIMP and Blender open at once, people don't even knoq you can do that half the time... because the windowed flag to blender on the command line is so obscure in this day and age of pointy clickiness.

    If you are eternally pissed off by blender's amiga-like-only-without-the-vital-ability-to-flip- screens-to-other-apps fullscreen interface.... just start it with -w.

    P.S. Blender people: why not put a "minimise" button in the top right hand corner even in fullscreen mode that switches off the screen grab and minimises the application in the usual fashion.

    1. Re:full undo? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I can't remember if I could switch to other windows on the same desktop, but you certainly can switch to other desktops to use GIMP or whatever, I used to do that all the time. And frankly, considering Blender has at least 2 (usually 3 or 4) windows, having it in anything but full screen (or maximized) doesn't make much sense.

  4. how to do change the coordinate system ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How do you change the coordinate system -- for example, what if I want the Z axis to point down instead of up or vice versa ? I was dabbling with it and couldn't figure it out.

    1. Re:how to do change the coordinate system ? by thhamm · · Score: 1

      hugh? why? its a right-handed coordinate system. why inverting z without transforming the other dimensions?

    2. Re:how to do change the coordinate system ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Who cares why, can you do it or is it hard wired ?

      You might consider, however, if it has the same coordinate system as other programs people might have learned to "think in", such as that used by AutoCad or ProE.

    3. Re:how to do change the coordinate system ? by sexylicious · · Score: 1

      Maybe to use a left handed coordinate system? There are some transforms that can be performed faster using a left-handed system.

  5. aaaah. by thhamm · · Score: 4, Interesting

    blender. one hand on the mouse, the other one on the keyboard. fastest and easiest modelling ever. it just plain rocks.

    im currently using it with a simple self-written python script to export meshes (with animation) and load them in my opengl app. for free.

    never saw an easier and faster interface (if you get used to it) in any other package.

    i think im using it since version 1.25. sometime 1998 or something. and the original manual is a treasure :) hey i even had bought a C-key! and when they went broke, i got the tutorial book #1 for free, with the cd. mr basic et al.

    greetings ton :)

    1. Re:aaaah. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Hah. blender, one hand holding my new graphic tablet's stylus and the other on the keyboard is the fastest and easiest ever.

      Vertex painting is particularly cool with a tablet+stylus.

    2. Re:aaaah. by thhamm · · Score: 1

      damn. got me. me want tablet too. me want go outside. me want balloon! :)

    3. Re:aaaah. by Bastian · · Score: 1

      I fell in love with Blender back in my Linux days.

      But after I bought a Mac and installed Blender, I discovered that the mouse cursor is very nearly the same color as the background color in the editing windows. After a period of being constantly annoyed at how easy it was to lose the cursor, I ended up giving up.

      Which leads me to ask, has the cursor color changed recently?

    4. Re:aaaah. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I dont know if you can change the cursor color, but you can easily change the background color, in fact i prefer my theme to the default blender theme, makes me a little bit more in control of my 3d world

    5. Re:aaaah. by Per+Wigren · · Score: 1

      You can change mouse cursors with Mighty Mouse. It costs $10 which I think is silly (stuff like this should really be part of the base OS), but it works great.

      --
      My other account has a 3-digit UID.
    6. Re:aaaah. by Bastian · · Score: 1

      Blender draws its own cursor.

  6. my 'pinions by 5cameron · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I love blender. Although I don't really use it. I guess I love the idea of it.

    I'm all about Processing (http://www.processing.org/) these days. Not the same at all, but arguably neater.

    1. Re:my 'pinions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That looks like a cool usable language but I don't understand what they mean by 'open project'. If they aren't making their code availiable to everyone to peruse and contribute then, by definition, it's not open is it?

      sigh.

  7. a real "undo" feature?? by Hex4def6 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Bah.

    Real men don't need an undo feature -- the get it right the first time :)

    In all seriousness, I have been waiting too long for blender to include one -- I know it must have taken a good bit of programming to implement, so kudo's to all those involved with the project.

  8. Blender is cool, but... by Masa · · Score: 2

    I like Blender. And the user interface is so clever and easy to use after a bit of learning.

    My only gripe about the Blender is, that the user interface is so damn slow. I don't understand how it can be so slow. The UI is actually completely unusable in my 1700MHz laptop (with only 256 MB of RAM, I know it's not enough for real work, but still, I expect that the UI would be more responsive).

    Is there any way to speed the UI up, besides buying a faster machine and more memory?

    1. Re:Blender is cool, but... by afd8856 · · Score: 2, Informative

      I was having the same problems with it. It's about the openGL acceleration of your video card. Blender's interface is generated with openGL, so if your card is slow at that, the interface will also be slow. Especially if you have a laptop, as they tend to support opengl poorly.

      --
      I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
    2. Re:Blender is cool, but... by namekuseijin · · Score: 1

      the GUI is made in OpenGL, if i'm not mistaken.

      It makes it very portable. And slower.

      --
      I don't feel like it...
    3. Re:Blender is cool, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Try setting the rt:0 button (in the scene buttons) to 2

    4. Re:Blender is cool, but... by NaveWeiss · · Score: 1

      Did you try changing the color depth? I once had problems with OpenGL because I was in 16-bit color mode, but it got better after I switched to 32-bit. (or it was the opposite?)

      --
      Slashdot community, please notice: I am looking for a girlfriend.
      Nave H. Weiss
    5. Re:Blender is cool, but... by mqRakkis · · Score: 2, Informative
      Also note, from the 2.35 ChangeLog:

      UI drawing

      Live updates of buttons and menus have been recoded to not use frontbuffer drawing anymore, resulting in substantial speedup...
    6. Re:Blender is cool, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Get a decent video card... one with good 3d acceleration, for example.
      Although Blender can be used without 3d hardware, I don't think it makes much sense, you can get a 3d card for almost nothing these days, unless you want a GF FX NT Rage Voodoo 66x800 that becomes obsolete in 6 months.

  9. Unicode support by NaveWeiss · · Score: 1

    The thing that disturbs me a lot in Blender is the lack of unicode support. They use the FreeType library which does support unicode, but there's no way to write international text in the program, and tried a lot of ways.. I hope they fix that soon.

    --
    Slashdot community, please notice: I am looking for a girlfriend.
    Nave H. Weiss
    1. Re:Unicode support by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I can understand that it's not a priority for Blender, but I hope the devs are keeping it in mind, I frankly can't understand how someone can program without unicode in mind these days...

  10. Colour theme by freqmod · · Score: 1

    You can change the colour theme in the themes tab in user preferences. Including the background of the 3d windows

  11. this is huge by michaelbuddy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I fell over when I saw the new features of this program. this is a huge release. you can see the improvements in rendering speed and quality even just rendering a cube. The internal rendering is outstanding with this.

    for anyone who has messed with it just a little but never got a grasp of using it, there are some great divx videos available on http://www.blender3d.org. With this, one can become extremely proficient, seeing somebody with skill actually use the program. 3D is hard to learn because so few people do it.

    IMO this is the best release they have had in a long time. Being able to UNDO, being able to render at this quality, and having video training, there's no excuse for any highschool not picking up graphics and 3D as an elective.

    Here's where this program takes off, mark my words.

    --

    ...::----::...

    I am in no way affiliated with this sig.