Blender Now Has Soft Body Support

johnnyb writes "For those who haven't been paying attention, Blender has been gaining features like mad over the last year. The Blender Foundation has just released 2.37, which adds soft body support, force fields, and deflection for realistic cloth, skin, and other effects. This in addition to all of the smaller additions, and all of the work that has gone into previous releases. If you haven't tried Blender yet, now is the time!"

Comments

"Blender now has soft body support"

[p4ul13]

Developers are quoted as saying "we added this feature to allow for acurate rendering of Slashdot posters".

Blender's great, but not for game mesh editing.

[Khakionion]

I really like Blender, but until it can properly export/import Quake MD2 files, it's not suitable to my purposes. For plain ol' prerendered CG, though, it fucking rocks the house down.

Re:Blender's great, but not for game mesh editing.

[Khakionion]

Yeah, those are the ones I'm talking about. Broken. The files they export don't load properly in Quake 2, among other games.

OSX Support?

[Hadlock]

Hopefully the latest version of Blender is usable once again in OSX. The last major revision had been all but broken, simply being a gray screen if you attempted to "maximize" the blender window. Perhaps it's my video card (32mb Radeon 7000), but a new project with no wire frame to render shouldn't crash the program.

maybe someone can shed some light on this issue?

Re:OSX Support?

[Curtman]

simply being a gray screen if you attempted to "maximize" the blender window

I'm using Blender in Linux, and I've noticed a similar bug that crept in a few versions back. In full screen mode, I usually resize the window manually with ALT-MMB (I think its ALT-RMB or something silly in KDE) so that I can see my panel, and switch to another desktop quickly. I've noticed that if I'm off by one pixel, so that the top left corner of the blender window is offscreen then the blender interface isn't drawn properly, and looks like this (the top image is the correct image, and the lower one is after resizing the window one more pixel to the left). If OS X has some key combo to force the screen to resize, maybe you could experiment with that. I haven't upgraded to 2.37 yet either, maybe its gone now.

Re:OSX Support?

[crazy blade]

People, Blender has a bug-tracker here. Knock yourselves out!

Now is the time?

[Draknek]

I'm sure this new release is great and all, but I don't see what soft body support adds to entice someone new to try it.

If you haven't tried Blender yet, then these additions are not likely to affect you or matter to you.

Re:Now is the time?

[NanoGator]

"I'm sure this new release is great and all, but I don't see what soft body support adds to entice someone new to try it.

If you haven't tried Blender yet, then these additions are not likely to affect you or matter to you."

Are you serious? Soft body is a Big Deal(TM), especially when you're a character animator. It's exactly the sort of thing that would make somebody spend $1,500 on Lightwave instead of using Blender.

Re:Now is the time?

[NanoGator]

"My point was that if you're a character animator, you would have tried Blender already, to see if it provided the features you needed."

No, I would have avoided it because it didn't have Softbody.

I like the idea of force fields.

[jd]

I'll be able to process my character's image in Blender and make him quite invulnerable. :)

Seriously, Blender has always looked impressive to me. If you're wanting to make a complex scene to blast through a NURBS-based renderer, such as BMRT, it would be almost impossible without a graphics package that you could do the design work in.

It is also miles easier than any commercial package I've seen. Rhino 3D and AutoCad 3D are plain murder. It's arguable as to which is "better", but I can tell you this - anything that does what you want, and lets you get the product -and- train for less than getting the alternatives, there's no competition. It depends on whether Blender really does do what you want, but assuming it does, then it is likely to be the better choice.

Amazing Artwork

[SenFo]

I'm simply amazed at how great the Blender artwork and movies have become. I tried Blender over 5 years ago as a hobby. Unfortunately, as I already knew, I was probably the worst artist in the entire world and couldn't produce anything that the software didn't create for me. But that doesn't keep me from admiring the hard work and amazing abilities of those that posses much greater skill than I do.

Anybody know if any major motion picture studios are using Blender? I know Pixar has their own proprietary software that they use. I'm not sure about any of the others.

Re:Amazing Artwork

[iibagod]

Try checking out the Project Orange. I'm not sure if any major studios are using blender, but I do know Spider Man 2 used Blender for a pre-visualization rendering...it worked rather well.

I'm just upset that the new HDRI code uses features only available in Yafray 0.0.8....which doesn't happen to be out yet. All my HDRI renders turned out like crap once I upgraded. But every other file sure is rendering a lot quicker. Thats a definate plus. And with new features coming quickly, I'm in monkey heaven.

My blender...

[Anonymous Coward]

My blender has had soft body support for ages. It's amazing how many babys will fit in the machine.

RTFM: Subsurf

[IoN_PuLse]

Enough said...

But what about the user interface?

[CyricZ]

I remember there being a lot of discussion regarding Blender's user interface. The main complaint was that it was very non-standard, and not very intuitive. While such an interface may be very useful and efficient for somebody intimate with Blender, it was widely said that it was difficult for those who casually want to use it. That said, has any work been done on an alternative user interface, one that may not be as powerful, but instead is more friendly towards new users and the casual/amateur user?