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".

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.

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.