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Blender 2.40 Released

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the new-and-improved dept.

LetterRip writes "Googles Summer of Code has born fruit with the Blender 2.40 release. Thanks to their support and the hard work of the coders they supported Blender has fluid dynamics simulation done by Nils Thuerey, a powerful inverse kinematics system done by Brecht Van Lommel, and much improved boolean tools done by Marc Freixas. Of course Blender has had a huge number of improvements aside from the work supported by Google. The animation system got a complete rewrite by Ton Roosendaal, as well as other major improvements like flive UV unwrapping LSCM, and a Modifier stack system. It also has seen greatly improved ease of use since the last Slashdot announcement addressing all of the complaints raised- things like 3d manipulators, full undo system, etc. There is also a quick start guide for new users, and nice video and written tutorials on new features and a fairly up to date manual."

11 of 264 comments (clear)

  1. one of the few success stories of wikibooks? by bcrowell · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Browsing through wikibooks, wikipedia's sister project to try to write other books the wiki way, it's generally pretty difficult to find anything good, even though wikibooks is 2.5 years old. I recently did an unscientific study as part of my research for an article on free books, and the Blender books on wikibooks were one of the very few success stories out of the massive piles of junk there. However, a lot of the best content on wikibooks seems to be stuff that was more or less just dumped into wikibooks after having already been written elsewhere, and comparing the wikibooks stuff on Blender with the stuff on the Blender site, it looks like that may actually have been the case here. There's nothing wrong with that per se (WP has a lot of 1911 Britannica articles that were just copied over), but it doesn't exactly help to convince me that the wiki book model has much potential for success outside of WP, which is uniquely well suited to the wiki approach.

    --
    Find free books.
  2. Yay! by komodotoes · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I tried to get into Blender a few times over the past while and I was always turned off by the lack of an undo system and the weird UI. People who are learning something new, especially something as complicated as Blender, need to be able to erase a mistake easily. I haven't tried it in some time, so maybe I'll give it a whirl again now that I am free to bugger up my work at will.



    NeverEndingBillboard.com

    --
    NeverEndingBillboard.com
    1. Re:Yay! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Well, I started to use blender as newbie tool(had some experience with 3Dstudio before)and thought that the blender UI was weird(with regards to 3D studio and stuff), then I realised I could change it so it was more to my liking.

      Then I realized that Blender was quite easy to use and I got then hang of some basic stuff quite quickly. Blender might be weird for people used to other 3D apps but for a beginner, there isn't much diffrence.

      And it is better to use Blender as a newbie tool then to use a pirated version of any other program.

  3. Re:Can someone translate for me? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    LCSM allows for dynamic "resizing" of the UV geometry map. Basically, it's one of those improvements that allows you do quickly do a task that used to be really tedious and slow in a couple of seconds.

    For those who are curious, The UV map "unwraps" the character to a flat image, so you can paint details onto it.

  4. Re:and it's completely useless on OS X because... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There's similar problems with Modo when upgrading to 10.4.3, and also Alias is advising Maya users not to upgrade to 10.4.3 for some nvidia cards. Doesn't seem like a coincedence to me.

  5. Re:Great... by jason.saund · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There *is* a lot of work being done on the interface, which will be in the next release. Reorganizing the buttons window is a very big task, and something that can't be rushed... hopefully you'll be pleased with version 2.41 :)

  6. Replacing the Game Engine: CrystalBlend by Jorrit · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Some of you may already know but we are aiming to make a new GameEngine for Blender using the Crystal Space 3D Engine (http://www.crystalspace3d.org/). This project is called CrystalBlend (more information on that project here: http://www.crystalspace3d.org/tikiwiki/tiki-index. php?page=CrystalBlend). The idea is (just like with the current game engine) to be able to make full games from inside Blender without the need to program. The current logic system for the game engine is a bit limited so you often have to resort to Python scripts to make the full game but with CrystalBlend we will make a totally new logic system that still allows for this fallback but makes it less needed.

    The reason I post here is that I'm looking for developers who want to help me with this project mainly on the Blender side. As the project manager of Crystal Space I will take on the Crystal Space side of CrystalBlend (i.e. 3D engine specifics). I will also work on the logic system itself but I would like some other people to help me with both the integration of Blender and Crystal Space as the development of the new user interfaces for the new logic system.

    Give me a mail (jorrit dot tyberghein at gmail dot com) if you are interested!

    Greetings,

    --
    Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
    1. Re:Replacing the Game Engine: CrystalBlend by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      People you can donate to CrystalSpace if you want. I think they deserve it!!! If you have paypal you can use this linnk https://sourceforge.net/donate/index.php?group_id= 649. I believe there are also some other possibilities on the CS donation page

  7. Re:Great... by aichpvee · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Maya's a lot easier to get into than 3DS, doubly so if you're a *nix user since it's very Unixie in a lot of ways. And speaking of 3DS, using a modifier stack in Blender is a HORRIBLE idea if it's anything like 3DS's. It's unwieldy and (even by v5 when I stopped using it) most of the modifiers screwed things up if you worked on the lower ones and wound up constantly having to collapse the stack. Copying Maya's construction history would have been a much better way to go for Blender.

    Of course Blender's modifier stack could be great (I doubt it), and I guess I'll find out in a few minutes.

    As for the interface, Blender's isn't really that bad. If you go through the tutorials on it (which are actually pretty good) it almost starts to make sense.

    --
    The Farewell Tour II
  8. Still no smoothing groups? by Rezonant · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I would love to switch from 3DSMax to Blender for my little hobby game, but the lack of smoothing groups in Blender makes this absolutely impossible. Googling for "Blender smoothing groups" didn't give me much hope. Are they even planned for inclusion?

  9. CAD? by Trogre · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Will I finally be able to model my new house with this version?

    I was sad to see the BlenderCAD project die a slow death, as it addressed a lot of the CAD issues that Blender 2.3 was missing.

    I'd still like to see persistent units, measurements and materials BOM.

    --
    "Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife