Slashdot Mirror
Blender 2.40 Released
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."
There is also a way cool zbrush like sculpting available as an add on script, see this post for details.
1
http://www.elysiun.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5610
LetterRip
...does the new Blender come with a kitchen sink?
There were interface improvements, a quickstart guide, and 3d manipulator - so yes interface improvements.
LetterRIp
I simply love this program. It's open source, and it is as versatile as a professional capitalist program like Maya, Lightwave, or 3DS Max. It has a great renderer, with support for external renderers built right in. It's perfect for people who want to express their creativity in modeling but don't want to shovel out the cash to pay for a capitalist program. Though, I prefer Wings 3D for the actual modeling. I use Blender for setting up textures, animations, scenes, and all that kind of stuff mostly. The only real problem with it is that the interface is intimidating to new users of it.
Is it written in Old Fortran beer???
If not, you can bite my shiny a... OH. BLENDER...
Never mind...
Anyone interested in Blender should be aware of the Libre Graphic Meeting. The plan is to get developers of Blender in one place, plus get developers of other free software packages like GIMP, Inkscape, and Scribus together too.
19 March 2006 in Lyon, France
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
I can also fly a 747, decode Sanskrit, and map the human genome without reading a single manual!
You can't "pick it up and use it" because the original creators elected to head out in their own direction and explore different interface methods. Part of that involved eschewing more orthodox philosophies.. an act which will always provoke complaints such as yours.
;)
Once you force feed it to yourself, after a while you'll start to enjoy it and even respect it. I wouldn't call it better than 3dmax or any other modeller you can name, but it's definetly a damn good interface.
I've been using the 2.40 release candidates for the past month, and it's a splendid update to an already splendid program. I've watched people produce things equal in quality to the products of extremely expensive modelling programs with it. I've also seen a lot of newbies create complete crap but that's part of the risk of free software.
The animation and fluid simulator is nice and all but I think my favorite enhancement ended up being the particle system changes.
The particle guides made setting up effects I'd waste days trying to accomplish in 2.37 something that could be done in 15 minutes.
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.
I have been using Blender since version 1.8. And I realize that a lot find the user-interface hard to use when you are a beginner.
...all 3D is hard to learn when youre new to 3d in general.
.3ds if you want to - and now with the new Collada protocol you can import/export even more information so virtually nothing gets lost in the pipeline - of course, theres still some improvements to be made here. But hey - thats what the community is all about - you want it? Participate - and Well come up with something great for us all to use - together!
...while in 3dstudio max...you get a lot of "boxes and cylinders" to draw-off straight away ...without learning anything at all...so yeah...3dstudio max is more "pleasing-straight-away". Maya is more professional and can handle bigger more complex jobs but is harder to work on smaller projects. Blender is sort of the "middle way"... I am not saying that Blender is better or worse than 3Dstudio max or Maya...but they all have their advantages - and you will all definetively do yourselves a HUGE FAVOR trying this application. Its a killer app!
The truth is however - even if it is harder to grasp as a beginner, most 3d applications are hard to learn - in fact
Blender isnt that hard compared to 3dstudio Max or Maya because of its better and more efficient workflow. I have bought 3dstudio max (a license) for over 4 years - but switched to Blender because I found that the modeling workflow was faster and more efficient. You can export/import
The main advantage That I think Blender has - in comparison to eg. 3Dstudio max is that once you get started it all becomes easier
It has - fluids (a really good one), Softbody, Some of the best rigging tools around and support that simply cant be beat. What do I mean by that? I mean - when I used 3dstudio max...I was an unsignificant "flea"... and when I complained about bugs in the software...It was always "my-fault" or "Windows fault"...but never Discreets fault.. And months later when the bugs finally got acknowledged and fixed - I had to purchase 1000 dollars in upgrades just to fix the bugs.
When I switched to Blender and had problems - guess what? 2 days after "mentioning" possible bugs - they got fixed. And it kept going that way. Blender rarely chrashes and its a dream to work with the passionate developers.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
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
Sorry for the technobabble, UVs are a way to map an image/texture to a 3d model. LSCM is a way to create your mapping to the model in a way that it is of good quality - live means that you can tweak it as you go instead of tweak recalculate, tweak recalculat. A modifier stack - is changes that are modifiers are 'virtual' ie can easily be done and undone at any point in the models life.
LetterRip
While some people would point the finger at Apple, I find it highly curious that Blender broke so severely (if you read the thread, lots of other things don't work) and far as I know, nothing else did...
Yes, I verified the bug- on my 17" Powerbook (with an NVidia card) none of the menus or popup listboxes appear. If you have a machine with 10.4.3 and an nvidia card, don't bother...yet.
Please help metamoderate.
There's a couple of errors in the post, but they're not important, except one whose rule many people don't know:
has born fruit with the Blender 2.40 release.
Borne fruit. "Borne" is the past tense of "bear". "Born" is a defective verb that's used as the passive voice of "give birth". Unless they went into labor before releasing their product, I'm pretty sure they meant "borne".
Here are mirrors please use them
e /Blender2.40/
http://public.planetmirror.com/pub/blender/releas
I'm guessing the article was submitted by a linux fan.
Why? It's a Windows and OSX app too.
Actually, yes, they are. They use OpenGL for all the 2d parts of the interface as well as the 3d display. So if your driver has broken 2d OpenGL rendering (many do, since it's not commonly used), Blender's menus will be broken to some degree.
at 6MB isn't blender starting to get bloated?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Socialism and capitalism are about who owns/controls capital goods, not who benefits from their use, and supporters of either system claim to benefit the public. Corporate sponsorships and charitable giving benefit the public, too, but are not "socialist" -- good PR opportunities are worth a lot.
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 :)
...If you participate in 'Blender Battles', which you should if you're interested in blender.
And don't forget the elysiun forums, which are in invaluable source of blender knowledge, and... Also another place where you can put up your dukes in some friendly blender competition.
While I'm at it, don't forget #smc (stands for "speed modeling competitions") on freenode.
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
Then youll be happy to know that - not only do we have full undo functionality , but theres even an UNDO-HISTORY function with a menu to go (Alt + U) so you can go anywhere in the history and redo from wherever you wish...heck...you can even browse through the various changes you made and go forward again if you still change your mind :)
:)
Blender even has different undos for different systems. Example: Global Undo and Local Undo - Meaning if you change stuff in you scene...you can just do the normal Ctrl + Z to undo there...or if you where editing your mesh you can undo/redo stuff with U in meshedit mode (Tab).
Blenders all about safety and workflow these days, if all above wasnt enough security for you - you can adjust your preferences to save "xxx-number-of-versions-back". Theres even a separate "Reopen last" and "Recover last session" system so if you for some reason stopped in the middle of it all..can continue your work where you left it - or select the last file you worked on. Hows that for total paranoia?
Want more? I could go on an on...but Ill leave that to you.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
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
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?
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
Basically, LSCM unwrapping lets you "skin" a model (not in the 3D skinning sense, but in the animal skinning sense) so you end up with a flat covering. Actually, the method is similar too -- just mark the "seems" where you would cut with a knife to remove the skin in one piece. Then, you can export that covering to a paint program, draw on it, and put it back on your model :)
The . isn't a decimal....for instance, 2.4.1 is a valid version number, as is 2.10.3, but 2.10.3 isn't the same as 2.1.3, see? At least, that's how many programs are versioned (mostly open source stuff, I suppose), where they don't worry quite as much about the software's marketing image.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
That's absolutely not true! I'm the project manager of Crystal Space and my main computer is a 64-bit AMD on which I run 64-bit Linux. Crystal Space is 100% 64-bit clean (at least the latest CVS, the latest stable 0.98 has problems).
Greetings,
Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4