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Blender 2.42 Has Been Released
bartv writes "Blender 2.42 has been released. It features an impressive list of new features for professional users. The most important improvements are: a new render pipeline, node editors for compositing and materials, support for anisotropic materials, improved fluid simulation and new character animation tools. Most of these features are the result of the production of Elephants Dream, the first Open Movie. During this project, Blender's lead developer Ton Roosendaal was coding the features that were required by the artists to produce their movie."
It's always nice to see that every new release pushes Blender substantially forward. Especially the nodes are a nice addition.
This release also sees official support for Irix restored. It had been been built for Irix but unsupported
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
I've tried Maya (evaluation), 3DS Max (cad), AutoCad and Friends (cad), etc. They all have very different interfaces. These are the few that would seem to define "convention," yet they are totally different. They are also hardly within the "hobbyist" price range. Blender is well within the hobbyist price range, has some decent, free documentation. The "getting started" range of documentation is actually quite good.
Not to mention people are free to, for example, fork the project and make it how they wish.
If you watch "The Making of" for Elephants Dream, you'll see that they looked plenty productive and the new node compositing (think Shake) looks down-right sick!
> The UI was natoriously difficult the last time I tried Blender.
Try it now -- it's much better. The old keyboard-driven model still works, and the menu panels are still kind of weird, but now most major functions have a visible button or menu entry, the "spin buttons" have arrows that indicate that fact, and there are now actual handles on each axis you can see and grab. In short it's not any stranger than maya or softimage now, just slightly different.
And it's still incredibly fast.
I tried an earlier version of Blender and liked it, but I had to switch to 3DS max because blender didn't support an export format that I needed. I like 3DS max as well, but it suffers from a big focus problem that Blender doesn't have. There are mouse shortcuts for zooming panning and rotating, but they only work when the window has focus and the main window is always loosing focus.
The one gripe with both packages I have is why is it so difficult to paint texture on an object?
Hate to point this out to you and ruin a perfectly good rant against hobbyists and open source jacks-of-all-trades, but they hired a professional screenwriter to write the script. They asked him for "artsy" and that's what he gave them. Sure, it's not Pixar by any stretch of the imagination, since Eddy Murphy's not providing the voice of a wisecracking fax machine, but there's a hell of a lot going on in ED. It's crafted like a puzzlebox, with multilayered symbolism hidden in the imagery and dialogue. It wasn't meant for saturday matinees, it was made for the art film festivals. If that not your cup of tea, that's fine, but don't decry it as "crap" and insist that just because you didn't see it, there must be nothing there. Film is subjective, not objective.
(Disclaimer: I'm not really a huge fan of arthouse films. I know 'em when I see em, and I'll give 'em the respect they deserve, but I usually end up watching Hollywood's output.)
Oh, and it's completely open. If you can do a mean Eddie Murphy Fax-machine voice, you're free to render your own Dream.
Tried the new physics engine, by dropping a cube and a cone onto a slanted plane. Things are definitely better than in 2.41, where the objects just hit the plane and stuck. Now they hit, bounce a bit, and slowly fall to align with the plane. They start to slide.
Then the cone goes spinning and flying off into space. Huge conservation of energy violation. Oops.
The Bullet Physics guys don't have sliding friction right yet. But they're making progress.
Still waiting for a way to give my characters hair-hair, with real hair physics and principles. Right now you still have to combine static particles and physics deflectors, which is but a crude hack and only really useful if you want to make your characters look like Ziggy Stardust.
There are two versions, one for if you have the newest version of Python and one for if you don't. You probably have the older version of Python installed and downloaded the wrong one.
The PPC 10.3 version works fine on 10.4. Just get the one with python 2.3.
Yes, it's in File->Export->3D Studio (.3ds).
(It's actually the first choice in the Export menu).
At least version 2.41 also had it, but I'm not sure when it became a part of blender.
It is one of the main, (in my opinion) achievements of the F/OSS movement
Except that it was developed by a company as a commercial product and later released as open source. I am not trying to diminish the (impressive) efforts made after they released the source, only stating the fact.
(That is, Photoshop would also qualify as one of the most impressive OSS projects if Adobe released the source.)
Ceterum censeo Microsoftem esse delendam
The program itself is awesome. Sadly, every tutorial, video or text, doesn't really help you. They just say "Do this, do that" without ever telling you why you're doing this task or that task, they only assume you know what each tool does and what it's primarily used for. Bad way to get people to use your program - I tried making a simple head using the step-by-step instructions in a tutorial, and failed miserably because the tutorial failed to mention that you need to select two certain regions for a loop cut.
Blender hardly needs improvement (though the new particle/hair stuff is insanely cool,) it's the tutorials that need major improvement. You're not teaching anyone anything when you don't explain why you do this cut or select this part of the mesh. If you can't teach people the whys and hows, nobody can learn it. "Do this, do that" does nothing.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.