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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."
See, the best invention really is neccesity. They should try to make a movie every year or two.
Or a spell checker. s/neccesity/necessity/
I just wanted to beat the Accuracy Nazis to it.
Hey, I read that as Bender!
The UI was natoriously difficult the last time I tried Blender. I agree that there may be a method to the madness, but why not have a mode for those who want instant gratification by using "expected" conventions? It could increase interest and hobbyists. I realize that some don't like watching impatient newbies infesting forums and fan sites, but if you want a product to survive, you need new blood. Today's snot-nosed newbie may be tomarrow's programmer for a great new feature.
Table-ized A.I.
At last count there were over 70,000 people trying to torrent this movie, not counting the HD version... wow!
but why not have a mode for those who want instant gratification by using "expected" conventions
Maybe its because those that want instant gratification only end up making shiny metal spheres on checkerboard planes.
are the result of the production of Elephants Dream, the first Open Movie.
:-)
Uh, the *last* thing I want to see is a Replublican's wetdream
Table-ized A.I.
Really, the list of new features and improvements is so impressive that, were it a company product, it would surely be named "3.0", not puny 2.42 (after 2.41)...
Blender has really come a long way since we tried to use it to program our game Log Cabin Adventure in it back when I was getting my BS in CS. I always liked it's UI better than 3DSM but it seems like their feature sets are getting closer and closer as well.
(end of post)
Watching so called 'Open Movies' is Communistic and hurts the American economy. In particular it hurts us. There's no such thing as a free lunch. You get what you pay for. Open movies contain viruses and trojans. Sharing open movies is illegal in most countries.
Don't download this movie or we will sue you. We know you broke the law when you were 14 years old. We have it on record.
Your friends,
The MPAA.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
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 been using blender for quite a while, I've been using the 2.42 RC3 package for a while, Its really getting quite easy. And yes the interface is kinda wierd, but then again, I have yet to figure out how maya's interface works. Its all a learning curve, just for some people its learning Blender, for others its learning 3d studio max, or maya, or the slew of other 3d packages out there. Personally, I prefer free(gratis), and the plus that its also free(open source) is very cool.
:(
Now that i've talked blender up. Why did you have to go and take down the whole site. I did kinda want to download the new version sometime
Has anyone seen Elephants Dream? It's a horrible movie. Sure the 3d stuff is cool, but that's not what I want advertised everywhere as "the product of open source". The movie is *bad*. We're talking worse than Gigli, seriously.
Jay | http://oldos.org
In future they should try to get better writers. I saw the Elephant's Dream movie, and technically it's not too bad. The models seemed fairly on-par with most "real" 3D animation feature movies. The animation was worse, but at least still around what you get on those 3D animated kids' shows or in-game cut-scenes. I was more impressed than I thought I'd be.
But did anyone think that story was any good? I didn't. And with all the stories and fan-fiction out there surely there must be hordes of aspiring writers out there who would like nothing more than a movie based on one of their scripts, even if it means making it creative common licensed. If nothing else, it gets their name on IMDB. That's a decent foot-in-the-door these days, if they're looking for a career. Then you perfect it with collaborative writing, TV-show style, where a whole team of writing staff have input (or in this case the whole Internet.)
Couldn't get open-sourcier than that.
But get WRITERS to do it. I'd bet good money this thing was written by animators and modelers. If you're a professional-level animator/modeler you're probably not a professional-level writer. No one's good at everything. Get over your egos and suck it up.
I guess it's the same problem open source programmers have with, for example, user interfaces or documentation. "It's just a minor detail, what really matters is this other aspect. Besides, how hard can it be? I'll do it myself."
Even if it isn't the main purpose of the program the sequence editor has been improved too, e.g support for FFMPEG formats, longer movies etc. At last a working relativly stable NLE on linux.
(and yes I know about LiVES, Kino and others, but I they have been unstable and with a diffecoult interface, even if the interface of Blender takes a while to get used to.)
Lock up your hookers, money, cigars and booze!
Oh, sorry, I thought we were talking about Bender.
Personally, I'm a fan of Softimage's XSI
x
It has a free mod tool for those who want to play around and learn the system (also excellent for game mods, hence the name)
It has a personal seat that sells for $495 so it is affordable for people to purchase for hobby/indie game usage.
http://www.softimage.com/products/xsi/default.asp
I believe that it was also used to make Half-Life 2
It also makes the baby Jesus cry.
For ME, the most important thing is the running of plugins* ment for other 3D tools. A lot of games release development plugins for 3Dmax. Fine if that's what you have. Not so fine if you don't.
*Number two is the running of published scripts.
BTW how well does Blender do hair, fur and cloth, along with particle effects like water and fire?
Then where is the script and story board? As an open source zealot I need these things!
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?
"support for anisotropic materials"
Wow, so Blender is only 15 years behind the times now?
Sorry, I think I'll stick with maya for making movies
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.
How about a Blender upgrade to a window manager that pipes graphics to Blender in realtime? Not just screengrabs, but any rendering being sent to the screen, before getting dressed in the widgets, or including them. With loopback to let us Blendo our desktops as we use them.
--
make install -not war
Or a piano? Why can't you make music with just hitting one or two keys? Oh yeah, there is such a musical instrament. It's called a radio.
Building 3d models is work. I spend months on mine. If you want to download a Tie Fighter and hit the 'render' button and pretend you 'know 3d', whatever.
The software isn't the problem. Your expectations of how easy/difficult 3d work is off the mark.
From the outset the 'look' of Elephant Dream and the creative process were given higher priority than the story telling. It is a movie by first time movie makers.
As such, it's visually amazing for a shoestring budget and small team that produced it. And every visual in the movie was created with Free software. That was the main point, Emo.
The PPC 10.3 version won't launch on 10.4. The only 10.4 version is i386. No, I won't buy a new Mac just to run Blender.
I have a nasty feeling that this is the tip of a very worrying iceberg.
*into the trash*
It's worked before, as when Todd Rundgren's "Change Myself" drove development of Lightwave. Not to mention a certain sci-fi show...
wasn't 0n SteVe's downward spiral. In Don't be a sling What we've known is perhaps
That is now, by far, my favorite word.
Oh, the posibilities...
"Oh, don't play 'open-sourcier than thou' with me!"
or
"Debian GNU/Linux: It's the open-sourciest!"
oh oh, or
"RedHat: Proving open-sourciness pays!"
$my_vocabulary = $my_vocabulary++;
=)
This sig rocks the casbah.
Isn't that the open source way? Of course, like most open source projects, your fixes will probably be ignored.
It's as if a cold shiver just ran through thousands of proprietary software companies all at once.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
*smirk* I see I'm not the only one who's thought of this. Not Blender specifically, but using a game engine for more than just "games". I might give X3D a whirl.
There was no way to export to .3ds, a requirement of many projects. Has such an export script been implemented yet?
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.
"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."
You do realize that there are nonprogram-specific books on modeling, don't you? They'll give you the "why". The "how" comes from understanding your tools. Everything after is just practice.
It turns out that the big problem is a bug - large objects don't work right, due to a roundoff problem. If you limit all objects, including the ground, to 50 meters in the longest dimension, they work better.