Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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)...
You need a quote checker, too. "Necessity is the mother of invention." and "The best invention is necessity." do not mean the same thing. :)
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 wasn't quoting your mother. I wasn't quoting anyone. I was just SAYING IT ON MY OWN.
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.)
Nobody said anything about my mother, but rather the mother of invention. Regardless, the way you worded it, using the word "really," implied that you were indicating that someone else was correct in saying it. But, if you weren't quoting anyone, can you explain what you mean? "The best invention really is necessity." Did the Blender team invent necessity?
Whether you were quoting someone or just have the verbal diarrhea, it makes no sense. It's kind of like saying "the best invention is starvation."
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?
There are plenty of things in this world that don't make any sense. Especially things people say. Honestly, I've heard people say it both ways.
If all of you want to get stupidly technical about all this, then try this on. To say that necessity is the mother of all invention implies that necessity is an invetion, since its other invention's mother and all. Unless of course necessity copulated with another species of concept in order to create an new hybrid species to create a new one which we now call invention.
Sound insane? I must be to keep posting my thoughts to slashdot.
It has nothing to do with being stupidly technical. It has to do with language. When it is said "necessity is the mother of invention" anyone with even a little bit of intelligence can identify that it's not a literal statement of fact, it's figurative. That same person will then think about what it might mean. Then being the marginally smart person they are, they will see the idea being expressed and the particularily articulate way that idea was expressed.
Your statement of "the best invention really is necessity" makes very little sense. At it's most literal, no one will agree with you. What is so great about necessity? Even taken figuratively... well, there's nothing figurative about it. If you've heard people say that and you connected it to the famous "necessity is the mother of invention", then you either didn't understand what they said or both you and the speaker aren't very good at the english language.
I realize that english is a living language, but even so if you want people to take you seriously and be persuaded by what you have to say, you need to use the language in a skilled fashion. Being articulate, forming complex ideas with efficient use of words, and constructing logical statements is the very basics of being a proficient communicator.
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.
Maya 1.0 was released in 1998. It didn't have anistropic material support until later versions. I guess Blender is only a decade or so behind our glorious leader. Both packages could learn a great deal from one another.
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.
"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
Sorry, but you're a dick. I hope Autodesk, Mayas new owner, makes you pay through the nose, Mr. Oh-I'm-so-professional Moviemaker. Allthoug I doubt you've got a legal licence. Then I hope they sue your ass off.
Finally Blender has overcome the largest part of it's shortcomings compared to bizarely priced 3D Studio Crap and Co. and all you've got is a wiseass remark. Let's see you're great "Maya Movie Work". I doubt it comes even near Elefants Dream in any respect.
In case you haven't gotten the drift yet: Blender is on the fast lane to becoming the 3D industries business model nightmare and allready is causing prices to drop and quality rising left, right and center. Try that with Gimp vs. Photoshop.
Bottom line: Quit being a jerk and give the Blender team some credit and cudos allready. If anybody deserves it in the OSS design app dept. it's them first. Many times over.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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
I heard about the new release from Blendernation before it was Slashdotted, and I could already see the countless trolling of "Blender's GUI isn't like my other 3D app" or "Maya's had that feature for years". Yadda yadda.
Feature-wise, Blender has many advantages over the other apps. Sometimes you can be a master at being a jack-of-all-trades (ironically), regardless if you are the best at any one thing. Blender is a production pipeline from top to bottom, including compositing that is integrated with the rest of the rendering pipeline and video editing. Blender also has decent built-in support for using Python to access its internals. Python alone is a great language, capable of serious programming from filesystems (e.g. using FUSE) to net protocols (e.g. Twisted), and the possibilities with Blender are endless. Sorry, but Maya still doesn't have comparable scripting power like this at its disposal. The point is not to say that Maya is bad, but rather that Blender has a lot of things going for it that makes it worthwhile in its own right.
Aside from feature comparisons, Blender's advantage is that it's open source. Maybe Maya will stay popular, maybe it won't, or maybe it'll get acquired by another company that might ruin it as a product. An interesting thing to notice is that community enthusiasm is different between proprietary and open source apps. Maya users tend to be enthusiastic about using Maya because of its feature set or becuase it's considered "professional". But I've seen some users turn on Maya once they started using ZBrush, probably because it gives them an easier way to make bragging-rights-quality organic models. Blender users like Blender because it is different than professional apps in its philosophy, and because they see that they have a role in Blender's future potential. Sometimes even the pure novelty of such a great project being open source is enough to keep users interested.
All this taken together, Blender is quite unique.
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.
Is the seat leather upholstered or just some cheap material?
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
It's worked before, as when Todd Rundgren's "Change Myself" drove development of Lightwave. Not to mention a certain sci-fi show...
You have too much faith in Windows Media Player. You should know better than to NOT use that, especially if you're already using Linux. I'll also assume that since you're on Linux, you must have a clue as to what a Codec is and why you need them. If not, well, I guess you'd just wind up throwing the video away instead of making a small fix and watching it. Right?
Isn't that the open source way? Of course, like most open source projects, your fixes will probably be ignored.
I hate to point this out to you, but $my_vocabulary was never declared!
:P
I jest
My UID is prime... is yours?
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
I was reading through a _Warriors_ game "strategy" (cheats) book at Blockbuster today, thinking "why aren't there more little movies with good stories using these game engines?" All it takes is one killer video to get everyone doing it.
--
make install -not war
There was no way to export to .3ds, a requirement of many projects. Has such an export script been implemented yet?
avi is spported by WMP and in fact avi is defined by MS, however you may not have the correct codec for the video or audio files in the *.avi. Check out the MS support page for further info.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the (supposed) good of its victims may be the most oppressive
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.