New Blender Released

An anonymous reader writes "Blender, the cross-platform, open source 3d suite, has released version 2.43 along with a website redesign. This version brings powerful new features within reach of every person. These features include sculpt modeling, retopologizing tools, render passes, render baking, support for multi-uvs, enhanced fluid simulator with particles, new rigid body engine, numerous new compositing modes including defocus (DOF) node and much more. Feature videos are also available."

Comments

Re:How about some user interface?

[MrCoke]

Blender has a good UI. It's just very keyboard based if you want to be very efficient.

Re:How about some user interface?

[nurb432]

How about just learning it instead of complaining?

The interface is just fine. Yes there is a steep curve, but if you take the time you will see there is nothing wrong with it.

New Features

[coast215]

Not only does it have great new features. It makes a mean smoothie too!

want to learn blender?

[spiderworm]

If you want to learn Blender, check out my book on wikibooks.org:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_P ro

Thanks!
spidey

No Changelog link?

[JonasH]

What, no link to the very nice changelog page?

Yes, I know it's in TFA, but come on, the story is about a release, so why not link to the changelog as well?

Re:How about some user interface?

[djcapelis]

Actually the next version of the manual is still being developed, the wiki is part of that.

And you still can get the paper version, albeit the slightly off-colored first printing run edition: http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/product_info.php?p roducts_id=79. You can also get a PDF of the manual as well. It's old and again we're working on the new one, but for most things it's quite fine as a reference.

The manual will continue, after all, it's part of how the blender foundation is financed. (Clue the conspiracy theorists that say we make the software hard to use on purpose in 3... 2...)

~D.J. Capelis
Blender Dev

Re:If I only had a brain...

[darkgumby]

You might find that POV-ray is a better fit for your programmer brain. http://povray.org

Re:Blender menus

[daverabbitz]

I haven't used Blender under Windows (or Windows at all) for quite some time, but the only time I have ever had problems with menu latency in blender was when I tried running it on a P200.

Perhaps you should see if the problem presents itself on the previous version of blender and on the current version with a retail release of Vista, and post a bug if the problem is still present. I would put my money on it being a bug in your OpenGL implementation.

* I haven't had a chance to try this release out yet.