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.

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

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