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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."
I've used many graphics applications. I'm pretty good with AutoCad. I'm not bad with 3D-Studio. (Well ok, that was a few years ago.) Blender drives me nuts. The best improvement will (because it doesn't seem to have happened yet) be a decent UI.
Anonymous coward not withstanding.
Blenders UI looks to be designed by sadists. There is a reason for UI standards. It's all standard stuff, Blender devs just do things their way (which isn't X's way or macs or Windows or anybodys)
If you don't believe in UI standards try using blender, it will make you a believer. Blender makes both Word Perfect and Autocad for DOS look intuitive and easy to learn in comparison. Sure if it's the only app you use you eventually get used to it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I like to use software after it has come its long way.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
like the ui and a whole bunch of other things. Granted I will never say they haven't put together alot more then any other open source project out their when it comes to a 3d package. That being said I find that they do certain things assbackwards compared to whats been done over the years with 3d packages. On top of this they've implemented object D while completely leaving out A,B,and C which is why you'd even put feature D in. Every new release I still find myself messing around with it and all the while still not understanding how or why people likes its work flow.
Creating an object while having it placed where some 3d cursor is without having a option to tell it "No create it a the center of the scene like every other peice of 3d software known to man" is just crazy to me. Even more crazy then that is not being able to select an object and have a window show its properties. When I say that please don't point me to the crude layouts to see a objects properties all over the place, instead go use Autodesks Maya, Softimage XSI, or 3DS Max and thats what I'm looking for. On top of that the floating property windows which are in blender have very small text and the input values are a pain in the ass to edit. Most of all though they way you select objects, polygons, vertices etc are just wtf. I don't know how many times I have accidentaly hit a mouse button on a high res mesh which moved a vertex without me even knowing it.
These are just personal opinions and obviously some people like it the way its currently done, why though I have no damn clue. Blenders a piece of software I'd truely like to see go far, hell it already has in many aspects. Mabye this is why I tend to bitch so much, because I'd realy like to see them succeed. I just don't like how many of the open source projects that end up geting past the crash every 2 mins phase, always end up reinventing the wheel when it comes to how things are done and have been done. Why can't they see "Hey every other 3d app has done it this way since the beginning of time. Maybe theirs something good about that method" instead of saying "No this is open source freedom of choice roxors so lets do it the opposite regardless if it helps you with work or not". It's sad they do things so far from the norm with certain interactions and presenting data to the user, because all it means to me is Softimage and Autodesk will continue to get my money next year and the year after and etc etc.
Then you are cutting yourself off from a very powerful tool. The Blender UI is simply a training aid to get you up to speed on the keyboard shortcuts. Once you realise that Blender is built around one hand on the keyboard firing up functions and the mouse in the 3D view to do the editing, you'll find that it is fast. However, like many powerful utilities, you must get up the learning slope to be productive with Blender.
It should also be pointed out that the Blender UI continues to be cleaned up and made more consistent over each release, so if you haven't seen it since 2.32, you are in for a surprise.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Unfortunately, although Blender has a very professional feature set, its UI and methodology are so vastly different to everything else out there that I doubt it'll replace the big boys anytime soon. Also, you can't afford to work on the deadlines that the industry imposes on you using open source software unless you pay to get a programmer on staff who can handle potential problems for you. The TOC for something like Maya or 3DS Max suddenly pales in comparison.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
I consider this a failure of the programming language you're working in, rather than a beneficial feature of your IDE.
Languages like Java (the other offender being C#) *do* punish the programmer for working without a complex IDE. They require like a million lines of code before you can even start programming. They require method autocomplete because they have methods like "my_array.sortThisArrayInDescendingAlphabeticalOrd erUsingHeapSort()". They require that your editor supports having multiple files open because no non-trivial functionality can be implemented in a single file.
If you're working in C, or Perl, or Ruby, or Python, or Haskel, or even C++ then vi works really well. Sure, it's possible to argue that a programming language should be more verbose than Perl, but getting much more unnecessarily verbose and strict about form than Python is probably a bad idea.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.