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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."
Blender is absolutely amazing software ... i've used it since 2.39 (I believe thats the release) ... and it's came a long way. It's helped me learn opengl and appreciate the difference between what an artist and a programmer can do. It's a great tool and a definite "must play with" for all developers. I only hope the skeleton & mesh export examples have been tightened up to include more documentation.
Does it have a frappé mode? :D
I won't believe it until someone releases a series of videos in which a lab-coated dude asks "Will it Render?".
Blender, the cross-platform, open source 3d suite, has released version 2.43
So Blender has become self-aware and is now rapidly releasing updates of itself, no doubt gaining strength and influence with each new version, until it is powerful enough to control the world's nuclear arsenal, so it can wipe out humanity and jumpstart the era of software...
Man, that sucks!
Blender has a good UI. It's just very keyboard based if you want to be very efficient.
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."
I've used blender before, and the tutorials out there stepped me through the interface quite nicely. I prefer their e-shop to a donate button, and just look at all the goodies you can have by supporting this project, including a guide. Well done. I just wish they'd update the Gamekit package (but no biggy, I'll order it anyway).
I hope, when they die, cartoon characters have to answer for their sins.
If you want to learn Blender, check out my book on wikibooks.org:
P ro
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_
Thanks!
spidey
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?
Blender, ..., has released version 2.43
In Soviet Russia, Blender release you!
I prefer GtkRadiant.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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.
Actually the next version of the manual is still being developed, the wiki is part of that.
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.
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?
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
I touch computers in naughty places
For the last 2.5 years I've been anouncing every major release of Blender on /. (this is more of a minor one) and no one cared. Now it's posted before I even noticed that 2.43 is up - and I've checked every day the last 2 weeks. Now the site is overrun and I can't get my copy. .. Wonderfull.
BTW:
1.) The new website (a new template for Typo3, their CMS, looks cool but it's way to wide and/or inflexible.
2.) Blender seriously rocks and is closing in on the big players in 3D quickly in terms of usability and featureset. Amonst the new ones: The integrated compositor now has alpha blending and pass rendering which has me ditching my video tools. No need for Final Cut Pro for Renders anymore.
Support the team. And thanks to them for yet another great Blender release. Can't wait to lay my hands on the 2.43 final.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
You might find that POV-ray is a better fit for your programmer brain. http://povray.org
"How about just learning it instead of complaining?"
Which one is easier?
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.
I've heard this critisism from people before, but usually because it is different to what they're used too rather than because it is actually bad.
I've sat and watched my brother, who is a professional 3D animator, using Max do do some relatively simple task with a path and was amazed at how long it took him. I'd been learning Blender and could accompish exactly the same result in at least a third of the time, and I'm a newb. I just happen to be uncorrupted by Max's UI.
He had tried Blender and found it difficult to use. I strongly recommended going through the tutorials, he took the time and now raves about how quick and easy it is to do complex tasks that used to take for ever.
I'd rate Blender up with Apache and Firefox as showcasing excellent OSS
I don't therefore I'm not.
Good post!
This has been similar to my experience as well, making Battlefield 1942 objects(models) with Kubuntu Dapper and Blender compared to my buddy with Win XP and 3D Studio Max.
I think it's all according to what you are used to.
I teach Firearms Safety and Marksmanship, and have found that the n00bs usually do much better than the 133t
bunch. With the n00bs, you don't have to break bad/inefficient habits, but it's at the same time tough to break out of the mold when you are accustomed to a certain concept.
After making a cheat sheet for translating functions between photoshop (5.0 w/ Win 98 I think) and Gimpshop, that did not seem too steep of a learning curve.
Hint: If you haven't guessed yet, I'm a 3d n00b...just giving my perspective.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I use Maya and Lightwave as well as everything from Modo to VUE 5 on a daily basis. The Blender UI sucks. The learning curve is rediculouisly long and in the past the documentation was poor. Everyone seems to feel the obligation to reinvent the wheel with UIs but it's counter productive. Simple logic here. Blender has features you'd expect in software costing $1,000+ yet even free it has a relatively small user base. Got to be a reason and it's simple, the UI. Not everyone has the time to learn a completely new UI structure. Maya is the most complex software for animation availible yet I could do a lot the first day and find things like physics easier than any other software I ever used. I still can't do basic navigation with Blender and I have spent some time with it. Most of it is hidden which makes it hard to use. There's a major menu at the top that's completely hidden and you have to pull it down to access it. If they ever want Blender to be a serious competitor instead of a curiousity stop adding features and fix the UI. Personally my favorite UI is Modo. Not an animation software but I had a working knowledge of it in two days and it's the most powerful modeller out there. Maya has a good UI to emulate or even something like Lightwave which is fairly easy to use, the physics are a pain but at least I can model and render a shot in it.I could give some one a pretty good working knowledge of it in a day. Standard conventions are there for a reason. I'd rather get my thrill out of using a software than mastering a hostile interface. How many pros use Blender? How many animated films or TV shows have been done with it? Elephant Dreams was a short and it required a lot of customizing at the time to do it. People download it but how many really use it? Even most of the ones that can't aford software use pirates rather than Blender. The features are really impressive but who cares if it's a nightmare to learn and use? If you expect people to adapt to your software rather than the other way around most will use something else. Zbrush took that stance and now they have stiff competition from friendlier UIs like Mudbox and soon Modo. They must be sweating bullets as they should. Telling me your UI is superior doesn't impress me when I find it a pain to use. Programmers tend to design UIs that make sense to them and not to artists. Modo and Mudbox were designed for artists and they have very devoted followings because of it.
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.
What could be better than a jet powered motorcycle? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8l6GTHLSWE
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.