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Blender 2.46 Released
The Penguin Man writes to mention the latest release of Blender, the popular open-source 3D graphics suite was officially launched today. You can download it from Blender.org. The culmination of half a year's work has resulted in many new features including a new particle system, approximate AO, the new cloth simulation system, and much more!
Will it blend?
firstpost!
Looking at the screencaps I'd say they've done a lot to improve the interface. For my amateur work I started with Blender about 2 years ago and quickly switched to Maya. If these improvements are as significant as they look, I may consider installing Blender on all of my lab machines.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Bender 1.0
From Groklaw (http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080511115151164): "Microsoft has just approached the Blender guys, and I would assume have or will approach other FOSS projects since we learn that Microsoft has assigned a guy to work with Open Source projects, with a request for information on how to make Blender run better on Windows." I hope all Blender developers read the rest.
One thing that always amazed me about Blender is how freakin fast it is. The load time for the interface is almost nonexistent. It's not exactly easy to use but you sure don't have to wait on it.
I have a new slogan for it
Blender: Once you get to know how it works, it's super intuitive!
Only 8 minutes sooner and you would have been modded funny, bolstering your self confidence, getting you that new job that lead to a fabulous career, a beautiful wife and being selected for the first L5 station in space 20 years from now as someone recognized your screen name and remembered laughing at your post years ago....
Only... 8... minutes..
Instead, Anonymous got it this time. And now anonymous will get all the glory.. again.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Subject says it all.
1...2...3...Go!
Complaints about the interface shall commence.
Again...
The UI is still an utter disaster. At least it looks like they finally improved the documentation for the mac platform - I once spent an hour trying to find out which modifier keys corresponded to which blender meta-keys, and how to get various buttons on a dual-button system. The Blender team, unfortunately, is driven exclusively by the concerns of users who are experts in the field, not beginners. If I didn't know better, I would attribute the reluctance to even CONSIDER modernizing the UI (which looks straight out of 1980's autocad, for fuck's sakes) to two words: "job security." It's a shame, as there are a lot of folks who would love to fool around with it and learn it...but when it took me two hours just to figure out how to render a JPG of a box on a damn checkerboard floor, no thanks.
Please help metamoderate.
I wish this program development would slow down. I've had the Essential Blender Guidebook since it has been released (about five months ago) and it feels like half the book is outdated due to the programs additions and rewrites.
Please consider picking up a copy of the Big Buck Bunny DVD it supported a lot of the development that was done for this release. You can see the trailer here.
Or consider preordering Apricot the game that is currently in development that is based on the Big Buck Bunny movie. You can see the development reports here.
Or you can donate here.
Thanks for your support and we hope you enjoy the latest release,
LetterRip
Maybe it already exists, but Blender would be sweet with an interface into a rendering engine that runs on gpu's via cuda or a ps3 cell BE. I think rendering / raytracing is a good candidate for cheaply available massive parallelism.
Maybe, I dunno.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
It's awesome being me.
obtag: gloodnewsveryone!
When Blender gets someone whose hate for new users doesn't surpass the burning fires of a thousand suns to design the user interface, I'll buy a copy, in the meantime it's sitting back there with early versions of the Gimp in the "this hurts to use" pile.
Does anybody have a torrent or mirror for this release?
Since I rarely share these complaints, I would like to ask: is it because you guys are instinctively comparing it to what you are familiar with? Photoshop-GIMP, Maya-Blender, etc.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
And try doing the same jpg of a box on a checkerboard floor in any other 3D app without prior knowledge.
Well, I bought Sculpt 3d on the Amiga back in 198-something, and it was pretty easy to work with. It took hours to render, but only a few minutes to set up.
And Bryce II was funky but well designed.
Wings 3d is really primitive, and fairly unpleasant, but still much easier than Blender.
In fact, I can't think of any 3d app that wasn't much easier to learn than Blender.
No, it doesn't suck, like any complex dedicated app, it takes a different mindset and some learning.
Now that that is over, we have yet another batch of great features! Go Ton and crew!
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Its posts like these that make me wish we had a (-1, Wrong) option.
Learning Blender can be slow; so I took notes along the way and wrote them up here:
http://www.davidjarvis.ca/blender/
An animated short using Blender:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvQbYXPmqiA
Your timing.
My 0.02 cents
Fine, I'm just going to go ahead and say this:
If you are disoriented by Blender's interface, that's fine, personal preferences and such usually get in the way of learning when you've worked with another application for a long time.
On the other hand if you hate Blender's interface and find it horrible or other such strong words then you are not a professional, you're not even intermediate. I doubt you could model a cube in any 3D application let alone Blender.
The reason you hate Blender's interface isn't because it's difficult to use, it's because you don't know how to use it, you opened it up for the first time because it's open-source and free and you were just overwhelmed by the complexity of a real professional software package and gave up after you realised this would actually take effort.
Then you went onto slashdot and complained like you actually know something.
Blender is not for you. It takes time and effort to learn and understand. It takes practice to acquire skills at modelling and animating (this goes for any 3D application). Something you obviously aren't prepared for.
I suggest that you stick to making squares in Paint because Blender and any other 3D package is way beyond you, but if you don't want to look like an idiot don't go on here, or anywhere else, and say Blender has a horrible interface or the like because anyone who has taken that seriously step into the 3D world will laugh in your face.
Mystery
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
You're right. I wish I was you.
have evidently never tried Maya either.
I mean, at least I found tutorials on blender and in 2 minutes I was navigating the screen with easy. Once I learned that it was frustrating as hell to do the equivalent with Maya, at which point I got up and did something else.
I just learned the last particle system!
Why do so many 3D tools use custom controls and weird windowing that often doesn't match at all the look and feel of the operating system they run on? So many 3D tools can't even feature normal buttons, for some reason they feel the need to have their own widget components, which makes the usability of already complex tools ... well ... more complex.
...
I always thought this had to with the history of some of these tools in X-windows and the lack of standard widget toolkits, and maybe also because this makes porting the tools to other platforms? I'm curious why this is so prevalent in so many of these tools
- sigs are for wimps.
There are two camps:
1. People who want 3DS MAX/Maya/Lighwave for FREE and Blender happens to be the closest thing... so take that an MAKE IT MAYA.
2. People who have been using Blender for many, many years and have come to either appreciate or at least get used to the speed that the interface allows... ONCE YOU KNOW IT!
Given that the interface HASNT changed much in all this time... perhaps its time for the GIVE ME MAYA FOR FREE crowd to go and write their own FOSS 3D app.
PS. For all those Blenderheads out there who haven't already seen it... check out www.indigorenderer.com for photorealism.
Anybody interested in learning about Blender's physics simulation capabilities (fluid, soft bodies, rigid bodies, cloth, hair, new particle system, etc) should consider taking a look at this book, which will hit the shelves in just a few weeks and will be fully up-to-date to version 2.46:
http://www.amazon.com/Bounce-Tumble-Splash-Simulating-Physical/dp/0470192801
Here's a video of some of the tutorials and techniques included in the book:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3du8ksOm9Fo
So hopefully they've improved it a LOT. Every time I've tried Blender, it's felt like the UI designer decided that they'd always wished every single other 3D -- and most 2D -- program worked differently, and this was their big chance to expose the great unwashed masses to the PROPER way to do it.
If it's radically changed, I'll consider using it. But perhaps I'll have to wait until the next version where they are supposed to allow total customization of the UI. (Though that may only be icons and menus, not actually how it operates. In which case, it's rearranging chairs on the Titanic.)
The interface is quirky. No doubt makes sense once you warp your mind around it, but it's certainly unlike the for-pay (i.e. not used by kids) software I've used. And it's not clear that its way of doing things provides any benefit.
You mean it's awesome being me
Its posts like these that make me wish we had a (+1, Funny) option.
The blender menubar is bizarre. You also can't navigate it with the keyboard (the top menu choices), using the keyboard for the actual menus seems kind of random, basic stuff. And nothing in the menu really screams for the need of a specialized one.
The about dialog is a disaster in the latest version, it appears for about a second. Not giving you enough time to note the build/version!
Even worse, if you move your mouse 1 pixel, the window disappears!
Resizing the window makes it go black, sometimes even moving it does this (if a portion was obscured).
The resize behaviour of the buttons at the bottom is hard to figure out. Sometimes they "shrink" (to the point of almost being unusable). Then even if they shrink, the panel gets cut off when you resize the window. C'mon guys, make up your mind, either you rearrange or you resize, but both?
The whole thing is really a usability nightmare. But I don't think it is because it's an open source product, again for some reason these 3D interfaces are designed by sadists.
- sigs are for wimps.