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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!
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.
Major complaints were that the interface was very non-intuitive compared to Maya and Max. The main reason I'd switch over is I have about 20 spare machines I can build into a render farm. It would be substantially cheaper using Blender to render than it would using Maya or Mental Ray.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
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); }
The catchphrase is a play on meanings: If something is intuitive, one should not have to "get to know how it works". Classical examples of intuitive devices are:
Hammers: There's a handle, a smashy end.
My play on this is that, however easy blender may be... It's not easy to use right after opening it up, as compared to say a hammer.
While that is true for "real" use of it, if say a kid wanted to make a quick 3-D model of, say the solar system for a school project, they won't have time to learn all the interface commands. A "simple" view which lets someone create things, manage them, recolor them, and move them would be nice and an "advanced" view which would be the same or similar to the current layout which would allow you to do much more advanced things.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
And yet, not too many people have heard of the very intuitive software package Art of Illusion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_of_Illusion
The parent was mixing the "simplicity" argument above with the horse whip analogy of a dying whip company in a new automobile filled market first arguing that cars are unnecessary, then forced to change over to producing radio antennas instead of whips. Then succeeding in spite of themselves.
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
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.
Definitely worthy trying out.