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Blender 2.57 Released — and It's Easy To Use!
An anonymous reader writes "Past Blender releases, as capable as they were, had learning curves somewhere between straight up and down and 90 degrees. The release of Blender 2.57 changes all that. No longer are simple features 'non discoverable.' It has more or less a completely redesigned user interface that is clean, sensible and newbie friendly (hey, I'm using it!). It has a handy tab interface for Actions/Properties such as Render, Scene, World and Object etc. Plus, it's fast and CPU friendly. I'm running the official Blender standalone binary on Fedora 14, with 2GB RAM , Radeon X1300 (free drivers) and a cheap CPU Intel duel e2200. No more more slow GUI, no more 100% unexplained CPU, just great stuff. Kudos to all who made this possible."
To be perfectly fair, I was proficient on a couple of 3D modeling / animation suites (SoftImage, FormZ), and I'd used several others (Lightwave, Lightscape, even PovRay) when I tried Blender. It was far and away the least inuitive and most buggy piece of software I'd ever used (this is saying a lot when compared to SoftImage). Blender is not "hard for newbs" Blender is baroque, ridiculous, and flaky. It's actually far more difficult to work effectively in it, and it's sufficiently divergent from everything else that becoming proficient at it would likely make you worse at anything else.