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."

Comments

You're A Newbie

[dylan_-]

Perhaps it really is now "easy to use". I doubt it. Many moons ago I downloaded Blender to give it a shot. I installed it, messed about for a while and was totally lost. Nothing made sense in it; I could barely figure out what I was supposed to be looking at or how to draw the simplest object. I gave up cursing the UI as completely impossible and arcane.

Some time later I decided to try it again. This time I didn't even try to figure it out, I just read the Complete Newbie tutorial and did exactly what it told me to do. All of a sudden Blender made sense and seemed quick and easy to use.

So, my recommendation is not to treat Blender like other packages, where you can figure it out by clicking around for a few minutes. You're a newbie. Do the tutorial. It will definitely save you a lot of annoyance.