Blender 2.65 Released

skade88 writes "Blender 2.65 has been released. Here is a quote from the Blender team: 'The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.65. We focused on making this the most stable release in the 2.6 cycle yet, fixing over 200 bugs. Fire simulation was added along with many improvements in smoke simulation. In Cycles, motion blur, open shading language and anisotropic shading support was added. For mesh modeling, the bevel tool was much improved, a new symmetrize mesh tool was added, and new Laplacian smooth, decimate, and triangulate modifiers are available.'"

Comments

3D Comp[uter Graphics Software

[stepdown]

For those wondering what Blender is, according to Wikipedia it's "a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software product used for creating animated films, visual effects, interactive 3D applications or video games" with a built-in game engine.

Re:3D Comp[uter Graphics Software

[gman003]

Or in fewer words, Blender is to Maya what GIMP is to Photoshop.

Re:3D Comp[uter Graphics Software

[robthebloke]

Or more accurately, Blender is to 3DS Max what GIMP is to Photoshop.

Blender is based around the modifier-stack philosophy present in 3DS Max, which is probably my biggest complaint about it tbh. Max is, and always has been, very inflexible compared to Maya. It's great for getting some stuff done quickly, but if you're not careful, you can easily run up against the boundaries of what's possible with the software. Maya is a very different beast in this regard (along with XSI & Houdini). It's organised around a node/attr dependency graph which can easily be reconfigured to solve whatever problem needs solving. If you hit a problem in Maya, there is always a way around it (which may be horribly hacky, but at least there is a workaround). That's the main reason Maya/Houdini/XSI are used extensivley within the VFX world, and why you'll never find anyone using Blender or Max.

That's not to say Blender isn't good at what it does, but it's not something that can really compete with Maya. It's great in the games arena (especially indy games), but it's core level architecture is not an approach that would work nicely in VFX world sadly....

Re:3D Comp[uter Graphics Software

[Will.Woodhull]

I don't think Blender is much like any of the Adobe products. The entire orientation of the development effort is different.

The Adobe products are designed for industrial use, where perhaps a hundred different artists are working simultaneously on the same 5 second animation scene, each doing some small piece of the whole. Blender is designed for an individual artist who exerts total control over every aspect of the work for as long as it is in his hands. That does not mean that Blender cannot be used collaboratively; it does mean that the collaboration has to be done consciously, between equal partners. Whereas with Adobe products there is the expectation that each minion will be walled off from all the others and there will be a rigid hierarchy of managers determining who will have what kind of access to which detail.

With Blender, the entire database for a sequence of scenes is wrapped up in the .blend file. And anyone who has access to the .blend can use it as a library of objects, meshes, textures, even reference images, exporting whatever they want into their own work. That is not true of Adobe, which is used in situations where industrial espionage is a concern. Pixar is not going to let the casual employee hired for a week to make the scales of the dragon more irridescent steal the walk cycle that has been 8 months in development and sell it to a competitor.

Big Corporate Art cannot afford to use Blender, except in certain corner cases. Blender is for the individual artist, not for big productions built by hundreds of minions.

Re:Great Renderer, Lousy UI...

[grumbel]

confusing UI that should be re-engineered from scratch.

They have done exactly that while going from 2.4 to 2.5 (or something, don't remember the exact version numbers). The GUI of current Blender is completely new and reorganized and has very little resemblance with what was there before.

Re:Great Renderer, Lousy UI...

[88NoSoup4U88]

Yes, was indeed from 2.4 to 2.5, and was long due.

Right now I'd say that it's a lot easier to use, though for a newbie it still takes some time to get used to the whole swapping around of the left- and right- mousekey.

Blender is one of the few open source tools where in the long run I could see myself permanently switching to it (currently also using 3DSMax/Maya). For now it suits me perfectly for making renders, but game compatibility still seems to be a chore. One of the downsides of it being open source, or better said: free, is that a lot of plugins aren't made commercially, and as such no support is to be expected. It happened a few times over the years where I was working on a game/modification, and a new version of Blender would completely break a plugin (for instance, for properly exporting animated MD3-files), and no official update of said plugin would be made. Thus having to choose between working with an outdated modeling app, or going back to 3DSMax. I hope that the future will bring more dedicated plugin writers; or better, native exporting support for the various games on the market.

You just don't.

[oGMo]

Plenty of scripting (and python) to go around:

• Scripting in Houdini (python, etc)
• Nuke in python
• Maya scripting in python and MEL.
• Softimage scripting (python, etc)
• 3dsmax in python and MAXScript

Re: Old News

[dylan_-]

With 99% of software packages you can indeed just "mess around with it" and pick up the basic usage. Not with 3D packages. Install Blender and then do the Complete Newbie tutorial. You'll be glad you did!