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: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: 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!