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Blender 2.66 Released
First time accepted submitter hochl writes "The Blender Foundation has announced a new release of the popular, free 3D design program Blender. From the release page: The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.66. This release contains long awaited features like rigid body physics simulation, dynamic topology sculpting and matcap display. Other new features include Cycles hair rendering, support for high pixel density displays, much better handling of premultiplied and straight alpha transparency, a vertex bevel tool, a mesh cache modifier and a new SPH particle fluid dynamics solver."
Since 2.5 came out Blender's UI has improved incredibly. I now prefer it to tools like 3ds Max and Maya, which feel clunky by comparison. And anyone who says Blender is a toy and can't be used for serious projects clearly doesn't know what they are talking about. Blender can read/write most formats, has excellent rigging and animation tools, an incredible compositor, integrated video editing, UV editing, sculpting, remeshing tools, motion tracking, soft and hard body simulation, hair, network rendering, several renderers available, including the new (excellent) cycles renderer, the list goes on and on. It has improved FBX support now, which means it integrates with most game engine asset pipelines seamlessly. Plus it has fairly easy-to-pick-up python scripting built-in, which means whatever you need that isn't there you can hack in without too much work.
Unlike many OSS projects, the blender foundation does a really good job of accepting patches, and creating branches for what seem at first to be random ideas, that quickly develop into can't-live-without features. And yes, that does lead to some bloat, but so what -- it's still a fraction of the size of 3dsMax, and far more functional in most areas.
Seriously, if you haven't tried Blender since 2.49, you haven't used blender at all.
Heh, captcha "approval"
The Blender manual claims it has been usable since 1994. If it is still inferior after everyone has had the source code for nearly 20 years then your argument has failed.
The only failure here is your total lack of any research.
Blender was a closed source program for roughly the first ten years of its life. The company, NaN (Not a Number), inc. was one of those profitable small businesses that got caught in the fallout from the dotcom collapse, and went under. They had begun Blender as an in-house tool for their own artists, but began selling it in the latter years; the folks who bought Blender and loved it managed to raise the cash to purchase the source code and copyrights from the now-defunct NaN, and released it as open source.
It was a small community working on it until the past few years.