New Blender Released

An anonymous reader writes "Blender, the cross-platform, open source 3d suite, has released version 2.43 along with a website redesign. This version brings powerful new features within reach of every person. These features include sculpt modeling, retopologizing tools, render passes, render baking, support for multi-uvs, enhanced fluid simulator with particles, new rigid body engine, numerous new compositing modes including defocus (DOF) node and much more. Feature videos are also available."

Goof Stuff!

Blender is absolutely amazing software ... i've used it since 2.39 (I believe thats the release) ... and it's came a long way. It's helped me learn opengl and appreciate the difference between what an artist and a programmer can do. It's a great tool and a definite "must play with" for all developers. I only hope the skeleton & mesh export examples have been tightened up to include more documentation.

Re:Goof Stuff!

Wait a second... what's wrong with programming in vi? It's way easier to use than some random IDE with an overly-complex GUI.

I mean... a Unix CLI *is* an IDE - and it's not like a programmer should be complaining about needing idiot-proof tools.

Re:Eclipse

I can generate hundreds of setters and getters via Eclipse in a matter of seconds.

I consider this a failure of the programming language you're working in, rather than a beneficial feature of your IDE.

Languages like Java (the other offender being C#) *do* punish the programmer for working without a complex IDE. They require like a million lines of code before you can even start programming. They require method autocomplete because they have methods like "my_array.sortThisArrayInDescendingAlphabeticalOrd erUsingHeapSort()". They require that your editor supports having multiple files open because no non-trivial functionality can be implemented in a single file.

If you're working in C, or Perl, or Ruby, or Python, or Haskel, or even C++ then vi works really well. Sure, it's possible to argue that a programming language should be more verbose than Perl, but getting much more unnecessarily verbose and strict about form than Python is probably a bad idea.

Woo-Hah!

Does it have a frappé mode? :D

Meh.

I won't believe it until someone releases a series of videos in which a lab-coated dude asks "Will it Render?".

How about some user interface?

I've used many graphics applications. I'm pretty good with AutoCad. I'm not bad with 3D-Studio. (Well ok, that was a few years ago.) Blender drives me nuts. The best improvement will (because it doesn't seem to have happened yet) be a decent UI.

Re:Mod parent up. Blenders UI sucks balls.

I use both Blender and Maya and I can't help but laugh about what people like you say. By the time you have actually learned all of the concepts and methods the UI is about the last thing you'll be concerned with. No matter how good a UI is it cannot teach you how to use 3d modeling software.

Besides Blender is built around hot key usage which makes it much faster to model in, IMHO than Maya, but yes you have to learn how to use it.

Re:Mod parent up. Blenders UI sucks balls.

The UI is obviously just a ploy to sell those cool cardboard keyboard overlays like they used to have for WP and Word for DOS. Making UIs really complicated and keyboard based is actually a value-addon for open source software :)

Re:How about some user interface?

Actually the next version of the manual is still being developed, the wiki is part of that.

And you still can get the paper version, albeit the slightly off-colored first printing run edition: http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/product_info.php?p roducts_id=79 [blender3d.org]. You can also get a PDF of the manual as well. It's old and again we're working on the new one, but for most things it's quite fine as a reference.

The manual will continue, after all, it's part of how the blender foundation is financed. (Clue the conspiracy theorists that say we make the software hard to use on purpose in 3... 2...)

~D.J. Capelis
Blender Dev

Re:How about some user interface?

I've heard this critisism from people before, but usually because it is different to what they're used too rather than because it is actually bad.

I've sat and watched my brother, who is a professional 3D animator, using Max do do some relatively simple task with a path and was amazed at how long it took him. I'd been learning Blender and could accompish exactly the same result in at least a third of the time, and I'm a newb. I just happen to be uncorrupted by Max's UI.

He had tried Blender and found it difficult to use. I strongly recommended going through the tutorials, he took the time and now raves about how quick and easy it is to do complex tasks that used to take for ever.

I'd rate Blender up with Apache and Firefox as showcasing excellent OSS

oh no!

Blender, the cross-platform, open source 3d suite, has released version 2.43

So Blender has become self-aware and is now rapidly releasing updates of itself, no doubt gaining strength and influence with each new version, until it is powerful enough to control the world's nuclear arsenal, so it can wipe out humanity and jumpstart the era of software...

Man, that sucks!

now I feel old...

wow..I haven't heard anything about Blender in forever! I used to use it maybe about 7 or 8 years ago...all I remember is that it felt very backwards when I started using Maya and XSI. Programming games in the same program that you do all of your modeling in was probably the coolest thing about it...go Python!

Article is a dupe

As seen right here. [slashdot.org]

Oh! I thought you said a new "Bender" was released!

New Features

Not only does it have great new features. It makes a mean smoothie too!

Question of the Moment

Question of the Moment: Can it make Vista look salable?

If I only had a brain...

At least a creative one. I am always impressed when I see works of art, and 3d rendering is no different. I always download these apps, then I try to find online tutorials, forums and all that... but I can never produce anything worth mentioning. I guess I just lack the creative artistic abilities. Now when it comes to programming, I can just sit down, lay down some code, and soon enough its doing what I wanted it to do in the first place.

Thanks for the link, I'm going to download this, and give it a try as well.

I would love to be able to make some beautiful scenes as the ones that they display on the blender website.

want to learn blender?

If you want to learn Blender, check out my book on wikibooks.org:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_P ro [wikibooks.org]

Thanks!
spidey

No Changelog link?

What, no link to the very nice changelog page [blender.org]?

Yes, I know it's in TFA, but come on, the story is about a release, so why not link to the changelog as well?

Well..

Blender, ..., has released version 2.43

In Soviet Russia, Blender release you!

Was I the only one...

Who read: New Bender Released.

Now that would truly be good news

GtkRadiant

I prefer GtkRadiant.

Now fully jargon-enabled

This version brings powerful new features within reach of every person. These features include sculpt modeling, retopologing tools, render passes, render baking, support for multi-uvs, enhanced fluid simulator with particles, new rigid body engine, numerous new compositing nodes including defocus (DOF) node and much more.

Now if only "every person" who now has these features "within reach" had any idea what all this stuff meant. :)

I still dont..

like the ui and a whole bunch of other things. Granted I will never say they haven't put together alot more then any other open source project out their when it comes to a 3d package. That being said I find that they do certain things assbackwards compared to whats been done over the years with 3d packages. On top of this they've implemented object D while completely leaving out A,B,and C which is why you'd even put feature D in. Every new release I still find myself messing around with it and all the while still not understanding how or why people likes its work flow.

Creating an object while having it placed where some 3d cursor is without having a option to tell it "No create it a the center of the scene like every other peice of 3d software known to man" is just crazy to me. Even more crazy then that is not being able to select an object and have a window show its properties. When I say that please don't point me to the crude layouts to see a objects properties all over the place, instead go use Autodesks Maya, Softimage XSI, or 3DS Max and thats what I'm looking for. On top of that the floating property windows which are in blender have very small text and the input values are a pain in the ass to edit. Most of all though they way you select objects, polygons, vertices etc are just wtf. I don't know how many times I have accidentaly hit a mouse button on a high res mesh which moved a vertex without me even knowing it.

These are just personal opinions and obviously some people like it the way its currently done, why though I have no damn clue. Blenders a piece of software I'd truely like to see go far, hell it already has in many aspects. Mabye this is why I tend to bitch so much, because I'd realy like to see them succeed. I just don't like how many of the open source projects that end up geting past the crash every 2 mins phase, always end up reinventing the wheel when it comes to how things are done and have been done. Why can't they see "Hey every other 3d app has done it this way since the beginning of time. Maybe theirs something good about that method" instead of saying "No this is open source freedom of choice roxors so lets do it the opposite regardless if it helps you with work or not". It's sad they do things so far from the norm with certain interactions and presenting data to the user, because all it means to me is Softimage and Autodesk will continue to get my money next year and the year after and etc etc.

Oh, just great. Thanks.

For the last 2.5 years I've been anouncing every major release of Blender on /. (this is more of a minor one) and no one cared. Now it's posted before I even noticed that 2.43 is up - and I've checked every day the last 2 weeks. Now the site is overrun and I can't get my copy. .. Wonderfull.
BTW:
1.) The new website (a new template for Typo3 [typo3.org], their CMS, looks cool but it's way to wide and/or inflexible.
2.) Blender seriously rocks and is closing in on the big players in 3D quickly in terms of usability and featureset. Amonst the new ones: The integrated compositor now has alpha blending and pass rendering which has me ditching my video tools. No need for Final Cut Pro for Renders anymore.

Support the team. And thanks to them for yet another great Blender release. Can't wait to lay my hands on the 2.43 final.

ack!

./blender Compiled with Python version 2.5. Checking for installed Python... got it! blender: xcb_xlib.c:41: xcb_xlib_lock: Assertion `!c->xlib.lock' failed. Aborted

Please, better editing in the manual

I'd like to use Blender. It's clearly a great program, probably the best open-source 3D app out there. I want to use it so much that I bought the manual, even though I can reboot into Windows and use Lightwave 3D. I really want to support open source projects like Blender.

But I found the manual to be very poorly edited. The fact that it was not written by native English speakers comes through very clearly. It was so poorly written, in fact, that I got a headache trying to use it and eventually just gave up.

If they come out with a new manual that's edited to a decent level of readability, or even if they just edit the old one better and republish it, I'd probably buy it. Until then, I'll keep rebooting into Windows when I want to do 3D.

But is it safe?

From BlenderNation:

We also have a new webserver for the website dubbed 'Emo'...

That doesn't sound very safe.

Cool but...

Can we use it for CAD yet? Can we model building modifications complete with measurements?

Blender menus

One question - is there any way to make the menus move at a reasonable speed? Moving between each menu [File | Add] etc takes around three seconds on this 3.6GHz P4. I'm not having problems with any other applications, just Blender. Running Vista RC1, if that's relevant.

Hint: I'm not about to learn the keyboard shortcuts just to put together one test scene, before anyone helpfully says "but the keyboard shortcuts are so powerful" ;)

How odes it compare to Bryce, Vue, and Poser?

Any Blender who has used Bryce, Vue, and or Poser care to offer some opinions comparing/contrasting these with Blender? Just curious how well it would fit in with these tools (e.g. I have a ton f Poser content from DAZ). Thanks!

Whats wrong with emacs

After all its an os as well

Why are their two Mac Blenders? It's a drag.

Blender is awesome but wow it is such a drag to have to download two separate but identical-looking and identically-named Blenders and keep track of what CPU's are in which Macs and use the right Blender on each one. This bug is as classic as Y2K. To a Unix or Windows user, it seems like you are shipping two applications for two platforms, but what you are actually doing is shipping one Mac app broken into two parts. One part will run on all Macs, however it will suffer reduced performance on some compared to if it was shipped complete. The other part will run on some Macs, and fail to run on others where it would run fine if it was complete. It's a huge bug, especially because it is so rare for a Mac app to fail to run if you have either the current or previous OS version. I don't know that it's ever happened to me on Mac OS X.

The programmers were probably thinking of an "application install" process, during which you are checking RAM allotment, you are familiar with the system you are installing Blender onto. It might be a once a year thing. However on the Mac there is no Blender installer, just a Blender application. Very few Mac apps use installers. So what you're actually asking the user to do when you ship an app this way is check what CPU is in the Mac they are using every time they LAUNCH Blender, which they may do hundreds of times per year on dozens of systems. If they are launching it from an iPod or network disk then which Blender it is has absolutely nothing to do with what CPU is in the Mac they are using.

Also, this is the second CPU transition for Macs ... the last time, bandwidth was even more precious, and we went through the "split the app to save bandwidth" thing with even more gusto, and we found out that it doesn't even save bandwidth. So many users download both anyway, either because they actually need both, or because they don't know which one they need so they download both to be safe, that it completely negates the proposed bandwidth savings. Further, when they download each half of the app, they are getting all the non-binary parts TWICE, so no bandwidth savings. A Universal Blender would be a smaller download then the two split parts. There is no ultimate benefit to this.

Does anybody know if you can transplant the Intel binary into the PowerPC version (or other way around) and get on Universal Blender? Or are there further differences? Do I have to tell the app package it has both binaries now?

Crying about Blender GUI - BS

I am really sick & tired about this useless crying about Blender GUI. I have a feeling that this writings coming from people who never seriously used 3D applications - or people who are afraid that will 3D Blender become more popular that their "favorite" 3D application, heh, what will most likely to happen anyway. It's true that is Blender not as simple as Photoshop, Corel Draw, Swift 3D or similar applications where you can show finished "artwork" to your mom after first few hours of playing with it. Indeed, Blender is complex and powerful, but if you want to make a movie or 3D game in first afternoon then better try to find something more simple and please don't write GUI "reviews" around.

On the other hand I don't understand people who using 3D applications like Maya, XSI, C4D, Max, etc for years and then come here and complaining about Blender GUI?! Is that really all what you can say about it?! Nothing about Inverse Kinematics, NLA, Nodes, Sculpt Tool, Game Engine, OpenEXR, Render Passes, Particles, Softbodies, Python, etc?! C'mon guys, I understand that you paid a lot for a GUI of your "favorite" 3D application, but please leave new users to decide on their own if it's worth to pay so much for your "better" GUI. 3D Blender is free of charge and that's why it's also priceless. This amazing application was lucky enough to run away from greedy hands of capitalists which can now only contest who will give better award to 3D Blender. Mac was first. Thank you! Also thanks to Google for sponsoring amazing Fluid physics implementation and other funky stuff which can now enjoy all 3D lovers around the globe! New Blender 2.43 is out and that's not all! We can again expect many new tools in the next release, and yes, they didn't forget about GUI improvements too!

Ton Roosendaal & your team, thank you for this state of the art software which I could only dream before...

The question is...

...will it blend [willitblend.com]?

Blender

I love using blender. It is one of the best 3D modeling suites once you get to know it. Way better than Maya PLE in my opinion. I have been using it for about 1 year.

Re:Bite My Shiny Metal Ass!!

Don't you mean "Bite my highly specular metal ass"?

Re:AUGH! DONT LINK TO A FUCKING BLOG

I HATE when they do this. Or, at the very least, link to blender.org in the summary! Jesus, is this difficult?

This is Jesus. YES.

Re:So what is this thing called Blender?

POV-Ray is just a raytracer whereas blender is a full featured suite that includes, among other things: a modelling environment, an animation environment, a game engine, physics support, hair support, water support, softbody support (think boobies if the term softbody isn't intuitive), python scripting support (and even a text editor included to go along with it), a non linear video editor (for composition), a primative sound editor and a few other things.

If you prefer raytracers, blender actually allows you to use yafray as a backing... blender's scanline renderer is quite good as well.

~D.J. Capelis
Blender Developer

Re:AUGH! DONT LINK TO A FUCKING BLOG

They did. Try the second link.

The first link is to a blender-specific news site. I wouldn't call it a blog.