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Blender 2.40 Released 264

Posted by CowboyNeal from the new-and-improved dept.
LetterRip writes "Googles Summer of Code has born fruit with the Blender 2.40 release. Thanks to their support and the hard work of the coders they supported Blender has fluid dynamics simulation done by Nils Thuerey, a powerful inverse kinematics system done by Brecht Van Lommel, and much improved boolean tools done by Marc Freixas. Of course Blender has had a huge number of improvements aside from the work supported by Google. The animation system got a complete rewrite by Ton Roosendaal, as well as other major improvements like flive UV unwrapping LSCM, and a Modifier stack system. It also has seen greatly improved ease of use since the last Slashdot announcement addressing all of the complaints raised- things like 3d manipulators, full undo system, etc. There is also a quick start guide for new users, and nice video and written tutorials on new features and a fairly up to date manual."
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Blender 2.40 Released More

Blender 2.40 Released

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  • free sculpting tool also (Score:5, Informative)

    by LetterRip ( 30937 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @09:07PM (#14324021)
    There is also a way cool zbrush like sculpting available as an add on script, see this post for details.

    http://www.elysiun.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=56101 [elysiun.com]

    LetterRip

  • lots of new features, but... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Toaste ( 892190 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @09:09PM (#14324029)
    ...does the new Blender come with a kitchen sink?

  • Awesome (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22, 2005 @09:14PM (#14324053)
    I simply love this program. It's open source, and it is as versatile as a professional capitalist program like Maya, Lightwave, or 3DS Max. It has a great renderer, with support for external renderers built right in. It's perfect for people who want to express their creativity in modeling but don't want to shovel out the cash to pay for a capitalist program. Though, I prefer Wings 3D for the actual modeling. I use Blender for setting up textures, animations, scenes, and all that kind of stuff mostly. The only real problem with it is that the interface is intimidating to new users of it.

    • Re:Awesome (Score:5, Insightful)

      by syphoon ( 619506 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @09:33PM (#14324146)
      I don't think I've ever seen someone substitute "proprietary" with "capitalist" like that before. What are you implying? Blender has a little red book?

      Open-source software is not the opposite of capitalism. It's an orthogonal concept.
      • Open-source software is not the opposite of capitalism. It's an orthogonal concept.

        This is, I think, the best descriptive sentence regarding FOSS I've ever seen! If you don't object, I might use it as my .sig!

        Anyway... to get back onto topic, a big Bravo! to all the Blender developers. Also, while Google continue to sponsers efforts like this, then they should be appauded. Bravo Google!

      • Blender _is_ free software, aside from the fact that it is open source.
        It's GPL. I followed the process.

        That means there is a political issue. Although it's not communist, whatever that means for you in the USA (I hear it's a pretty bad word around there), it does have politics implied. And they could have something to do with capitalism.

        Free software by itself is not against capitalism. But it is made to fix some of the flaws of some capitalistic systems. Proprietary software can be seen as a product of ca

        • I mentioned communism only as a traditional anti-capitalist concept, to illustrate the fact that that is a domain that open source doesn't cover. That is why I called it an orthogonal concept. It can exist alongside capitalism without trouble. And FWIW, I'm not even in the same hemisphere as the US.

          But it is made to fix some of the flaws of some capitalistic systems...[Snip]

          This doesn't follow at all. Capitalism doesn't enter into what free software/OS addresses. It fixes the flaws of other developmen

          • I agree with you that Open Source is orthogonal to capitalism.
            Open source is mostly a way of developing programs and distributing them.
            It has no politics at all.

            Free software, on the other hand is not orthogonal to capitalism.
            Non-theorethical modern capitalism gives power to the corporations, and takes it away from "consumers". It _could_ be said that actual capitalism wouldn't work that way, and that the free market this and the free market that, but the problems happen in practice, not in theory.

            Free soft
      • You're right that FOSS is orthogonal to capitalism, but that statement requires some qualification because many people will misinterpret that statement to mean taht FOSS is not trying to compete in the same way that commercial software is.

        Many people use the term "capitalism" almost synonymously with "free market economy", but that's not correct. Capitalism is a mechanism for financing business ventures; free market economies are economies in which goods can be traded freely. Capitalism and free market ec
      • Open-source software is not the opposite of capitalism. It's an orthogonal concept.

        It's not orthogonal to capitalism nor to any other politico-economic system, because if it were, it would have no direct effect on their operation, by definition of "orthogonal".

        FOSS directly affects centralist socialist systems quite drastically --- it undermines any attempt at centrally managed software development, by its very nature. FOSS would in theory not affect pure distributed communist systems made up of cooperatin

    • Re:Awesome (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Quarters ( 18322 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @09:51PM (#14324236)
      and it is as versatile as a professional capitalist program like Maya, Lightwave, or 3DS Max.

      No, it's not. In terms of expandability and versatility Max has it beat hands down. Here, do these things in Blender:

      Script a new custom helper node that has a private parameter block to hold run-time specific information and uses the exposed viewport drawing commands to create a custom icon and transform gizmo for the helper object. Create a new material that has a global parameter block to hold settings for .FX (or .HLSL or .GLSL) shaders. Have those shaders work in the viewports. Have the settings be easily accessible both by the scripting language and the C++ SDK so that the data can be easily exported. Create the custom helper node and material in a scripting language, not C or C++ w/ an SDK.

      Now create an entire bipedal skeleton with head, neck, clavicles, R/L upper arms, R/L lower arms, R/L hands, 4 spin segments, pelvis, R/L upper legs, R/L lower legs, R/L feet, proper IK and joint constraints. Do that in less than 30 seconds.

      Still with me?

      Keyframe animate the new skeleton over 100 frames. Create a second skeleton of a totally different scale with a different bone count. Now map the animation from skeleton 1 to skeleton 2, taking into acount the differing bone counts and scale. Do that in less than a minute.

      Use a cloth simulation to create the animation of a person walking through a curtain. Use an extremely dense mesh for the curtain cloth. Now skin-wrap that animation on to a low-res version of the curtain with an IK bone setup instead of a cloth simulation (since cloth sim can't be use in a real-time engine). Quickly! The skin wrapping needs to be done in a minute or so.

      Blender isn't a bad product at all. It's actually a very nice product. That doesn't mean it's more versatile than Max, though. Autodesk has more man hours poured into Max each year than Blender has had for the entire time its been a product. Autodesk has the advantage of a huge customer base and the smarts to talk to those customers and incorporate new features that increase productivity. Max wasn't nearly as versatile 3 years ago as it is now. Except for the biped creation step above it couldn't do any of the things I listed either (except maybe the custom helper node).

      There's nothing wrong with "capitalist" software (eyeroll at the bad melodramatic turn of phrase). If Max provides features and options that fit a current or designed workflow and increases productivity then it is well worth the purchase price.

      • Re:Awesome (Score:5, Insightful)

        by LetterRip ( 30937 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @10:11PM (#14324319)
        [QUOTEScript a new custom helper node that has a private parameter block to hold run-time specific information and uses the exposed viewport drawing commands to create a custom icon and transform gizmo for the helper object.[/QUOTE]

        No problem.

        [QUOTE]Create a new material that has a global parameter block to hold settings for .FX (or .HLSL or .GLSL) shaders.[/QUOTE]

        Sure.

        [QUOTE] Have those shaders work in the viewports.[/QUOTE]

        Alas we will need Ogre or CrystalSpace integration for that yet...

        [QUOTE]Have the settings be easily accessible both by the scripting language and the C++ SDK so that the data can be easily exported. Create the custom helper node and material in a scripting language, not C or C++ w/ an SDK.[/QUOTE]

        Scripting and direct access to the C code no SDK.

        [QUOTE]Now create an entire bipedal skeleton with head, neck, clavicles, R/L upper arms, R/L lower arms, R/L hands, 4 spin segments, pelvis, R/L upper legs, R/L lower legs, R/L feet, proper IK and joint constraints. Do that in less than 30 seconds.[/QUOTE]

        There are preexisiting skeltons with full constraint setups avialable already. Not automagic - but it is the weighting and morphs that are the big time consumers. We have very good morphs and weighting system now, and the rigging and constraints is quite easy and straight forward.

        [QUOTE]Still with me?[/QUOTE]

        Yep

        [QUOTE]Keyframe animate the new skeleton over 100 frames.[/QUOTE]

        Done.

        [QUOTE]Create a second skeleton of a totally different scale with a different bone count. Now map the animation from skeleton 1 to skeleton 2, taking into acount the differing bone counts and scale. Do that in less than a minute.[/QUOTE]

        Nope can't do this yet - motion retargeting will hopefully come by this summer - that is a pretty recent addition though to 3ds etc.

        [QUOTE]Use a cloth simulation to create the animation of a person walking through a curtain. Use an extremely dense mesh for the curtain cloth.[/QUOTE]

        Done

        [QUOTE]Now skin-wrap that animation on to a low-res version of the curtain with an IK bone setup instead of a cloth simulation (since cloth sim can't be use in a real-time engine). Quickly! The skin wrapping needs to be done in a minute or so.[/QUOTE]

        Haven't tried it but pretty sure is doable.

        [QUOTE]Blender isn't a bad product at all. It's actually a very nice product. That doesn't mean it's more versatile than Max, though.[/QUOTE]

        Absolutely agreed.

        [QUOTE]Autodesk has more man hours poured into Max each year than Blender has had for the entire time its been a product. Autodesk has the advantage of a huge customer base and the smarts to talk to those customers and incorporate new features that increase productivity. Max wasn't nearly as versatile 3 years ago as it is now. Except for the biped creation step above it couldn't do any of the things I listed either (except maybe the custom helper node).[/QUOTE]

        Well - with Blender you can accomplish most of what you listed now.

        [QUOTE]There's nothing wrong with "capitalist" software (eyeroll at the bad melodramatic turn of phrase). If Max provides features and options that fit a current or designed workflow and increases productivity then it is well worth the purchase price.[/QUOTE]

        Absolutely agreed.

        LetterRip
        • Ehh, BBCode doesn't work here by the way. Is there a good reason? [b] isn't worse than <b> - why can't Slashdot support both? It's not like the post markup language is true HTML: <ecode></ecode> and <URL:http://example.com/> aren't HTML, and if <blockquote> works why doesn't <bq>?
          • Because Slashdot isn't based on UBB or any of it's many clones, that's why. They decided to implement a small subset of HTML, rather than their own special code. This was done way before UBB and clones were something in widespread use. I imagine they went that way since HTML is something most geeks are farmilar with.
      • Sure I can.

        I just fire up Emacs silly. Just have to remember the modes and huge meta key combo's.

  • Inverse kinematics?? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Pig Hogger ( 10379 ) <pig DOT hogger AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday December 22, 2005 @09:15PM (#14324056) Journal
    Does it run on Alcohol?

    Is it written in Old Fortran beer???

    If not, you can bite my shiny a... OH. BLENDER...

    Never mind...

  • There's Blender meeting in March (also for gimp... (Score:5, Informative)

    by H4x0r Jim Duggan ( 757476 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @09:16PM (#14324065) Homepage Journal

    Anyone interested in Blender should be aware of the Libre Graphic Meeting [libregraphicsmeeting.org]. The plan is to get developers of Blender in one place, plus get developers of other free software [compsoc.com] packages like GIMP, Inkscape, and Scribus together too.

    19 March 2006 in Lyon, France

    • No disrespect meant, but your meeting hasn't recieved any exposure at all among Blender developers - I've seen a few posts at GIMP and other mailing lists, but not a single email on any of the Blender lists.

      LetterRip
      • If you could spread the word in the forums you know of, that would be helpful. It was a gimp mailing list where I heard about it, so I don't know how well-publicised it is in forums of other projects.

        I'm not actually involved in the meeting, I'm just interested because I think the conference is based on a good idea.

        (Correction: In my post I said the conference was on the 19th, but it's actually a 3-day event from the 17th to the 19th)
    • What about Paint.Net [wsu.edu]? Sure, it's win32 only, but in its (very) short existance, so far it's almost caught up to the GIMP from a user's perspective.

      Granted, it still lacks a number of more advanced features, but at the same time is elegant in its simplicity and power, and is a pleasure to use --- the UI is clean and responsive, and doesn't attempt to do a half-assed job of copying photoshop.

      Oh, and it's also Open Source. The executable is tiny, and the program loads in about 5 seoconds on my rather humble

  • one of the few success stories of wikibooks? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bcrowell ( 177657 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @09:29PM (#14324130) Homepage
    Browsing through wikibooks [wikibooks.org], wikipedia's sister project to try to write other books the wiki way, it's generally pretty difficult to find anything good, even though wikibooks is 2.5 years old. I recently did an unscientific study as part of my research for an article on free books [lightandmatter.com], and the Blender books on wikibooks [wikibooks.org] were one of the very few success stories out of the massive piles of junk [wikibooks.org] there. However, a lot of the best content on wikibooks seems to be stuff that was more or less just dumped into wikibooks after having already been written elsewhere, and comparing the wikibooks stuff on Blender with the stuff on the Blender site, it looks like that may actually have been the case here. There's nothing wrong with that per se (WP has a lot of 1911 Britannica articles that were just copied over), but it doesn't exactly help to convince me that the wiki book model has much potential for success outside of WP, which is uniquely well suited to the wiki approach.
    • Hi,

      the manual on Blenders wiki was indeed developed prior to being put on the wiki but the first version was for 2.33 - It is undergoing heavy development, and in particular all of the translations have happened afterwards. Also, some of the best pages are new additions (ie a superb page done on the hair system, another on the mesh tools etc.).

      LetterRip
    • were one of the very few success stories out of the massive piles of junk [wikibooks.org] there.

      Junk? Dude, that's the coolest thing I've read for ages! You just made my day. Lemme find some toilet paper, I'll be back later...

    • Yeah. I don't think there is anything wrong with the idea of wikibooks - but unlike WP, the project is too vaguely goaled. No one seems to have an idea what they are trying to do. Thus, it's basically failed to capture the public imagination. Bazaar-style development needs many more eyeballs.

  • So amazing that its hard to realize its free. (Score:5, Informative)

    by MindPrison ( 864299 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @09:35PM (#14324155) Journal
    I have been using Blender since version 1.8. And I realize that a lot find the user-interface hard to use when you are a beginner.

    The truth is however - even if it is harder to grasp as a beginner, most 3d applications are hard to learn - in fact ...all 3D is hard to learn when youre new to 3d in general.

    Blender isnt that hard compared to 3dstudio Max or Maya because of its better and more efficient workflow. I have bought 3dstudio max (a license) for over 4 years - but switched to Blender because I found that the modeling workflow was faster and more efficient. You can export/import .3ds if you want to - and now with the new Collada protocol you can import/export even more information so virtually nothing gets lost in the pipeline - of course, theres still some improvements to be made here. But hey - thats what the community is all about - you want it? Participate - and Well come up with something great for us all to use - together!

    The main advantage That I think Blender has - in comparison to eg. 3Dstudio max is that once you get started it all becomes easier ...while in 3dstudio max...you get a lot of "boxes and cylinders" to draw-off straight away ...without learning anything at all...so yeah...3dstudio max is more "pleasing-straight-away". Maya is more professional and can handle bigger more complex jobs but is harder to work on smaller projects. Blender is sort of the "middle way"... I am not saying that Blender is better or worse than 3Dstudio max or Maya...but they all have their advantages - and you will all definetively do yourselves a HUGE FAVOR trying this application. Its a killer app!

    It has - fluids (a really good one), Softbody, Some of the best rigging tools around and support that simply cant be beat. What do I mean by that? I mean - when I used 3dstudio max...I was an unsignificant "flea"... and when I complained about bugs in the software...It was always "my-fault" or "Windows fault"...but never Discreets fault.. And months later when the bugs finally got acknowledged and fixed - I had to purchase 1000 dollars in upgrades just to fix the bugs.

    When I switched to Blender and had problems - guess what? 2 days after "mentioning" possible bugs - they got fixed. And it kept going that way. Blender rarely chrashes and its a dream to work with the passionate developers.

  • Yay! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by komodotoes ( 939836 )
    I tried to get into Blender a few times over the past while and I was always turned off by the lack of an undo system and the weird UI. People who are learning something new, especially something as complicated as Blender, need to be able to erase a mistake easily. I haven't tried it in some time, so maybe I'll give it a whirl again now that I am free to bugger up my work at will.



    NeverEndingBillboard.com [neverendingbillboard.com]
    • Undo has been available for quite some time.

    • Re:Yay! (Score:4, Informative)

      by 3dr ( 169908 ) on Friday December 23, 2005 @01:35AM (#14325072)
      Please do try it. Undo does work, and Blender has really improved during the 2.3x releases. I've not tried 2.40 yet.

      To other Slashdotters who've mentioned UI difficulty:
      The interface in blender is designed around having the right hand on the mouse, and the left hand on the keyboard. UI actions are very terse, and therefore slow to learn and easy to forget. Find, read, and do the available tutorials! There is plenty of info to get going, and once you get over the initial hump you'll find Blender *fast* to use.

    • Lots of goodies awaits.... (Score:4, Informative)

      by MindPrison ( 864299 ) on Friday December 23, 2005 @01:50AM (#14325114) Journal
      Then youll be happy to know that - not only do we have full undo functionality , but theres even an UNDO-HISTORY function with a menu to go (Alt + U) so you can go anywhere in the history and redo from wherever you wish...heck...you can even browse through the various changes you made and go forward again if you still change your mind :)

      Blender even has different undos for different systems. Example: Global Undo and Local Undo - Meaning if you change stuff in you scene...you can just do the normal Ctrl + Z to undo there...or if you where editing your mesh you can undo/redo stuff with U in meshedit mode (Tab).

      Blenders all about safety and workflow these days, if all above wasnt enough security for you - you can adjust your preferences to save "xxx-number-of-versions-back". Theres even a separate "Reopen last" and "Recover last session" system so if you for some reason stopped in the middle of it all..can continue your work where you left it - or select the last file you worked on. Hows that for total paranoia? :)

      Want more? I could go on an on...but Ill leave that to you.

  • and it's completely useless on OS X because... (Score:4, Informative)

    by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @09:55PM (#14324252)
    ...none of the menus work in 10.4.3! [blender.org]* Looks like we'll have to wait for 10.4.4 to be released by Apple, as developer previews of 10.4.4 apparently resolve the issue.

    While some people would point the finger at Apple, I find it highly curious that Blender broke so severely (if you read the thread, lots of other things don't work) and far as I know, nothing else did...

    Yes, I verified the bug- on my 17" Powerbook (with an NVidia card) none of the menus or popup listboxes appear. If you have a machine with 10.4.3 and an nvidia card, don't bother...yet.

    • Re:and it's completely useless on OS X because... (Score:4, Informative)

      by lancelet ( 898272 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @10:07PM (#14324301) Homepage Journal
      Blender broke on OSX so severely because its entire user interface is built using OpenGL. Most applications you're familiar with probably use OpenGL only for the 3D displays, not for buttons, list-boxes, etc. Blender is notorious for pushing the OpenGL implementation much further and requiring a much more complete coverage of The Standard than other applications (games, for example). Don't point fingers unless you've looked at the code!
      • Isn't building the interface on OpenGL exactly what Apple says Mac OS X can do? Apple itself uses OpenGL for many of its core technologies, like Expose, Core Video, Core Image, etc. Check it: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/opengl/ [apple.com]

        As far as the "finger-pointing" goes... I'm not going to look at the code, and I'm not a Blender user, but I have to ask: If Apple says Mac OS X can support an OpenGL API (which is a standard), and hasn't set some arbitrary limit on the support the OS gives to that standard,
        • OS X doesn't really build its interface on OpenGL the same way Blender does. The current iteration of Quartz 2D is a software renderer, everything is rendered to a window via the CPU, and OpenGL is used as a really fast blitter capable of alpha blending and transformations. Blender appears to do a lot more through OpenGL, including using some of its feedback related features. Quartz can do something similar using Quartz 2D Extreme, but that's buggy and disabled by default in 10.4.x.

    • Re:and it's completely useless on OS X because... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      There's similar problems with Modo when upgrading to 10.4.3, and also Alias is advising Maya users not to upgrade to 10.4.3 for some nvidia cards. Doesn't seem like a coincedence to me.
    • Well that's surprising. For reference, it is ONLY with an nVidia card (my 15" PB's Radeon 9700 shows menus under 10.4.3, I just tested with the new download).

      How odd that one graphics card would work while the other wouldn't. Are they drawing their own menus and stuff in OpenGL or something?

      • Re:Works with ATI (Score:2, Informative)

        by Eideewt ( 603267 )
        Actually, yes, they are. They use OpenGL for all the 2d parts of the interface as well as the 3d display. So if your driver has broken 2d OpenGL rendering (many do, since it's not commonly used), Blender's menus will be broken to some degree.
        • That was what I figured, since something like GTK or QT would be doing their own drawing using the OS functions (I would think). I'm a little surprised that nVidia is having this trouble and not ATI. Based on my experiences with both companies, I would think it would be the other way around.

          But I wonder what caused it? Was it a change in Blender, or one in an OS X update. Curious.

          • OSX change. If we could have fixed it in the blender code we would have. A few of the core development team uses OSX so it's a high priority. But GL broke on that platform for that card and since as others have mentioned, we draw our entire interface in openGL, that's been problematic. Not much that can be done but wait for the issue to be fixed.

            Linux Platform Manager
            Blender Project

  • Grammar Nazi (Score:5, Funny)

    by Geoffreyerffoeg ( 729040 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @10:08PM (#14324312)
    There's a couple of errors in the post, but they're not important, except one whose rule many people don't know:

    has born fruit with the Blender 2.40 release.
    Borne fruit. "Borne" is the past tense of "bear". "Born" is a defective verb that's used as the passive voice of "give birth". Unless they went into labor before releasing their product, I'm pretty sure they meant "borne".

  • bloated? (Score:4, Funny)

    by AvitarX ( 172628 ) <.gro.derdnuheniwydnarb. .ta. .em.> on Thursday December 22, 2005 @11:27PM (#14324638) Journal
    at 6MB isn't blender starting to get bloated?

    • Re:bloated? (Score:5, Informative)

      by djcapelis ( 587616 ) * on Friday December 23, 2005 @12:11AM (#14324806) Homepage
      We're working on it!

      No, seriously, we're working on it.

      Linux Platform Manager
      Blender Project
  • ...If you participate in 'Blender Battles [mudpuddle.co.nz]', which you should if you're interested in blender.

    And don't forget the elysiun forums [elysiun.com], which are in invaluable source of blender knowledge, and... Also another place where you can put up your dukes in some friendly blender competition.

    While I'm at it, don't forget #smc (stands for "speed modeling competitions") on freenode.

  • Replacing the Game Engine: CrystalBlend (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jorrit ( 19549 ) on Friday December 23, 2005 @12:30AM (#14324877) Homepage
    Some of you may already know but we are aiming to make a new GameEngine for Blender using the Crystal Space 3D Engine (http://www.crystalspace3d.org/ [crystalspace3d.org]). This project is called CrystalBlend (more information on that project here: http://www.crystalspace3d.org/tikiwiki/tiki-index. php?page=CrystalBlend [crystalspace3d.org]). The idea is (just like with the current game engine) to be able to make full games from inside Blender without the need to program. The current logic system for the game engine is a bit limited so you often have to resort to Python scripts to make the full game but with CrystalBlend we will make a totally new logic system that still allows for this fallback but makes it less needed.

    The reason I post here is that I'm looking for developers who want to help me with this project mainly on the Blender side. As the project manager of Crystal Space I will take on the Crystal Space side of CrystalBlend (i.e. 3D engine specifics). I will also work on the logic system itself but I would like some other people to help me with both the integration of Blender and Crystal Space as the development of the new user interfaces for the new logic system.

    Give me a mail (jorrit dot tyberghein at gmail dot com) if you are interested!

    Greetings,
    • Some of you may already know but we are aiming to make a new GameEngine for Blender using the Crystal Space 3D Engine

      Ouch, that would appear to be very bad news for many Blender fans.

      Crystal Space is in a terrible state in respect of its portability to 64-bit platforms, whereas Blender is clean. Some distributions don't even carry 64-bit CS builds because of the mess (eg. Gentoo), and trying to build it by hand shows exactly why --- it's not just a localized hiccup but a disaster area.

      If you base Blender'
      • That's absolutely not true! I'm the project manager of Crystal Space and my main computer is a 64-bit AMD on which I run 64-bit Linux. Crystal Space is 100% 64-bit clean (at least the latest CVS, the latest stable 0.98 has problems).

        Greetings,
        • Crystal Space is 100% 64-bit clean (at least the latest CVS, the latest stable 0.98 has problems).

          That's excellent news about the latest CS, Jorrit. Thank you.

          However, my post was 100% factual, for the current state of CS in Gentoo and for the source release that I tried to build by hand (a few months old now) in the absence of an ebuild. Here are the details:

          Gentoo Portage on Athlon 64 (x86_64 arch), sync'd today (note both ebuilds "Masked", owing to build problems):

          * dev-games/crystalspace [ Masked ]
  • I would love to switch from 3DSMax to Blender for my little hobby game, but the lack of smoothing groups in Blender makes this absolutely impossible. Googling for "Blender smoothing groups" didn't give me much hope. Are they even planned for inclusion?

    • Re:Still no smoothing groups? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Fireflymantis ( 670938 ) on Friday December 23, 2005 @04:24AM (#14325457)
      Yes there are smoothing groups, although as per the blender philosphy, it is hard to figure out how to do it. One has to select the verts (or side, or faces) of the group and turn it into a material group. From there, you can assign in a unique texture, have it be automatically be made into a seam group for LCMS unwrap and UV texturing, and set it as a smothed group, amongst other different nifty things.

  • CAD? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Trogre ( 513942 ) on Friday December 23, 2005 @04:11AM (#14325428) Homepage
    Will I finally be able to model my new house with this version?

    I was sad to see the BlenderCAD project die a slow death, as it addressed a lot of the CAD issues that Blender 2.3 was missing.

    I'd still like to see persistent units, measurements and materials BOM.

  • My has some more information and also mentions Project Orange:

    >>>
    Blender 2.4 on par with commercial 3D tools

    The developers of the open source 3D package Blender [blender.org] have released Blender Version 2.4 [blender.org]. B-Bones, Envelope Skinweighting [blender.org] and Fluid Simulation [blender.org] are just a few of a sheer innumerable amount of features that have been added throughout 2005 in approach of the 2.4 release. It is safe to say that Blender has come to level with current commercial 3D tools, with even a few features unique to Blender. T
  • maybe it is time i got a graphics card.
  • I just started to suspect that we're about to witness quite a few Blender-rendered hardcore porn movies.

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