Not just a Bmesh update, but that is the coolest part!

Here comes Blender 2.63, chock full of all sorts of fun new features, and more specifically: The mesh editing system has been upgraded to Bmesh! On the splash of course, we can see evidence of the mango team already at work (as well as in a some release notes), and even a couple fixes and features for the video sequencer, which I hope is just a taste of what is to come. Almost fifty developers, some submitting patches to bugs, new features, and some commiting like crazy (think Campbell Barton with more than 700 commits!) have put this build together. In the next few hours 2.63 will show up for downloading. So what's next?

Where is Blender 2.63? Almost here.

You might be wondering where the Blender 2.63 release has been hanging out. Well behind the scenes of the start of the new Blender Foundation Open Movie (Mango), the developers have been working hard on getting the next release of Blender prepped. The development process is in the BCon3 stage right now, which means that bugs are being fixed and the release is getting stabilized. No new features are being added at this point, since all the big ones have already been merged. Here are the features that have made it in.

Beyond Blender 2.60

Not only has Blender 2.60 come out in the last couple weeks, but also a bugfix 'a' release, which brings the latest version of Blender up to 2.60a (Which you can download here, if you haven't already...)! This release brought us 3D audio, video sequencing improvements, vertex weight groups, navigation meshes (for the game engine), even greater improvements to the animation system and better support for other languages. You can see the full release log here if you want.

Now it's the Blender developers are gearing up for their 2.61 release, which should occur sometime in December. This release is set to bring a number of very large improvements!

The Future of the GIMP

GIMP 2.7.3, the latest development release of GIMP was released a week ago, continuing to impress those who have been using it for a while. 2.7.3 introduced a fully working single-window mode, as well as working session management, and a new scale widget which takes less space in the dockable dialogs. Those were very visible changes in 2.7.3, however that short list, doesn't go anywhere near doing justice to the large amount of work that was put into this latest development release. For the whole list of changes since 2.7.2 you can read here. If you want to read about all the changes in the 2.7.x series you can read in the 2.7 release notes.

Along with this latest development release, you can check out the GIMP Roadmap, which shows some (but definitely not all) of the major targets for future versions of GIMP. 2.8 will, in itself, be a major milestone for the GIMP, however, what really excites me is the other milestones on the Roadmap page. Many of the changes are critical if GIMP is to start gaining a larger audience, specifically if it is to try to grab designers from  Photoshop. These changes include the major targets for 2.8, gaining single-window mode and layer groups, as well as many of the targets for later versions, such as 3.6 - smart objects, and 3.8 - a unified transform tool.

GIMP development is looking forward to exciting changes. Mentioned on the GIMP website was the fact that GIMP is also shortening it's development cycle (like a lot of other major programs these days!), starting with trying to release 2.8 in the end of 2011 (probably around December).

With all these changes, and more attention being focused on GIMP, many people are starting to wonder about first impressions. A well known designer has contacted the development team to ask about designing a new icon. Although no one with authority responded to him, he raises a good point. Is the icon getting old? An Ubuntu blog, and a web designer both mentioned GIMP's name, wondering if it might be time to change it, in order to better attract people to the program. You can head over to the Ubuntu blog to vote on a poll about the matter.

Keep checking up on the GIMP as it undergoes these dramatic changes.

The Journey of Blender 2.6 has Just Begun...

Blender 2.59, the final release in the 2.5x series, has been put up on the Blender website. There was some last minute hassles that popped up behind the scenes as you might have seen if you subscribe to bf-commiters, the development mailing list. This was mostly due to the fact that a number of Blender developers were away at the SIGGRAPH conference. However despite this inconvenience and a number of last minute bugs that were found, Campbell Barton and the rest of the crew made it through and release version 2.59, definitely the best version of Blender yet!

Now the focus turns to Blender 2.6x, starting with 2.60, where many branches which have not been combined with Blender will be. The official list of branches about to be merged is on the Blender Wiki here, however I'm sure that those won't be the only goodies added to Blender 2.6. On Blenderartists there is already mention of all of Nicholas Bishops work, which hasn't been listed on the Blender Wiki. Besides that there is also the 8 branches from GSOC this year. Need I even mention the fact the Bmesh will (hopefully) finally be integrated!

Exciting times ahead for Blender.

The New Blender Support Network?

Announced in this week's Blender Developer's Meeting notes, is a new idea for a Blender support network.

- (Not code releated) Blender Network proposal is open for review
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Org:Foundation/BlenderNetwork

The proposal (which can be found using the link above), is a great idea for connecting professional Blender artists and customers. It is an easy way to provide support to studios as well as individuals.
To use the network you will have to sign up as a member. The membership fees will help cover the costs of the web hosting/maintenance and moderators. There are three different membership types planned:

• Academic (free)
• Freelance (50 euro/year)
• Corporate (250 euro/year)

There will be various ways of "networking" with fellow artists and corporations. And each member will have a private page which can be updated with jobs he/she has done, and other information.

If the proposal goes through the BF has already asked Lumikuu to help set up the network and then maintain it for the first couple of months. 

You can find the discussion thread on blender.org here.

We'll see how far this goes in the coming months, but this could be the new big thing for Blender.

Cycles - A New Blender Renderer

The Buzz is growing as we learn more and more about this amazing new renderer for Blender - Cycles.

After leaving the Blender Foundation to work at Octane Renderer, the amazing developer Brecht has returned and will be working for the Blender Foundation in these coming months. He brought with him a new, experimental renderer that he had been working on in his spare time: http://code.blender.org/index.php/2011/04/modernizing-shading-and-rendering/ it's name was Cycles.

The new renderer (which is still very much a work in progress), is blisteringly fast and looks to completely revolutionize Blender's rendering. It includes fully integrated physical based rendering, with Global Illumination, and all sorts of great materials. It can utilize both the GPU and the CPU, which is what makes it so much faster. In fact, in the video below the rendering speed is almost real-time!

You can see an example of Cycles that Brecht posted on YouTube:



If you want to check it out for yourself run over to Graphicall where there are already a few builds of Cycles being distributed.

You can read more on the BlenderArtists Thread.

Blender 2.57 Released

The last stable version of Blender was released on September 16, 2009. We've come a long way in the last one and a half years. Through three alpha releases and four betas (five if you count the 2.56 re-release). It's been a long road. One with many changes, hundreds of bugs fixed, lots of features added (and quite a few that weren't quite ready), and most of all: a lot of hard work. Someone posted a link to a very neat pdf document on the Blender website, from the very beginnings of the 2.5x project, describing the evolution of the Blender UI.

From all that, we got Blender 2.57.

It's always nice to see a few screenshots so I thought I'd go through an old project I'd done (Oceanscape) in 2.49 and see what it looked like in 2.57. It opened up fine, although I did have to readjust the layout a little, since the properties windows does not deal that well in horizontal view. 

The Light at the End of the Tunnel - Blender 2.57

The rumors are out.

Blender 2.57 is coming.

And with it comes the light at the end of the tunnel for Blender 2.5x development. It has been announced on the developers mailing list that 2.57 will be considered the first 'stable' release.

2.57 will be a final release. The first stable one of the 2.5 series.

The release is supposed to happen around the end of March, and already plans are being set in motion. Python has been updated from 3.1 to 3.2, the newest release. Although it has been causing some pain for linux developers, because 3.2 is not yet packaged for their releases, for the most part the change has gone off without a hitch.
The other exiting development is the splash screen competition, which hasn't been seen recently because all of the splash screens have come from Sintel. This is the first splash screen for the 2.5x series that will be from the community. You can visit the thread for submissions here on BlenderArtists and you can see some of my favourites after the break.

Dead Anim8or Not so Dead After All!

Looks like Anim8or has made a partial recovery after being pronounced clinically dead. Posts were already up on Anim8or.com, BlenderArtists.org and here, when Raxx, a senior moderator at Anim8or.com posted about an email he had received from the sole developer of Anim8or, Steve. Apparently Steve has been rather busy lately, and is also completely revamping Anim8or. Because of this unfortunate combination, it looks like there still won't be much activity on the release side of things, however, at least there is a hope for the future.

Look forward to a year from now when v1.0 has been released and we are all sitting there scoffing at how we thought there was an end to Anim8or.

Anim8or is dead

Anim8or, a small, free 3D modelling and animation program, has been proclaimed dead by the members of the official forum over at Anim8or.com. Anim8or is where I was first introduced to 3D, and it helped me learn a lot of basic concepts that have been very useful in learning other programs like Blender. A post by one of the senior moderators has brought all the fun to an end: http://www.anim8or.com/smf/index.php?topic=3925 

He has come up with four reasons why Anim8or is dead and won't be coming back.

1. Steve (The sole developer of the program) hasn't logged in to the Anim8or forum for more than a month
2. Steve hasn't answered any emails from the moderator
3. It's been more than 2 years since even a small update to the program has been released, the last update being v0.97d
4. Steve has disabled new user registration to the forum since December 8th

It would appear that Steve has found different interests, and the program has stagnated. A shame considering all the hard work other people have put into the community and the program (you can see my contributions here). Hopefully all the great Anim8or users will be able to find a new program to put their effort into like Wings3D or Blender, which are much less likely to stop being supported.

So long Anim8or, and thanks for all the Fish.

A New Year and a New Blender Beta

2011 has arrived (a couple days ago, but still it's here!), and with it a new Blender beta has been released, 2.56. Unfortunately a few days after the release, a show-stopping bug  was uncovered, which forced the Development team to do an update release, named 2.56a, which was just released today. So to get the latest release, which included more then 20 bugs which have been fixed since the other release days before, visit the Download page. The release logs also contain some information on the newest release.

Since Blender 2.55 over 400 bugs have been fixed in Blender, which has brought a lot of stability to Blender, not to mention that (as of writing this post) there are only 48 bugs listed! Now that most of the bugs are fixed many developers can focus on some of their todo list, and it also gives external branches (such as Bmesh) a chance to more easily add to their projects, without worrying about bugs that will block their work. I even found and fixed a (rather small) bug.

Over in bf-extensions, I myself have been helping out a little trying to get scripts organized and finalizing what will go into release and what will stay out. Besides organizational and documentary stuff (like writing up the change log on scripts for 2.56) I have also been working on the Dynamic Spacebar Menu addon, fixing up some stuff and adding some more features. Although most of the changes didn't make it into 2.56, they did all make it into 2.56a so make sure you download that release!

So with the new year, things are starting to look up for Blender. We can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and a tentative release date for Blender 2.6 is around the summer time of this year (note: very tentative!). The next Blender version (2.57) is supposed to be a release candidate meaning that Blender will very soon be out of beta:

        "Meeting also agrees to publish Release Candidates again for next (2.57) version, especially when that's the first "out of beta" release :)" (From the bf-commiters mailing list)

Happy Developing in 2011

Blender 2.5 Progress

Blender 2.5 has been slowly progressing, as more developers start focusing on bug fixing, and well rounding, instead of Sintel (which has enjoy lots of success). Blender 2.55 beta was released on November 4th, and continues to build on Blender's ever growing series of betas. Despite the seemingly never ending cycle, progress is being made. Hundreds of bug fixes have been made, in fact during the last month more than 300 bugs reports were closed. However there are still bugs in the program, and so about the same number have bugs have been reported. Still if you check out Letwory Interactive, which publishes status updates on the development of Blender, it would appear that we are starting to close more bugs then are being reported. According to the developers, we could be expecting the final release somewhere in the next three to five months.

Also having to do with Blender development is a cool post made over at BlenderGuru.

Sintel Open Movie Released

Sintel is out.

Download it here.

A great animated short from a technical standpoint, and it lasts 14 minutes and 48 seconds too! Although as many people have pointed out, there are a couple of plot holes, I think that overall the short is very good. Although maybe not as good as the Blender Foundations previous short Big Buck Bunny, it is very close, and I would definitely recommend watching it.

As you might or might not know, this short was produced as an open movie, which means that almost all software used to produce the movie was open source. The main production tools included Blender, Gimp, MyPaint and some other software.

I look forward to the Blender Institutes next open movie project which could be in production in the next year. You can see an interview with Ton Roosendal (The Producer of Sintel as well as head of the Blender Institute.) over at BlenderGuru, where Ton talks about the Sintel project, as well as his plans for the next project, with a possible codename: "Mango".

http://www.blenderguru.com/interview-with-ton-roosendaal/

Maya and Blender - Presets and Integration - And other keymap help

Lots of people have been wondering how they can easily switch between Maya and Blender, without having to worry a whole lot about different hot-keys and such. Well there are two easy solutions that I have come up with.

One.

Blender now has a Maya key-map preset built right in! No need to go through the long lists of key-maps and change everything so that it is to your liking, instead right on the splash screen is a nice little drop down menu with presets (under the name Interaction Presets). Right now there are only two, Maya and Blender, however in the future it is possible that other 3D programs will have their own "interaction" presets built into Blender. Unfortunately for the die-hard Maya user, not every singe hot-key has been ported (Blender's features aren't all the same as Maya's - otherwise there would be no point in having it.), still it is supposed to be very helpful.

This change has been in Blender's Trunk since r31638 at least, so building the latest version of Blender will guarantee that you have the feature, however even if you are not a programmer, you can still have access to it! Download a fairly recent version of Blender for Windows (Complete with Installer!) from Letwory Interactive at this page, and enjoy!

Two.
Blender Guru just released the Free Blender 2.5 Cheat Sheet, a list of all the keyboard shortcuts in Blender, grouped by task (eg. Modelling, Sculpting, Fly Mode, etc.). Now you won't have to worry about knowing the shortcuts, just look them up!

Hope these ideas help you out with your Blender fun (and work)!

Oceanscape

If you're new to blender, still developing your skills or even are an expert at it the Blenderartists Weekend Challenge is a great way to hone your skills. I usually check back there every week or two to see what the theme of the contests is and if I like it and have the time then I'll enter. You can read up on the rules here and then you can start designing!

For last weekend's Weekend Challenge the theme was "Cityscape" so after some initial concept creation I made this:

I decided to make this a big learning experience as well so I split the scene up into layers and composited all the render layers together. There are 3 separate layers: the foreground (The buildings in the front and some of the water), the background (all the far off water and buildings) and the sky (moon, stars, etc.). I then applied some colouring effects (making everything a little blue) as well as giving some bloom and a little background bluring. I modeled all the buildings, platforms and bridges, then I lit it all (extremely hard work I must say.) and got everything the way I wanted it to be.

My final result was what you see below:

I used the .blend files from a Blender Guru tutorial to give me some hints on how to create my highrises, and from there I was on my own.

I do wish I had gotten it a bit more complete, maybe added some people walking around, some more building variation and I was hoping to create some sort of transportation system (monorail or something.) however I am very happy with what I accomplished and learned in my latest foray into the world of 3D.

Blenderstorm

The title of a recent BlenderArtist thread, and then an email in the Blender Developers mailing list: Blenderstorm... Is Back. I haven't see it before, but then, I haven't seen a lot of things. However one thing is for sure, it has one slick website.

By now I'm sure you're going, "What is Blenderstorm anyway?" Well you can head over there and check it out, but I'll also give you a short summary as well.

Blenderstorm is essentially, a big, online brain storm of problems with Blender and (This is important) solutions to those problems. You must have a solution if you add a problem! The problems (or ideas as they are called by the website) are then put into the "Idea Sandbox", where users (you must create an account to use Blenderstorm) can comment on the ideas and provide other solutions as well.

Blender 2.53 Beta Release

Although many Blender 2.5 Alphas have been release, everyone has been looking forward to the Beta, and now it is here! There has been a lot of changes since the last Alpha, including a whole new way of using add-ons (as well as including a lot of great ones), a lot more stabilizing of the python API, a whole host of improvements in sculpting, thanks in part to the Google Summer of Code, and many other great upgrades.

Blender Guru - The Complete Weather Series

About a month ago Andrew Price, the man behind Blender Guru, was able to finally start working full time on making blender tutorials. And he has just finished his first month, after publishing five high quality tutorials on Blender Guru. All of them are relating to June's theme "Weather", if you want to know what next month's theme will be, visit his post here. The titles of the five tutorials he has published are:

• Puddles
• Rain
• Lightning
• Snow
• Heat Distortion

I'm glad to say that Andrew is keeping an open standard and has written two of them up, instead of just using video for all of them. The Puddles and Heat Distortion tutorials are both available for browsing as soon as you get to their pages, no need to watch any videos. That along has made me check back at Blender Guru very often! The style of these tutorials are usually very easy to follow, and (surprisingly) I've actually learned more about blender through these tutorials. If you're interested in learning more about blender, check out Blender Guru!

Fire in the Comptuer!

No, my computer is not on fire! (Otherwise I wouldn't be typing would I?) Instead I've been using myPaint to come up with another piece of art! I was
testing out some more brushes, and just in general playing around.

To create the backround I just stroked it a couple times with the default brush. I then used an oil-pastel like brush for the base of all the logs, and after that used the charcoal brush to give the wood a slight texture. I used the glow brush (with different colours) to create all the flames, and finally went over certain areas with the blur brush to give it the look of gas coming off the fire.

Hope you enjoy!