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 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.

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)!

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 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!

BlenPaintArt

I recently completed a piece entitled "Orbs in the Grass" done completely in Blender 2.5 r28678. A simple piece which used the new Cloud Generator script to create the clouds and a couple particles systems for the grass, and although it isn't perfect it's pretty good for me. You can see my BlenderArtists thread on it here.

I also just painted a little piece using MyPaint, a open-source painting program which is very simple but powerful. You can learn more about it (and download it) from their website here. It is very effective with a tablet, which sadly I lack, but you can still do amazing things with it using just a mouse. Allthough I wouldn't call my art amazing, I still think it's pretty cool. This is based on a concept sketch I did one day. I can truthfully say, it looks a lot better in the colour that you can get with MyPaint!

Sintel Trailer Released

The Open Movie project "Sintel", codenamed Durian, has just released it's trailer. After starting in August 2009 the Durian team has been hard at work, modeling, animating, coding, rendering and doing all sorts of things. Finally we get to see some of the fruits of their labor, but not just in picture form. A 52 second long trailer has been released which includes all sorts of cool action and adventure shots from the movie.

One of the shots, the one where Sintel is in the alley, has been followed for a while. We first saw it in some indirect lighting tests after that was implemented into blender, and now we get to see the final product.

Other scenes we have been following even further back since Durian decided to keep us involved in the first minute of the movie, that is the first couple shots including a bit of sintel's battle with the Gatekeepers and her talk with the Shaman.

All in all the movie is shaping up very well and looks very good, especially with Jan Morgensten's amazing music to add that mythical feel to it. Although there are a couple things with the hair (You have to look very closely) overall that issue seems to have been cleared up, especially when we look at this post about some wacky bugs in Blender 2.5 that the team discovered.

The new logo is featured right at the end and does look very good, especially compared to the previous 3d text.

Download the trailer here and enjoy it! I am especially looking forward to the movie after seeing this taste, and apparently it is supposed to come out sometime in June right before SIGGRAPH happens.

Blender Guru and the Compositor

Blender Guru just released its latest tutorial: Introduction to the Compositor. It looks like a very interesting tutorial, especially judging by the comments on the page of the actual video. Also the cover art is very nice, however I know from experience that although the cover art usually looks very nice (A tribute to the mastermind behind blender guru) the user's finished product is vastly different, as you will see if you try Blender Guru's Introduction to Texture Nodes tutorial.

However despite differences I do recommend trying out the tutorial as well as various other ones on Blender Guru: http://www.blenderguru.com/

I only wish that the author would present each tutorial in multiple formats or text only such as in the Creating Volumetric Cloud tutorial. In that one he had a video tutorial as well as a written tutorial included on the page. Even if the written one is too long or costly (images) to put on the webpage, at least allow the pdf to be easily downloaded.

When I went to download the much talked about, and very interesting looking Creating Realistic Fire in Blender 2.5 I was surprised and disappointed at all I had to do to get to the pdf. I thought a simple download this link was in hand but instead I had to sign up for the Blender Guru mailing list (Maybe he wants to show off how many people signed up??) and then I found (to my dismay) that the website he used (for hosting? or maybe just for the mailing list thing) was blocked by my ISP. Maybe this is only something I am experiencing, but I couldn't even find another place to download.

Hopefully the rest of his wonderful tutorials will be text based and easily downloadable. I have really enjoyed the ones I've read and wish to read more, especially about things like the compositor or making realistic fire/grass/clouds/whatever... 

Thanks for what you've done Blender Gure, please make it accessible for the rest of us! (Or at least the "us" who have these problems)

Christmas Blend

I thought I'd show the "Blender Render" I did over Christmas, which I'm hoping to, along with the spring render, turn into a seasons series. I am expecting to do a render for summer and fall, and then have a complete collection. The blend itself was fairly simple, I used some reflective spheres for the ornaments and used a beveled curve with a cloth modifier applied for the two strings which are resting on the floor. The one moving had no modifier applied.

Blender

Blender is a free(as in Open Source) 3D Modelling suite, written in C with some C++ extensions and Python as a embeded(I believe) scripting language. Although many people are put off by its interface there are many tutorials out there to get you started. Blender is, in some people's minds, almost as advanced as some commercial programs out there such as lightwave, Maya or 3D Studio Max. It has many cool features such as:

• Fluid Simulation: Not very good for large scale sims but very good at small scale
• Particle Animations: Lots of cool particle effects from boids, to strands(hair/grass/...)
• Mesh modeling: This may be one of the weaker features as there are no n-gons(multi vertex faces) and things like boolean subtraction are very weak, but still a solid system.
• Sculpting: Along with multires it allows you to create some stunning images
• Sophisticated Rendering and Materials/Textures: A variety of procedural textures, and quite customizable materials, including Ray-traced reflection, ray-traced and other transparency, sub-surface scattering, Ambient Occlusion(Approximate and Ray-trace), ect.
• UV-Editing: A very comprehensive UV-Editing tool as well as texturing painting( even directly onto the mesh).

Blender includes many other cool features as well which can help you do things like make games( a game enging), edit video(A non-linear video editor) and more. A new version is being developed and is just leaving the alpha stage, this includes many new features like better/faster sculpting, a new mesh api(this means better modeling and n-gon support), A new Python Script API, many internal changes, Volume Rendering, Smoke Simulation and even more advanced fluid simulation. This new version is called 2.5(the development) and 2.6(the release). You can check out the latest version of 2.5 here:
2.52 Download Page
And look at the development process by joining the bf-commiters@blender.org mailing list, or checking out graphicall.org which shows the latest builds/commits/ect. To get involved in development poke around the development tab on blender.org.

I started using Blender after hearing a couple comparisons between it and a much smaller(but still lovable) 3D Package called Anim8or. At first I thought the comparisons were unfair, but though they may have been slightly stacked the comparisons did show that blender was a far more advanced program. I mucked around in it, quite confused, for a while until I found The Essential Blender. A book(which you can download the text of and browse on the web), made by the Blender Foundation to introduce Blender 2.48(much different from 2.5). The text alone was invaluable, and when I bought the book much later it helped me to understand Blender a lot! I would definitely recommend this book to beginners.

Also just surfing the web for tutorials will help you come up with all sorts of stuff. A very good site that started a while back is Blender-Tuts which is a listing of many tutorials around the web. BlenderCookie is another website which has very comprehensive tutorials, although they are all video which can be a show stopper for low bandwidth users...

I hope this has helped you all to understand blender a little better. :D