To be fair this is just a RC with a change log. When they choose the RC and put it on oficially the release logs updates on the main page are quite good http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/
edit: whoops somehow I missed the last few posts already saying this!
Thats the point, they arent. They are just copy-pasted from previous 2.5 versions, which then link to more endless lists of changed stuff instead of one video showing all the new significant changes, and discussing the other smaller changes.
Oh, well then, you'll just want to go to blender cookie once they put up a video after the official release. Jonathan Williamson usually goes through the pertinent changes and explains them.
Oh, well then, you'll just want to go to blender cookie once they put up a video after the official release. Jonathan Williamson usually goes through the pertinent changes and explains them.
Ah yeah, lets get a guy to cover ONE feature of a whole new build, when we could get the guys who actually developed the features to explain all the changes. Great idea. :poly142:
(And he doesn't cover anywhere near all the new features in a build.)
what ever if you noticed like almost all open-source apps blender is aimed at devs, and there really seems to be no marketing or PR guys to polish off thigns like feature videos etc.
Ah yeah, lets get a guy to cover ONE feature of a whole new build, when we could get the guys who actually developed the features to explain all the changes. Great idea. :poly142:
(And he doesn't cover anywhere near all the new features in a build.)
Actually, he is a member of the Blender organization and he does demo updated features that matter to artists FYI. And don't get snide, I was kindly offering a possible solution to your complaint. Beggars can't be choosers. Those change logs are written for a programmer to read because those are the people whom typically care about them. If you don't like it, then donate some money to them and ask for them to consider doing what you'd like them to do, but I'm sure they have enough to do making a professional quality 3D application for all to use for free.
So, Blender is only for programmers and not artists?
He never said that. He said Bender is aimed at devs
There would be plenty of consistent docs, books and tutorials had Blender not shift the whole UI every 0.x0 release, and it's a release candidate. You expect launch day presentation event like for RCs?
really wtf are you expecting from the RC, it is not a final release and if you noticed if you go the the blender site, it is still pointing to 2.59 as the current stable release which is the release that is targeted at someone like you.
also because blender isn't a commercial product and doesn't have a pr and marketing team, they can take there time to get documentation out, since they dont got to worry about losing money on a bad release like autodesk would.
Sorry Andreas but if are seriously saying that blender is undocumented you Fail at the internet ...
i mean i just dont even know where to start with how stupid that statement is.
I think Andreas is coming from the perspective of someone trained in a commercial App. If you have a problem using a feature in max, its just a case of pressing F1 and reading the documentation (which is very well written).
While there is definitely good information on the net its hidden amongst a whole lot of utter bullshit, created by inexperienced artists who hardly know the program themselves. When your working to a deadline you dont want to waste that time sifting through bullshit.
But...this is not a finalized release. Afaik, there are other releases that come before these where users have to compile shit.
I know what an RC is. Every release is as badly documented (in a way non-programmers can glean information from) as the last. I am not referring exclusively to RC's, but final builds.
Seriously guys, read the posts and ATTEMPT TO COMPREHEND THEM before posting.
Sorry Andreas but if are seriously saying that blender is undocumented you Fail at the internet ...
i mean i just dont even know where to start with how stupid that statement is.
Blender is very badly documented by its developers. They document like coders (cause they are) and its not easy to follow what changes have occured. I think its something like 70-80% of the worlds people are kinaesthetic learners,especially artists. We learn by seeing shit being done. Not pages and pages of text thats layed out like code.
There were feature videos on the Blender shorts DVD's, so I know they got the resources to do the vids.
There's no need to be so defensive, Andreas. While I understood your first post, clearly many did not, and nothing you've posted since has helped anyone in any way.
It's true that an official video - aka one that can be found from the same website you'd download Blender from, and therefor visible to newcomers - would be a nice thing, especially for those who don't follow Blender very closely.
Untill that happens, you can keep up with Blender happenings through BlenderNation, although you'll have to put up with a number of shitty animations with no redeeming features other than 'this was made in Blender', which for some reason works quite well for the commenters over there.
Blender documentation was never of much help for me either last year.. nice to see they're at least trying to get it more consistently presented and written.
Pretty much all of my Blender learning has been through user videos, then again I hardly ever look up the official documentation no matter what app I use...
Mostly, yeah. Only the 'More features' page falls into the previous levels of inadequacy. Is that the new format, or is it just for the summer coding project?
http://cgcookie.com/blender/ <-- not all free, but ecpecially watch all the vids in the tips section there great.
http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/ <-- probably the main forum for blender related stuff, more searching is involved but it is a good resource.
http://cgcookie.com/blender/author/kernon-dillon/ <-- probably my favorite video tutorial guy, kernon dillon WATCH his creating an urban stairway video series totally changed my perception of snapping in blender and made me realize how absolutely powerful and accurate snapping is in blender.
http://google.com <-- this is my first stop when i cant figure something out inside blender
lastly, blender's development cycle has been extremely aggressive the last 2 years so a big problem is that even if stuff gets documented it gets old fast. this is awesome but at the same time it means if you want to use blender properly you actually have to keep tabs on its development and seek out information on its latest developments.
also the amount of scripts that are constantly released also is another reason to check out blender.org often for its news section, and also to check the blenderartist (formerly elysiun) forum often its general and news section and scripts section are wonderful and well all the sections are chalk full of educational info.
He's no amateur, hes been in the Blender game a long time, but yes, its a very impressive effort.
I think it just goes to show that Blender is an effective game development tool that is cross-platform compatible. It's something to break out of operating system lock-in and open up the market to those willing to develop for that market segment since most corporate publishers have become too cozy with Microsoft's DirectX to offer the public any form of choice. Just to clarify my position, I hate monopolies and MS is a monopoly. I could just switch to Linux or Mac OSX, but I'd be cutting myself off from a wide segment of PC games that I happen to love.
@greevar that is a pretty messed up statement leave the MS monopoly for the Apple one?
apple is extremely controlling over there products and there usage, and pretty much arbitrarily decides what gets in there marketplace, and what can compete with them in it.
besides, there lacks games engines for OS X, but there is maya, modo, 3dcoat, silo, and a few other good modeling tools to work with, and than there is all the adobe stuff.
there are also lot of game engines moving to support OS X, but source and UE3 not work on it, and im sure crytek will follow along soon. So there is the 2 big OS's, and really no point to support linux, due to it's market share, and the fact it that is can be a bitch to distribute commercial software for, so it would not be worth the time and money it takes for any dev house.
Blender is only as effective as the artist is at using it.
Personally I would love if Blender had a DirectX option for the viewport renderer. OpenGL on the Fermi cards is slower than cards 2 or 3 generations ago. My 8800GTX performs better than my current 460GTX, due to Nvidia crippling the cards
I think it just goes to show that Blender is an effective game development tool that is cross-platform compatible. It's something to break out of operating system lock-in and open up the market to those willing to develop for that market segment since most corporate publishers have become too cozy with Microsoft's DirectX to offer the public any form of choice. Just to clarify my position, I hate monopolies and MS is a monopoly. I could just switch to Linux or Mac OSX, but I'd be cutting myself off from a wide segment of PC games that I happen to love.
Consoles are the main target platform for games, and games are ported to both 360 and ps3, so it's not about directX.
It's about you(and most everyone else) being on windows and developers targeting that platform even if they could port their games to every other platform.
Blender game engine (and I'm a fan of it) is not as effective as other engines though, and lacks the horsepower that something like unity and UDK has, nor the community behind it, and the fact that it is not the main focus behind blender.
as much as i love blender and the bge (it is however great for fast prototyping imo), the bge is just no ready for primetime. it can do a lot of pretty things but it has horrible performance, until they fix that it will always be good for fast prototyping but nothing really serious. that said i just had a fun idea for a game that could work on bge
also in terms of rapid prototyping heres a failed project i worked on a bit with some blenderheads, was fun while it lasted !
Just chiming in here
I rate blender quite highly for VFX work, the smoke and fluid simulators are pretty nice (even without the qualifier "for a free program")
I find it pretty fast to knock out good FX through blender.
I used to model in it, but I can't imagine doing that now as I'm used to max, but for VFX it's still very useful for me.
signed up to vimeo just for you buddy! http://vimeo.com/30590662
This is a file im playing about with at the moment, seems to get decent results if I just tweak my turbulence seed now.
It's interesting you say about control though (or lack of), as I've been encountering a similar thing to a degree. I think you can get really nice results, but for fire etc you seem held back by the fluid simulator and it's hard to break out of the "fluid" look, which can be really nice in it's own right but it's not as flexible as say, fume, or maya fluids.
But this is an aside, I definitely think you can make some pretty nice things through just blender (and did I mention, I really like it's node based rendering?)
Also, it's worth noting the new release schedule. They've been planning this for a while, and it's now going into effect.
"We're reviewing with all branch/patch developers the status of their work, and make a migration schedule for all new features. This could include projects like new Mesh editing (BMesh), paint/sculpt improvements, Rigid Body Physics, new Curve/Nurbs system (Nurbana), Ocean Sim render, Particle Nodes, OpenCL compositing, Cycles render engine, Camera/motion tracking, and so on.
We do this in a series of small steps; with stablest branches first. This is the "2.6x series" resulting in a number of releases named 2.60, 2.61, 2.62 and so on. Each release is supposed to be stable, only finished branches will be added. Plan is to make a very tight schedule for this, with a bi-monthly release.
For Blender 2.6x the UI, Python API and general design specifications will remain on 2.5 compatible level, although there's several 2.5 leftover projects to complete still."
Yea, lots of cool stuff being worked on and implemented
The pessimistic part of me feels that only things that they need for Mango will be prioritised
There was supposed to be a mesh tools re-factor in the early 2.5 stages but it never happened. and I find the apparent lack of development in this area a little concerning.
Currently the moddeling tools are only usable because of addons like loop tools, bevel and inset/Extrude. I mean a bevel addon because it's not actually in the Blender?...that's a bit silly.
I really wish they would hurry up and fix BMesh so that the most basic feature in any 3d application...the actual modelling tools...can get a much needed upgrade. They should look toward Modo in this regard, for inspiration.
Yea, lots of cool stuff being worked on and implemented
The pessimistic part of me feels that only things that they need for Mango will be prioritised
There was supposed to be a mesh tools re-factor in the early 2.5 stages but it never happened. and I find the apparent lack of development in this area a little concerning.
Currently the moddeling tools are only usable because of addons like loop tools, bevel and inset/Extrude. I mean a bevel addon because it's not actually in the Blender?...that's a bit silly.
I really wish they would hurry up and fix BMesh so that the most basic feature in any 3d application...the actual modelling tools...can get a much needed upgrade. They should look toward Modo in this regard, for inspiration.
/end rant
+1
that is the main reason why i almost don't use blender at all now, kinda messed up when you can do all this cool physics, stuff and smoke simulations, and animation easily, but the simplest modeling makes you want to throw your comp out the window.
they should at-least have loop-tools, inset-scale, and bevel add-ons in there by default and enabled by default.
Yea, lots of cool stuff being worked on and implemented
The pessimistic part of me feels that only things that they need for Mango will be prioritised
There was supposed to be a mesh tools re-factor in the early 2.5 stages but it never happened. and I find the apparent lack of development in this area a little concerning.
Currently the moddeling tools are only usable because of addons like loop tools, bevel and inset/Extrude. I mean a bevel addon because it's not actually in the Blender?...that's a bit silly.
I really wish they would hurry up and fix BMesh so that the most basic feature in any 3d application...the actual modelling tools...can get a much needed upgrade. They should look toward Modo in this regard, for inspiration.
/end rant
yeah, i feel the same, its allways the sticking point for me when i try and get back into blender. lots of amazing stuff but the modelling tools stink.
I had a chance to use cycles in work today for a quick test. its an awesome renderer.
Yeah Blender got played by that BMesh developer who turned around once everyone had commited to BMesh and started asking for regular donations to keep working on it... pity. Hopefully it'll get sorted soon, they're gonna need to bevel stuff for Mango I assume!
Yeah Blender got played by that BMesh developer who turned around once everyone had commited to BMesh and started asking for regular donations to keep working on it... pity.
What is up with BMesh atp anyhow? Has it been taken over by someone else or is Mr.Donations still the only one working on it?
@PolyHertz,
It still being developed by Joseph Eagar but Campbell Barton has been officially working on it over the past couple of months, AFAIK. Campbell is a full time developer on Blender now, being employed by the Blender Foundation.
@Andreas,
iirc, blenders 3d viewport doesn't natively support AA and when its forced via the GPU drivers, it breaks some stuff. Not sure if it will ever get fixed
Just wanted to chime in and say I've used the 2.6 build and it looks awesome, very promising. I had used 2.4 but the interface scared me to death, the current version seems much more friendly. I love how flexible the interface panels are.
Nevermind original question, I found your post with the zip file of the bevel add on.
However, now that that particular add on is removed from svn, is that zip file the latest version of the script? Is the author not supporting this add on anymore, period?
Yea, it looks like 2.6 broke the script so they removed it from the SVN, rather than assigning it to someone to fix. Which is lame
Blender really needs an internal bevel tool that they are willing to support.
There is another Bevel tool, which works ok. You can get it HERE
Replies
http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/
edit: whoops somehow I missed the last few posts already saying this!
Bingo. Thought I'd been quite clear on that
Thats the point, they arent. They are just copy-pasted from previous 2.5 versions, which then link to more endless lists of changed stuff instead of one video showing all the new significant changes, and discussing the other smaller changes.
Oh, well then, you'll just want to go to blender cookie once they put up a video after the official release. Jonathan Williamson usually goes through the pertinent changes and explains them.
Ah yeah, lets get a guy to cover ONE feature of a whole new build, when we could get the guys who actually developed the features to explain all the changes. Great idea. :poly142:
(And he doesn't cover anywhere near all the new features in a build.)
Actually, he is a member of the Blender organization and he does demo updated features that matter to artists FYI. And don't get snide, I was kindly offering a possible solution to your complaint. Beggars can't be choosers. Those change logs are written for a programmer to read because those are the people whom typically care about them. If you don't like it, then donate some money to them and ask for them to consider doing what you'd like them to do, but I'm sure they have enough to do making a professional quality 3D application for all to use for free.
Edit:
What Passerby said.
So, Blender is only for programmers and not artists?
Yeah cept we find it way harder that it should be, as there is no user friendly documentation.:thumbup:
He never said that. He said Bender is aimed at devs
There would be plenty of consistent docs, books and tutorials had Blender not shift the whole UI every 0.x0 release, and it's a release candidate. You expect launch day presentation event like for RCs?
also because blender isn't a commercial product and doesn't have a pr and marketing team, they can take there time to get documentation out, since they dont got to worry about losing money on a bad release like autodesk would.
Sorry Andreas but if are seriously saying that blender is undocumented you Fail at the internet ...
i mean i just dont even know where to start with how stupid that statement is.
I think Andreas is coming from the perspective of someone trained in a commercial App. If you have a problem using a feature in max, its just a case of pressing F1 and reading the documentation (which is very well written).
While there is definitely good information on the net its hidden amongst a whole lot of utter bullshit, created by inexperienced artists who hardly know the program themselves. When your working to a deadline you dont want to waste that time sifting through bullshit.
I know what an RC is. Every release is as badly documented (in a way non-programmers can glean information from) as the last. I am not referring exclusively to RC's, but final builds.
Seriously guys, read the posts and ATTEMPT TO COMPREHEND THEM before posting.
Blender is very badly documented by its developers. They document like coders (cause they are) and its not easy to follow what changes have occured. I think its something like 70-80% of the worlds people are kinaesthetic learners,especially artists. We learn by seeing shit being done. Not pages and pages of text thats layed out like code.
There were feature videos on the Blender shorts DVD's, so I know they got the resources to do the vids.
It's true that an official video - aka one that can be found from the same website you'd download Blender from, and therefor visible to newcomers - would be a nice thing, especially for those who don't follow Blender very closely.
Untill that happens, you can keep up with Blender happenings through BlenderNation, although you'll have to put up with a number of shitty animations with no redeeming features other than 'this was made in Blender', which for some reason works quite well for the commenters over there.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.5/Manual
It's not 100% complete yet, but I believe it's what you're looking for Andreas.
RARWRRAWRRAWRRAWR!!!!!
Yes, constipation can be difficult. I hope you "pop the cork" buddy. :poly124:
Pretty much all of my Blender learning has been through user videos, then again I hardly ever look up the official documentation no matter what app I use...
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/changelog_260
http://www.blender.org/education-help/tutorials/
http://cgcookie.com/blender/ <-- not all free, but ecpecially watch all the vids in the tips section there great.
http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/ <-- probably the main forum for blender related stuff, more searching is involved but it is a good resource.
http://cgcookie.com/blender/author/kernon-dillon/ <-- probably my favorite video tutorial guy, kernon dillon WATCH his creating an urban stairway video series totally changed my perception of snapping in blender and made me realize how absolutely powerful and accurate snapping is in blender.
http://blenderartists.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?32-Tutorials <-- user driven but you will find stuff, just a more specific link.
on irc.freenode.net #blender #blendercoders #blenderchat <-- go in ask a question
http://wiki.blender.org/ <-- big gigantic resource
http://www.blender.org/education-help/ <-- good place to start.
http://google.com <-- this is my first stop when i cant figure something out inside blender
lastly, blender's development cycle has been extremely aggressive the last 2 years so a big problem is that even if stuff gets documented it gets old fast. this is awesome but at the same time it means if you want to use blender properly you actually have to keep tabs on its development and seek out information on its latest developments.
also the amount of scripts that are constantly released also is another reason to check out blender.org often for its news section, and also to check the blenderartist (formerly elysiun) forum often its general and news section and scripts section are wonderful and well all the sections are chalk full of educational info.
*one more edit* kernon dillon's vimeo page
http://vimeo.com/user559863
Dead Cyborg
I think it just goes to show that Blender is an effective game development tool that is cross-platform compatible. It's something to break out of operating system lock-in and open up the market to those willing to develop for that market segment since most corporate publishers have become too cozy with Microsoft's DirectX to offer the public any form of choice. Just to clarify my position, I hate monopolies and MS is a monopoly. I could just switch to Linux or Mac OSX, but I'd be cutting myself off from a wide segment of PC games that I happen to love.
apple is extremely controlling over there products and there usage, and pretty much arbitrarily decides what gets in there marketplace, and what can compete with them in it.
besides, there lacks games engines for OS X, but there is maya, modo, 3dcoat, silo, and a few other good modeling tools to work with, and than there is all the adobe stuff.
there are also lot of game engines moving to support OS X, but source and UE3 not work on it, and im sure crytek will follow along soon. So there is the 2 big OS's, and really no point to support linux, due to it's market share, and the fact it that is can be a bitch to distribute commercial software for, so it would not be worth the time and money it takes for any dev house.
Personally I would love if Blender had a DirectX option for the viewport renderer. OpenGL on the Fermi cards is slower than cards 2 or 3 generations ago. My 8800GTX performs better than my current 460GTX, due to Nvidia crippling the cards
Sadly, learning it is like walking through a jungle with no Machete.
Consoles are the main target platform for games, and games are ported to both 360 and ps3, so it's not about directX.
It's about you(and most everyone else) being on windows and developers targeting that platform even if they could port their games to every other platform.
Blender game engine (and I'm a fan of it) is not as effective as other engines though, and lacks the horsepower that something like unity and UDK has, nor the community behind it, and the fact that it is not the main focus behind blender.
There's blenderartists standards and polycount standards ;P
Andre is pretty awesome though, I just wish he could pop into polycount and become more awesome, he's limiting himself.
True.
also in terms of rapid prototyping heres a failed project i worked on a bit with some blenderheads, was fun while it lasted !
I rate blender quite highly for VFX work, the smoke and fluid simulators are pretty nice (even without the qualifier "for a free program")
I find it pretty fast to knock out good FX through blender.
I used to model in it, but I can't imagine doing that now as I'm used to max, but for VFX it's still very useful for me.
I had a play with the fire fx a while ago and it seemed really cool although I didn't spend enough time on it to actually feel in control.
http://vimeo.com/30590662
This is a file im playing about with at the moment, seems to get decent results if I just tweak my turbulence seed now.
It's interesting you say about control though (or lack of), as I've been encountering a similar thing to a degree. I think you can get really nice results, but for fire etc you seem held back by the fluid simulator and it's hard to break out of the "fluid" look, which can be really nice in it's own right but it's not as flexible as say, fume, or maya fluids.
But this is an aside, I definitely think you can make some pretty nice things through just blender (and did I mention, I really like it's node based rendering?)
Highlights:
3D Audio
Vertex Group Modifiers
Massive update to animation system
A trillion bug fixes.
Release log: http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-260/
Download: http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/
Also, its the first non RC with my PolySphere script in it
"We're reviewing with all branch/patch developers the status of their work, and make a migration schedule for all new features. This could include projects like new Mesh editing (BMesh), paint/sculpt improvements, Rigid Body Physics, new Curve/Nurbs system (Nurbana), Ocean Sim render, Particle Nodes, OpenCL compositing, Cycles render engine, Camera/motion tracking, and so on.
We do this in a series of small steps; with stablest branches first. This is the "2.6x series" resulting in a number of releases named 2.60, 2.61, 2.62 and so on. Each release is supposed to be stable, only finished branches will be added. Plan is to make a very tight schedule for this, with a bi-monthly release.
For Blender 2.6x the UI, Python API and general design specifications will remain on 2.5 compatible level, although there's several 2.5 leftover projects to complete still."
The pessimistic part of me feels that only things that they need for Mango will be prioritised
There was supposed to be a mesh tools re-factor in the early 2.5 stages but it never happened. and I find the apparent lack of development in this area a little concerning.
Currently the moddeling tools are only usable because of addons like loop tools, bevel and inset/Extrude. I mean a bevel addon because it's not actually in the Blender?...that's a bit silly.
I really wish they would hurry up and fix BMesh so that the most basic feature in any 3d application...the actual modelling tools...can get a much needed upgrade. They should look toward Modo in this regard, for inspiration.
/end rant
+1
that is the main reason why i almost don't use blender at all now, kinda messed up when you can do all this cool physics, stuff and smoke simulations, and animation easily, but the simplest modeling makes you want to throw your comp out the window.
they should at-least have loop-tools, inset-scale, and bevel add-ons in there by default and enabled by default.
yeah, i feel the same, its allways the sticking point for me when i try and get back into blender. lots of amazing stuff but the modelling tools stink.
I had a chance to use cycles in work today for a quick test. its an awesome renderer.
What is up with BMesh atp anyhow? Has it been taken over by someone else or is Mr.Donations still the only one working on it?
Anyone else getting really aliased performance in the viewport?
It still being developed by Joseph Eagar but Campbell Barton has been officially working on it over the past couple of months, AFAIK. Campbell is a full time developer on Blender now, being employed by the Blender Foundation.
@Andreas,
iirc, blenders 3d viewport doesn't natively support AA and when its forced via the GPU drivers, it breaks some stuff. Not sure if it will ever get fixed
I made a new thread as to not clutter this one up any further and to keep the new discussion a little more focused
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=90106
Any input would be great
Nevermind original question, I found your post with the zip file of the bevel add on.
However, now that that particular add on is removed from svn, is that zip file the latest version of the script? Is the author not supporting this add on anymore, period?
Blender really needs an internal bevel tool that they are willing to support.
There is another Bevel tool, which works ok. You can get it HERE
http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/