Blender 2.50: A New Beginning

Written by Michael Swengel on January 7, 2010

A Little Background

When I started out with 3D design and visual effects, I used Blender 3D, a free and open-source 3D modeling, animation and compositing application. It boasts a powerful feature set with an astounding price: $0.00.

That was back in the early 2.x days. At the time Blender 3D was a sweet program but not much more than a hobbyist’s toy. It was fun to use, but it was lacking much of what is needed in a professional 3D program. The rendering engine, modeling tools, and animation system were decent but nothing to write home about.

Because of the features I felt were missing from Blender, two years ago I made the switch to LightWave 3D as my tool of choice. LightWave is fast, easy to learn, and extremely powerful. Compared to other commercial packages, LightWave is also substantially less expensive. Lightwave costs between $895 (PDF manuals) and $995 (printed manuals). Autodesk asks a whopping $3,275 for Maya 2010.

Since that time, Blender has undergone a LOT of work under the proverbial hood. We have seen the additions of realistic physics, character animation, fluid simulation, and even sculpting à la ZBrush! Not even LightWave has fluid simulation or sculpting without expensive plugins and third-party software.

Blender 2.4x Features

As of version 2.49, Blender 3D boasted all of the following:

CHARACTER ANIMATION:

Dependency Graph
Rigging
Inverse Kinematics
Skin Weighting
Armatures
Stride / Walking Support
Shape Keys
Drivers
Animation Curve Interpolation
Actions and NLA
Armature Drawing
Constraint System
Armature Tools

PARTICLES AND PHYSICS:

Fluid Simulation
Particle Guides and Distribution
Hair and Fur
Cloth Simulation
Rigid Body
Bullet Physics
Soft body
Physics Baking

GAME ENGINE:

GLSL Pixel and Vertex Shaders
Split Screen and Multiple Viewports (Think Halo)
Physics
Game Logic (events, actions, etc)

TOOLS, RENDERING, SCRIPTING:

UV and Image Editing
Radial Blend Texture
Sampling and Filtering
Python Scripting and API
Subsurf UV Mapping
Set Chaining
Node Editor
Transparency
High Dynamic Range (HDR)
Video Sequence Editor
Subsurface Scattering
Approximate Ambient Occlusion
Adaptive Sampling
Soft Shadows
Render Baking
Real-time GLSL Materials
Grease Pencil (for making sketch annotations, notes, etc)
Video Textures
Dome Rendering
Projection Texturing

MODELING:

Subdivision
Mesh Ripping
Boolean Operations
Object Grouping
Modifier Stack
Multi-res Mesh
Sculpting
Deform Modifiers

Support for Import & Export of many file types:

  • Import
    • 3D Studio
    • AC3D
    • COLLADA
    • DEC
    • DirectX
    • LightWave
    • LightWave Motion
    • MD2
    • MilkShape3D
    • Motion Capture
    • OpenFlight
    • Paths (SVG, PS, EPS, AI, GIMP)
    • Pro Engineer
    • Raw Faces
    • Stanford PLY
    • Video Sequence
    • Wavefront
    • X3D and VRML97
  • Export
    • 3D Studio
    • AC3D
    • Autodesk DXF, FBX
    • COLLADA DAE
    • DEC
    • DirectX
    • LightWave LWO
    • LightWave Motion
    • M3G (.m3g, .java)
    • MD2
    • OpenFlight
    • OpenInventor
    • Quake 3
    • Raw Faces
    • Softimage XSI
    • Standford PLY
    • VRML97
    • Vertex Keyframe Animation
    • Wavefront
    • X3D Extensible 3D

…and MUCH more I don’t have space for here.

That’s Great But…

…if you had asked me a year ago if I believed Blender on the same level as it’s commercial counterparts, I would have said no. Even with all of these (excellent) features, Blender still could not quite compete with expensive commercial applications like LightWave, Maya, XSI and 3D Studio. The commercial programs, while expensive, could get the same task done in less than half of the time – often with a better result.

Blender 2.50 (pronounced “two-fifty” according to the Blender Foundation), however, is a new beginning for the software. The core of Blender has been reworked; critical new features have been added; the user interface looks far more professional.

The New Kid On the Block

New Features

Version 2.50 has everything mentioned above, but it also adds several key new features:

  • Smoke and Fire Simulation (and it looks amazing!)
  • Volume Rendering (clouds, smoke, etc)
  • Bump Maps
  • Deep Shadow Maps
  • Interactive Particle Animation
  • NGon Support (polys with more than four vertices)
  • Event System with Graphical Editor
  • Updated Animation System
    • Linked actions
    • Updated Dope Sheet
    • Graph Editor (Ipo Curves, Functions)
  • Updated UI (Let’s face it, the 2.4x interface was a bit messy and unattractive)
  • Custom Key Mapping (set your own keyboard shortcuts)
  • 64-bit support (crucial for memory-guzzling projects)
  • And more is coming

In addition to new features, Blender 2.50 fixes the nagging bugs from v2.49.

Blender 2.49
Blender 2.49 (Click image to enlarge)

Blender 2.50 Alpha 0
Blender 2.50 Alpha 0 (Click to enlarge)

(Note the addition of a full-screen mode in 2.50!)

Development

Currently, Blender 2.50 is in the Alpha 0 stage. For you non-developers, that’s the first phase of testing for new software.

Planned releases are as follows:

Alpha 0: Initial testing release
Alpha 1: Finalize the UI
Beta 2: Implement changes to the modeling system
Beta 3: Implement changes to the animation system
Beta 4: Implement changes to the rendering / compositing systems

Because Blender is an entirely open source program, the Blender Foundation welcomes community involvement in its development. They want your help to test the software. Does it work for you? Does it do what you want in a 3D application? What could be improved? What do you like or dislike?

Feature suggestions, bug reports and comments are very welcome. I love that.

Get It

Blender 2.50 is not yet officially released. The current official release of Blender is version 2.49.

Because it is still alpha software, you probably won’t want to run Blender 2.50 in a production environment or count on it working 100% of the time. Although, what the Durian project is doing with 2.50 is remarkable.

The official version of Blender 2.50 Alpha 0 can be downloaded from the Blender website.* The other option is to head over to GraphicAll.org where members of the community and some Blender Foundation developers are constantly posting updated builds with the latest and greatest bug fixes and features.

Cross-Platform Support

Largely because it is open-source, Blender 3D is available for each of the major operating systems:

Windows 32-bit (2000, XP, Vista, 7)

Windows 64-bit (2000, XP, Vista, 7)

Linux x86 32-bit

Linux x86 64-bit

Mac OS X (32 and 64-bit)

Solaris

Irix

This certainly gives Blender an edge over much of its competition – which is bound to either the Microsoft or Apple operating systems.

It’s source is public and can be compiled for, really, any platform.

The Road Ahead

Can Blender overtake LightWave, Maya, 3D Studio and other commercial software? I really believe it can.

However, even if it can’t ultimately beat the commercial alternatives, it should give Newtek, Autodesk, and the others a run for their money. They will be forced to either lower their prices or add features to compete with Blender.

Blender has come a long way in two years. What was once a mere hobbyist’s toy now has the potential to surpass what the industry has been using for ages.

Trackbacks

Submit Feedback

Comments must be approved before appearing.

Your Name
Required
Your Email
Required, will not be published
Your Website
Optional
Your Message