2.44, 2.50 Development Roadmap

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road_ahead.jpgTon has published the development roadmap for Blender 2.44 and 2.50. 2.44 will be worked on during April. It will be a release with mainly bugfixes and minor improvements. This will be the last release before 2.50 which will consist of the long expected UI overhaul and other feature upgrades. The tentative releasedate for 2.50 is october/november 2007. Check out the report on Blender.org.

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    • frozerino

      Woohoo, 2.50 is going to be big!

    • amoose

      no shadow alpha texture mapping?

    • PaulR

      omf *drool*

      amoose, eh.. the what now?

    • micah fitch

      This all sounds great, but I really hope that the interface doesn’t become slow like every other 3D program I’ve ever used…

    • Cloudsk!pper

      The Interface will be the same, but in a more
      logical order. ;)

    • Jan Rosencratz

      I’m still dreaming of an Aqua-native interface… such a thing would absolutely rock my little world

    • Bellorum

      Erm, when he talked about march-april, Ton meant development time, not a releasedate;-)

    • http://www.rexprime.com rexprime

      This is the best news i have heard in a long long while.

    • http://www.blendernation.com Bart

      @Bellurom – ah! I really shouldn’t write BN articles and watch TV at the same time anymore :) Still, I guess there won’t be that much Blender development going on tonight..

    • http://www.dilid.com/otto Virgilio

      A tear has just shed… =)

    • amoose

      For those of you that didn’t know what I meant by,

      “shadow alpha texture mapping”,

      this is from blender.org:

      “The current implementation only supports a fixed transparency per face, no textures are being evaluated. The transparency value can be controlled with the new Material option “Shad A” (Shadow Alpha) in the “Material” panel.”

      You can see it at http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-243/irregular-shadow-buffer/ at the part about “Transparency”.

      With that ability you can for example make the leaf from the creeping ivy generator cast a shadow in the shape of the leaf not the plane with out adding verts.

      ______________
      the evil moose

    • Auria

      Awesome news! cant wait to use that

    • Polarbear

      This is what it says about 2.50
      “Release date unknown, hopefully october/november 2007?”
      But anyway 2.44 and 2.50 will be awsome stuff…

    • gaalgergely

      sweet!

    • Goldensparrow

      I hope the UI doesn’t change a whole lot… It could do with an aesthetic overhaul but thats it…. Although it was a pain to learn, after years of usage, I love Blender’s UI over any other app and want it to stay…

    • http://thebigdavec.googlepages.com Dave

      That looks like a lot of stuff to have in blender by november this year. But I am constantly stunned and amazed at what goes in to blender. And how fast. Happy days ahead, people :D

    • Vassilios Boucer

      Great (AMAZING!!!!!)… development roadmap!
      I also Love Blenders User Interface over any other app and want it to stay…Special!

      Ofcourse with all this new UI overhaul and other feature upgrades for Blender 2.50 i read in the roadmap list Included!

      Great News!

      Go Blender!

    • Rob W

      2.44 might be released tonight?! Wait a minute… (checks calendar). Ah ha, you almost had me there for a moment! :-)

    • eonmach

      Those things that to come up, it´s no surprise Blender will be a standard,

      I just wish in my WILDEST dreams, that some physics could be added to armatures (e.g. moving around a rig for a dinosaur or dragon, the tail would be wiping around with no -or almost no- animation required, almost all so called pro 3D apps do it, even MOHO a relatively small and funny to play with,2d vector based animation program does it) , game engine physics intregrated into object level, in real time…
      maybe SSS? maybe?…a “make a beautiful and fast render” button?

      …and maybe a harem full of beautiful, kinky and “non-questions asked ” servants :)

      I now, I now, don´t you hit me at once… I ain´t no coder, but every month there are much more things that blender can do now…that seemed impossible a year before… and fewer things that other apps can get cocky about, simply put the Blender coders are impressive people… I know it´s a matter of time…not the harem but the next to better things… ;D

      still doing my animation short code name “iceQ”, (blender gallery april 2005)

    • aws357

      Might be an april fool, but then again not…

      The fact that 2.44 is close is no secret…

      How close it is… well it will be done when it’s done :D

      * return playing on Blender *

    • aws357

      @eonmach
      You can put physics in bones. In an indirect way.

      Once, Wim pointed me to this link.
      http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BSoD/Introduction_to_Rigging/The_Bones-on-Curve_Spine

      It’s a revelation, because when you apply Softbodies to the curve, then you have your physical bones :D

    • gauravanim

      YOOO i am desperately waitin
      come fast 2.4,2.5

    • Peng You

      i’m happy to read that 2.44 will be a bug fixed version too. A stable software is necessary if Blender wants to become a (more) professional choice.
      thanks a lot developers!

    • Sanne

      Very exciting features that are planned for 2.50, wow.

      Still, the thing that I would be most grateful for is:
      “Possible projects for 2.44:
      - make blender 64 bits safe”
      It would be so very cool to get this for 2.44, so I can build my 64 bit Blender with no worries, with no issues about all those 32 bit dependencies I need to install if I use 32 bit Blender in compatibility mode.

      In any case, thanks for everything, all you Blender coding geniuses. :)

      Sanne

    • U-238

      2.5 Sounds like it’ll be great. I really do hope though that they’ll retain the “morphability” of the UI. (Being able to split and join windows and such at ones will.)

    • Erik Sejersen

      Dont think this is fake… it’s posted on 31/3 not 1/4, some difference… hope that normal baking is gonna get implemented!

    • http://www.marketiers.org/ shul

      What about real subsurface scattering? or at least an API for the renderer itself for plugins?

    • http://www.osysi.net Bmud

      With all that event information like being able to play back a “tutorial”. Will verse be able to have real integration as well?

    • http://mpan3.homeip.net mike pan

      OMG it works! I can now see the scene in its final rendered form in realtime 3D!

    • FuzzMaster

      Aaaah! November for cloth? Arghh!

    • Nathan

      - Macros
      - Tutorial recording

      ^ These are two massive upgrades that will greatly smooth down the learning curve required to learn blender. If you don’t believe me, check out k-3d (www.k-3d.org) which already has the feature.

      On GUI: Although I love Blender’s UI, there many hidden features that i’d like to get into GUI form (so they are findable without having to know about the specific hotkeys)

      Also, there are a few settings that imo should be turned ON by default, such as:
      “Updates other affected window spaces automatically to reflect changes in real time”
      (Button, UV/Image Editor)
      and
      “Use light for face”
      (Button, Buttons Window. In the editing options, texture face tab. This button is accessible only in UV Face Select Mode)

    • Kram1032

      Yeah!
      2.5 will be great! :D

    • Tynach

      Wow… Can’t wait! I hope, however, that the new UI will have the same defaults, and allow you to customize it. I don’t want to re-customize my .b.blend.

    • DimitrisChristou

      I also think that the UI works fine as is.

    • Thomas

      Well, let’s hope Ton will be so kind to put an option (in v.2.5)that can revert back to the current UI scheme, since lot’s of tutorials (well, ok, all) are made with this UI scheme.
      But I agree that the “3ds max UI scheme” would be cool.

    • german

      I think that blender needs that new UI to get more popular. People, who start with blender are getting headache when they need to work with this Interface, even if it is kind of very elaborated.

      I use blender for professonal reasons to visualize 3D reconstructions of biological structures. With time, a lot of researchers were quite impressed of this work and of course they were interested in blender. I recommend them to use blender too, but usually they don’t feel comfortable with blender, because it takes them too much time to find all this shortkeys and functions, which are much more easy findable in other progs. In other words, one can save that money fore the time to learn blender and therefore buy something else. This gives a very bad reputation for blender, which I think can be rapidly changed with a more logical UI, because blender is very good and much better than its reputation.

    • Ankit Pruthi

      just cant wait for v 2.50……it is gonna give 3ds max a huge competition(and may be leave max behind) once it’s interface is customizable….
      but i also dont want the current ui to change completely..its much better than other applications and wish they were the same

    • http://www.kyperjokki.fi/ Toni

      I think the basics of the UI will not change, but much of the work is invisible for an end user (cleaning up / restructuring the ui and tool related code). But certainly also actual usability improvements and new tools, building on the proven basic philosophy and structure Blender has.

      Certainly it is interesting also if the refactor is made so that even alternative UIs are possible, like perhaps some different ‘easy mode’ for casual users even, although apart from experimenting that is also a problematic road .. already almost everything and certainly all the basics are in the menus, not only accessible via memorizable hotkeys like back in the dark ages :)

      ~Toni

    • http://www.dynavisionfx.com Bart Robinson

      I think the event system recode is one of the more important aspects, if that allows us to get custom hotkeys and construction history. For custom hotkeys look at XSI as an example. They have some very interesting structures for hotkeys. As long as there IS NOT a list of key combinations to CHOOSE from, in other words, it is completely freeform, it will be good. For instance, K (Start Knife Tool) would be different from K-E (Knife Exact) would be different from K-M (Knife Midpoint). Construction history will be wonderful too. With Blender as procedural as it is, making it more so will extend it’s power exponentially. Additionally, it would be great to see Blender tools integrated into a node based pipeline very similar to the composite tools (Think Houdini, cause that’s what we’re getting closer to). Also break off windows, not anchored in the interface would be cool. Anyhow, good luck developers. Thanks!

    • http://shawnfumo.blogspot.com Shawn Fumo

      This is something that I really like about Blender is how sensibly it seems to be developed. Instead of just piling on new fancy features, they always seem to go back and refactor the underlying code. But it is done in such a way that the whole program isn’t rebuilt from scratch all of the time!

      The interface recoding I think will be very important. The macro, tutorial, and keymapping stuff alone will have a ton of possibilities. As mentioned, the tutorial feature will be amazing for new people. I played around with the OpenCanvas painting program that someone mention in another post, which can play back the steps of a painting and it is an amazing resource. There’s also the advantage of small size instead of tutorial movie files.

      I don’t think people have to be all that worried about the interface. I really doubt there will be a totally new out of left field type thing. More flexibility would be nice.. current functionality is good, but things like being able to overlap windows if you really want to would be cool. People don’t all work in the same ways. Some of the newer macromedia/adobe products are nice in how you change where everything is, even detatching toolbars and such.

      And this way people could make more familiar interfaces if that’s what they’re most comfortable with. With the understanding that they’ll have to adjust for tutorials that use the default interface. But the tutorial recording could help again. If done right, it could be based on recording the functions themselves and so work for any interface setup.

    • http://sgbzona.blogspot.com sgbzona

      I’ll like to see a native Pixie exporter for shaders direct from Blender.

    • http://blenderartist.org BLENDER

      blender is the best

    • http://www.digitalfxartist.com Digital FX Artist

      The changes sound great. I have a few suggestions…

      1. With the radial menus, make them customizable by the user. Allow us to change the menu items on the fly, how many menus are available and hierarchical menus.

      2. I hope when you talk about the node api, you mean you will make each of the nodes an individual dll. This will allow users to program their own nodes without having to download all the code and recompile it on their machine. Then can then upload and allow others to download the node files to use. If this is what you are thinking, you could see a very big explosion in the nodes available.

      3.With the render export api, is there any way to incorporate the rendering engine into the nodes? You can pick a node, the pick a rendering engine to render that node with. For example, you could use the Yafray engine with one node and the Sunflow engine with another then composite them in the same node network.

      4.Construction history. Can you do something like Maya has, have a node based construction method? This seems like it would give you far more flexibility.

    • http://www.digitalfxartist.com Digital FX Artist

      One more thing…

      Allow us to change the camera used in each rendering node.

    • http://btags.ic.cz Kamen

      Lol now we have the 2.49a and 2.50 is still coming.
      No offence ment it just seems a bit funny to me. However I couldn´t be more happy with the development of Blender. It´s just great,