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Blender Foundation Releases Blender 2.5 Alpha 0

200

blender-2.5-releaseThe Blender Foundation have just released the first test version of the upcoming Blender 2.5 - a HUGE accomplishment as Blender 2.5 is a massive rewrite of many parts of the software such as the user interface (support for multiple windows, completely Python driven, custom keymaps), rendering (volume rendering, much faster raytracing and the beginning of a new interface for external renderers), physics (smoke, new particle system) and a new animation system that aims to make *every* property in Blender animatable.

The naming of this version has caused much confusion over the last few months, but the Blender Foundation seems to have settled on 2.5 for all the test versions and 2.6 for the first 'stable' release. 2.6 is expected to be released 'mid 2010' (SIGGRAPH would seem like a good bet for that). More information about each release can be found in the release logs (see below).

Even if this is 'just' a testing release, this moment marks a milestone for the Blender community. Blender 2.5 is widely believed to be the version of Blender that will overcome the (perceived) notion of being difficult to use by users of other 3D applications. That, combined with the powerful new feature set may well be its ticket into a much, much larger user community.

Congratulations to everyone involved with your hard, hard work!

Links

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

200 Comments

  1. A true testament to the power of shared technology and culture, blender has grown faster than anyone could have believed in the 7 years since it was made open source. Long live the King of Free art apps.

  2. OH YEAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    It's not official but it's more official then graphicall.org. SO IM HAPPY! haha thanks for posting!

    oh yeah im like the fist one to download it haha

  3. yippiiiiiiieeeeehhhh!!!!!
    thanks to all the developers for their hard and excellent job....its so great that there's a wonderfull 3d-program for free :D and more great, that there a people who developed this program....
    sorry, my english isn't the best *g*

  4. I'm super excited about this. As an example of what the "everything animatable" impact can be, especially with the proposed "Would you like to use Maya/Max interface?" splash button, here's my weakly percieved history of XSI.

    1. XSI exists. Maya and Max dominate, Autodesk Scoffs.
    2. XSI 6 released, it includes an easily clicked "Max/Maya Interface" button right up front.
    3. Autodesk craps its pants, buys XSI.

    Congratulations and big hugs to all the developers, you've really made a beautiful piece of software.

  5. YES! I've been waiting for over a year for this! I can't wait to get home from work and see what it can do!!! I hope they've gotten the bugs worked out of the sculpting, if not I'll have to report the bug, can't wait to start!

  6. On the road map there is written that in alpha1 you want to put all of the functionality of 2.49 - do you mean that there will be some kind of option to make it look and behave like old good blender?

    It looks strange for me. It's hard to switch from horizontal to vertical panels alignment and lack of colored buttons makes it hard to find yourself. But indeed I can feel the power of new blender. Rendering is much faster.

    Good luck with further development.

  7. Here is to Blender by far my favorite app,
    An event that's sure to make all the Blend-heads clap,
    See if you other 3D clowns will be able to survive,
    When facing the power of Blender 2 . 5!!!

    Lame, I know, but I had to wax poetical about this one!!!
    Let the Blender Domination era begin!

  8. Hubert Grzeskowiak on

    guys, this is still an ALPHA version. means this is no official release or anything. alpha means it's a testing version for devs. it isn't even a beta, which would mean experimental software for users.

    i'll wait until this is more stable

  9. Great news although this version is rather unstable, some vital options are still gone (no Bevel, lack of Unwrap options, problems with Knife tool, disabled option of loading Background Image, problems with displaying windows properly - Theme panel in horizontal windows). Some serious projects will have to wait until the next release.

  10. !!! C O N G R A T U L A T I O N S !!!

    This is a HISTORIC DAY for Ton, the dev team, the Blender Foundation, and this community!

    I remember when my friend first pointed me to Blender years ago, when it was released as shareware by NaN, and he said to me, "This software will someday grow to challenge the industry kings!"

    And NOW it DOES!

    The amount of persistence, imagination/intelligence, and vision shown by Ton and those who have supported him through all the years of experimenting with different development models, to get to the smoother path of the Blender Foundation, create one of the strongest open source projects, and release such amazing software and an empowering contribution to all the artists and dreamers of the world... is unique, world class, and inspirational!!!

    !!! T H A N K Y O U !!!

  11. Great news!! Finally, but it sure is an alpha release, it's pretty unstable.
    Where is Freestyle? It doesn't appear...
    How do I activate GLSL? =___=
    The keys are mapped in a different way...
    Anyways the renderer is way faster YAY!!

  12. Wait a minute! That's not version 2.5! That's 2.49b. Is the wrong Intel Mac version linked????

    ETA: German mirror seems to work...

  13. It looks amazing! Very different from Blender 2.49, so you can't really rate its new interface yet because you basically have to learn a totally new program. ;)

  14. Hi,

    @Mihael - Its main integration developer is unable to manage the development for now, due to health reasons, so its not likely to be in this version, give it some time. It will be there eventually. Either way he managed to port most of the core tools over to bmesh. If you want to give it ago just download the source-code and compile with scons - or cmake, although that isn't supported for the bmesh branch and is a bit outdated.

  15. New announcement! 3D Magix 2.5 is available!

    Ok, sorry, not funny.

    Seriously, this looks absolutely amazing. Congratulations to the Blender team! Can't wait for each coming milestone.

  16. Ha ha ha !!!
    SOOOOO GOOOOD !!!
    Thanks Mr Ton.
    Thanks to all developpers !
    Thanks to the community !
    You guys ROCK !
    mwah mwah mwah ! :D

  17. Kind of a misleading giant graphic for a testing release, eh Bart?

    Now you'll have to make something even bigger for when the actual production-ready release is made some time next year. :-P

  18. 2.5 is AWESOME, congrats to all developers who made this possible!!!

    Thank you Blender Foundation too!!! :-DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

  19. Great news, but since I'm not in a possible testing work flow, I'll have to wait a while for a more stable version. Nevertheless, glad to see the big developments in Blender!

  20. Thanks to all involved in the continued development of Blender. I've been using it since 1999 (don't know which version), and all I can say is, Wow. I personally consider Blender to be God's gift to me. I'll show my support by only buying Blender books and stuff from their website.
    I hope the new internal render engine will support caustics so I can drop the 2 external renderers that I use.

  21. It says Blender 2.6 in mid 2010... Im totally excited about this... I was expecting it to be even delayed...! Thank God... If you are releasing it in mid 2010... hats off to you guys in advance ;)..

  22. I've just open it and made a quick "tour du propriétaire"......WOW ! bunch of cool a useful things ;-))
    Thank you to a very dedicated staff. I don't think I'll sleep to night..This is my chrismas gift for this year ! ;-))

  23. I wonder how you install yafaray on 2.5. Unless it's actually built in already.

    One other thing I want to add, is that I use an API called Papervision3D, which is 3D in Flash. The easiest way to put external models into Papervision is to use the widely used collada (.dae) format. 2.49b's collada exporter works fine for static, non-animated models (it had trouble exporting animated meshes from blender). I was hoping that animations were available with the new release, but when i tried to load the exported model, it was, not the way it should be; missing triangles, inverted normals, and other things. I would guess that the API's collada parser is not compatible with the new collada files exported from 2.5. But it could be my computer itself, so other people may have better luck than me.

  24. Being a TrueSpace user for the past 6 years and the fact that TrueSpace is no longer being developed. I have been waiting for this GUI makeover for over 2 years. I have dabbled with Blender and can get around and make some stuff. But I am hoping that Blender will even out-do Studio Max and Maya... I just can not afford $3000 for what they offer.

    Also, will Blender make room for TrueSpace users who migrate and allow us to import TrueSpace models?

  25. As many have already said. The program itself is already a great piece of art. Great respect to all men and women who helped get it to this point. I am officialy making blender as the center of my pipeline. This release in itself is just about as stable as the last version of silo (my current modeling app).

    This update is a huge impact on blender's future.

    In reply to Oscar Baechler: The original Softimage has been around since the beginning. Jurasic park Terminator 2 and as far as I know Abyss was made in it as well. It was rediculously priced for those times. Then maya won over the market with its accesability and customization. Only later was xsi created. One of my professors from school used to work for softimage and thats more or less what he told us.

  26. Let me add one more thanks to the long list.

    The new user interface was a little intimidating (reminded me of being new to blender again), but I was able to get the hang of it in about 15 mins. Very happy with it.

  27. The long wait is over, and we would be nowhere without the work of many many people. I am truly grateful that so many of you would be willing to do so much for so little. Thank you for each and every one of you.

  28. Hell!
    I haven't done any 3d stuff for years now because I went back to my old passion - making music, playing piano. But now I regret that a bit due to Blender capabilities. That's incredible. A few years ago you had to spend thousands of bucks to get something like Blender.

  29. I must be a behind on the news. When did it become 2.5 and not 2.50? Other than that, this is great news! Downloading this along with KOffice 2.1 right now.

  30. Good job, guys :)

    Frankly, for me this release is pretty useless -- it lacks some of the very basic modeling tools and 'Drag Immediately' doesn't seem to work.
    Also, it would be nice to see an *optional* UI font antialiasing -- the readability of smaller size antialiased text sucks.

    Still, I see a very bright future for Blender. New features are AWESOME!!!

  31. Awesome!!!!

    Thanks a million to the developing teams. A stupendous job!

    Autodesk has all the reason now to be seriously worried....

  32. Thanks and congratulations to all developers, you are great
    Now blender is on a new level ... AWESOME work ;D
    keep it up
    and thanks again

  33. Show and prove the true power of free application community.
    It is amazing to witness the very good development and a very good culture is also established. Let me recall from the Bible: It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when it is sown in the earth, is less than all the seeds that be in the earth. But when it is sown, it groweth up, and becometh greater than all herbs, and shooteth out great branches; so that the fowls of the air may lodge under the shadow of it. Hope Blender grow and grow that mankind can truly the share value of themshelves.

  34. Thank you soooo much dev guys. You guys are legends. It's awesome what you guys do for us users with little appreciation of the amount of work that goes into developing such ground breaking software.

    That is why I feel so guilty to admit that I'm a bit disappointed with 2.5 alpha. It's probably just me resisting change, but I feel like there is very little Blender in the new release. I'm mostly referring to the interface changes.

    I'm sure the majority of the Blender users voted for these changes and democracy rules but I'm having a hard time getting use to it.

  35. am said "Also, it would be nice to see an *optional* UI font antialiasing — the readability of smaller size antialiased text sucks."...

    The same for me: there are a lot of news cool functions, but blender is unusable on small screens or non 16/9 screeens. Because of the news layout system, you HAVE TO work with colums on sides and 3D view in the middle. ON small 4/3 screens, these colums are very small and blured fonts are hard to read.

  36. @Anber use it for a while than you find that the basic blender philophspy is still there but is so so much better. I have been using the svn builds for some time and only its unstable nature and the fact that a lot of the external render engines have only started developing render export scripts that I hang onto 2.49. Working in 2.50 is just a blast.

    The interface is just miles ahead of the 2.49 these guys have really done some fantastic work and more will come in the following months so that when we get to that 2.6 release it will be truely epic

  37. thank you very much indeed. I'm just trying to get around the new interface and i think they've done a great job. But i can't seem to find the smooth-property of the mesh..

  38. Looking at the roadmap for the 2.5 release I noticed that the Blender developers seem to mix up the nomenclature of Alpha and Beta releases.

    An Alpha release is NOT feature complete (i.e. all features that were planned for the release are implemented), whereas a Beta release IS feature complete, but may still contain bugs. Microsoft is also well known for messing up this distinction but I would hope to see FOSS developers sticking by the proper definition.

    From the roadmap it seems to me that the Beta releases are still adding features. Or am I mistaken?

  39. Olaf: The distinction is that the Beta releases attempt to be more complete and useable. They resemble regular Blender releases a lot more. Only difference is that there isn't time to freeze features and only do bugfixing for a long period of time - that will probably only happen for 2.6.

  40. @tyrant monkey. You are right, I'm just resisting change and being anal. I'm sure most people will love this. Years of using Blender ,even before it was open source, has institutionalized me :)

    Just some issues are bumming me out. I'm can't zoom my buttons and they are taking up 30% more of my interface. Visual clues on how to proceed after some actions seems to be absent. Can't find a way to remove buttons added to my toolbox and many more. I just pray that these are 2.5 alpha issues and not by-design.

  41. I don't know what you guys think but personally I feel that the GUI is TOTALLY AWESOME!!!!!!!!!

    Can't wait to 2.6 comes out, the only problems I have are various bugs and the fact you can't seem to remove buttons added to the toolbox, but apart from that it is freaking SHVEET!!!

  42. @Anber wrote:
    Just some issues are bumming me out. I'm can't zoom my buttons and they are taking up 30% more of my interface. Visual clues on how to proceed after some actions seems to be absent. Can't find a way to remove buttons added to my toolbox and many more. I just pray that these are 2.5 alpha issues and not by-design.

    ...the 2.50 release is like switching from an old computer to an really new one.You put the new maschine on your desk, be really happy to have him and then starts the work. Bringing the new software to the disk, explore the new funktions and mayby worry about a few things.
    The blender 2.5 is a new blender and it will take a time till anything work fine. But by this great team of dev. we are looking in to an very promising future !

    gretting madturtle

  43. I didn't think I would be 2.5 till build 25000 (right now I'm at 24876 and since I pull from source and build my own, I'm usually ahead of graphicall by at least half a dozen build numbers). First, thanks to all of the developers and to Ton for the amazing work. 2.5 really shows fine industrial design and thoughtful planning. As others have pointed out, the current software is alpha (obvious from the splash screen). I've seen a lot of things not working, and renders crashing (sometimes right away, sometimes not until 50-100 frames have been generated). Alpha is a work in progress. It looks wonderful from here, but we are not there yet. I will hold off sending in bug reports for at least a week, till things settle down a bit more. Thanks again to the developers. This is going to be great!
    Bob

  44. Awesome new blender version.

    I enjoy this new version. The event system, the new User Interface, etc...

    Now we must learn a lot to be able to use it !!!

    Regards,
    Gre from France

  45. Soooo Happy!!! I noticed it's very very fast in "sculpting" with a large number of faces...!!!
    AWESOME!!!!
    I can't wait for 2.6!!!!! ; )
    THANKS TON, THANKS BFOUNDATION!!!
    Blender rules!

  46. @bobster no bug reports for a week, I think you are missing the whole point of this release, the devs want bug reports the want the users to use and push and file bug reports so that the know what problems are there and the can squash them.

  47. Just a reminder that the official Blender 2.5 Alpha 0 from blender.org is based on revision number 24834, so any build you see on GraphicAll with a revision number above r24834 has improvements/new features over the official release, check the build titles!

    Like the latest build from Fish, "Blender 2.5 alpha0 (r24874) Fedora12 64bit"

  48. AWWWWWEEEEEESSSSOOOOOOMMMMMMEEEEEEE!!!!! i was drooling while playing with 2.5. great work guys!!! kudos kudos! I can't wait for the final version.

  49. ISSUE: When I hit E to extrude, it doesn't ask me how I want to extrude, it just extrudes the region - and along the z axis!!!

    Ace, have a Windows build, now! Thanks, Nathan!

  50. So far so awful, but I'm sure the multires/sculpt bugs will be squished. Careful - some are not UNDO-able or openable, bubbye 1st project! I'll need to do more de(f/t)ective work before reporting.

    Everything else I've tried is worth the buzz. Relearning keys etc., but looks like a much better setup once we get used to it, and looking stuff up you get to find where the [jaw drop]new stuff[/jaw drop] is.

    I was just putting some music back onto my computer. Next song, Van Halen's Eruption - how appropriate! Crazy technical ability, mind-blowing innovation, so fast, and more amazing sh@#$%t for decades after...

    Dave Heinemann, 4th year noob renewed

  51. A small step for man, a giant step for Blender !!!!
    Congratulations with this achiefment, Ton and the rest of the team.

    Cheers,
    Olav

  52. This is a horrible release. I'm on an iMac Intel Core Duo, OS X 10.5.8 32-bit. None of the mac builds will run (I've downloaded/tried all of them.) All of them crash before the splash screen. This has never happened with Blender before--not ever the Graphicall 2.5 releases. If this is what I have to look forward to as the future of Blender then I guess I'll be going back to Cinema4D.

  53. Thank you for the development team's hard work. This is a very fine-looking Alpha release.
    I really like the new UI - it looks very good. It is very different, but not so different from Blender 2.49 that it's an impossible stretch to find your way around (at least not for what I was doing yesterday :)).

    One thing I noticed is the lack of Radiosity support. I know some say Radiosity is old but - at least speaking for myself - I still routinely use it for GI-ish stuff (especially color bleeding which it did rather nicely, but which AO as you know doesn't do).

    I wasn't aware that Radiosity had been deprecated. Is it now officially out of 2.5 never to return, or is it just delayed until a further update? I am fully aware that Yafaray (for example) could be used instead, but so far, external renderers for Blender have felt like a bit of a hack. Materials/textures/lighting aren't well integrated into the base tooling. So I've always gravitated to the internal renderer (and achieved really decent results with the right combination of AO + lighting + radiosity).

    Is Blender 2.5 intentionally not going to be backward-compatible for blend files that rely on Radiosity at rendering time? Are you aware of others features that are dropped out of 2.5 that will create further potential backward compatibility issues for work authored in 2.49 and prior?

    Lastly, do we use the regular bug-tracking mechanism for the 2.5 Alpha 0 release or is there a special location for 2.5?

    Many thanks again for the great work.

  54. Congratulations and a big Thank You for the very huge work done By the developpers on this release !

    I had big fears about the new interface, but it looks handy. I like a lot the new color picker for the materials, and many functions are faster and more fluent.

    I've already noticed that the Choice Pan/Rotate doesn't work and some other bugs, and 2.5 just crashes after the opening of the console on one of my machines, but I have confidence that these problems will be solved soon !

    Good work guys.

  55. I'm gonna have to play with it a bit, I hope the old properties window and other stuff come back so I can move on from 2.49.

  56. @ Tzuqris : The properties window (panel) is here : just click on the little + sign in the right upper corner of the 3D window. The small triangle just beside is used to split and merge windosw, almost like the old way too.

  57. Work fine on my macpro with Leopard. I still have to try it with Snopard.

    Wonder if there is a webpage that list the changes in the default keyboard shortcuts?

    Because I admit I like the new interface and all, but I don't know where to find things I could find in a heartbeat on the older Blender.

    And now that the splash screen is much larger, that means Blenderheads can go wild w00+ !

  58. Blender 2.49 current not problem My PC

    bat

    Blender '2.5 A.0' to 'run time Error'........ and sound "BooM!!"

    ...............

    Why?

    .........

    relation........ Korean language PC ?

    Im serious T.T

  59. I absolutely love the search in 2.5! Perfect :)

    A shame that grease pencil doesn't work yet though. But you can't ask for everything in an alpha release :)

  60. educos: Radiosilty as it was in 2.49 is deprecated for good. But GI is something several developers have shown interest in. Until then you can use 2.49 or even an external renderer in 2.5.

  61. Open success.(happy ~ ^^)

    Blender 2.5 is........

    so great!!!!!!!

    I´d like to express my heartfelt thanks to developers. ^^

  62. i have been using blender for about two years , and i know this should probably be in a bug report but when i run blender 2.49 everything works fine but when i run blender 2.5.0 the default scene causes it to lag in redrawing the 3d view all the python parts of the ui are fast except for the open file screen, the game engine is fast !!! which is a mystery for me because the default cube lags on redrawing
    and the game engine doesn't recognise any controllers

    SyntaxError: invalid syntax
    Python module not found - controller

    i can get the poly count as high as about 2 million then it unexpectedly crashes and its not a memory issue since i have plenty of ram and blender only reports using about 249 mb - sometimes it crashes with the simple cube - but it most often crashes when sculpting

    when i go to render via opengl it prints out on screen - failed to create opengl off screen buffer - i can increase performance and relief this error so that it can render via opengl by replacing the files in lib with the files in lib from version 2.49 from that evrything is much faster
    , any ideas why ?

  63. is it possible to pan and zoom the backdrop image in the render node editor like in 2.4, any hidden option to switch off this auto-center behaviour?

    great gui, great work, great "blenchmarks"

    thx a lot

  64. I love that Blender dose evolve, but I do not like Blender 2.5 and think that the new UI is not as flexible as the classic UI, and the new UI dose feels slower and older. I miss the floating windows that you got when pressing the "n", "w" and so on, and the pull down settings that was briljant is now gone as well as the add menu on "space".

    I can complain on lots of UI things, but that is not right when the programmers has done a great job with whole Blender that now feels faster and more professional.

  65. Anybody knows how to swap rendering buffers? in 2.49 it was "J" Key. Also what happened to the shortcuts for sculpting? G, S, P, D keys?

  66. blender 2.5 alpha0 will not run on my vista 32 bit pc with ATI readeon x1400 :( just hangs

    runs fine on my crappy XP machine tho :D

  67. @ Gnash83 : You said : A shame that grease pencil doesn't work yet though. But you can't ask for everything in an alpha release :)

    But it works ! I think that you just not found the button to enable it, in the left column of the screen !o)

  68. @Gnash83 and ROBAL : You need to hold the 'D' key if you want to draw without pressing the tool-bar operator every time - also just to clarify the left column means the properties bar or the 'n' key.

  69. I am so happy with Alpha 0. Before that I was using some builds from graphicsall.org but they were good enough only to tease. With this alpha I was able to do some real work. It still did crash a few times within an hour or two. But I was saving my work often and still was progressing without major setbacks.

    I would like to thank whole Blender community and those driving it. Thank you, guys!

  70. The new UI, although more aesthetic, wastes a lot of screen space, it reminds me the problem of GNOME!
    I don't need a big 100x25 slider, plus the caption written separately above just to see a lonely "1.5" floating in the middle. I don't need all that empty space between elements etc...
    There should be a way to resize the UI elements like before, or I missed it. Maybe it is customizable via the UI Python scripts...?

    And I'm not a big fan of vertical layouts: my eyes can read more quickly horizontally than vertically.

    But don't get me wrong, even though I do sound negative, I'm really impressed and thankful for all the new sweet features!!! Especially the new "everything is accessible via Python" thing is in my opinion the most powerful new feature: we're going to see tons of new plugins and new ways of using Blender.

  71. @Piiichan

    You can resize the elements by holding down CTRL+MM (middle mouse button) and sliding the mouse horizontally to scale the buttons and text.

    You can change the layouts to horizontal by right clicking in any layout and selecting the 'horizontal' checkbox.

    And yes, you can completely customise the UI with python scripts.

    =)

  72. ...btw, trying to get rid of horizontal layout is NOT a good idea.

    As someone already pointed out -- it's easier to read that way.
    That's just how eyes work.
    In previous versions of Blender one could easily use BOTH layouts, but in 2.5 horizontal layout is utterly useless. Hardly an improvement...
    Also, disappearing scrollbars leave LARGE spaces on panels, that are not only unused, but also give UI an untidy look.

    Otherwise -- looking good :)

  73. @Socceroos
    Thanks for the tip, it's already much better :) although it could still be even better
    I'll have to check how the UI scripts work.

    I agree that new users can understand the new UI more easily, but when you are used to having so many tools & settings visible at once, it's hard to live without it.

    By the way, what happened to the F4, F5, F6 etc... shortcuts in the properties view?

  74. 1mil thanx to the BF and anyone involved. 2.5 though still not 100% stable (I know it's alpha) looks amazing! Thank you! Can't wait to see the completed Durian project and rock solid 2.5 (or 2.6) release.

  75. Is it possible (or will it be) to resize the view and select which views to show in quadview mode? For example I wanted 3 large ortho views (top, back and left) and a small perspective. Also the hotkey for viewport does not work here (WinXP 32bit). Also Sculpting in one of the views in quadview mode does not show in other views until you repaint them (zoom, pan, sculpt, ... in the specific view) and then only this view is repainted.

  76. @ 165 AlphaSite

    "@Gnash83 and ROBAL : You need to hold the 'D' key if you want to draw without pressing the tool-bar operator every time – also just to clarify the left column means the properties bar or the 'n' key."

    It isn't ment to be like that in the final release, right? It is completely impossible to draw anything meaningful with a wacom while at the same time holding down keys on a keyboard.

  77. More quadview quirks... :)

    First Grease pencil buttons(and the D-keys) should be toggle buttons, not like translate/rotate/scale/... because you usually want to draw/write something which rarely consists of a single stroke.
    Also drawing in a quad view using the toolbar buttons actually draws only in the Front view. It does not matter if the cursor is in it or not. Drawing with the D-key pressed draws in the correct view.

    Still alpha0 :)
    I hope alpha1 will come soon with all this minor quirks fixed :)

  78. Excited about the new release... but could only run it once (Windows Vista 32 bit), and now it won't open (even after restarts and shut downs) and gives me this error: "blender.exe has stopped working"

  79. I disgusted with Blender users. Nearly 200 comments and not a one uses the word sexy.

    Describe it like it is. It's damn sexy, and you all know it!

    Come on, you'd hit it.

  80. The new version does not work on my acer(aspire 1360) laptop XP, it installs but the graphics on the interface are blurry lines. Can anyone advise?

  81. I love how Blender developed in the past years. And i really love the new Blender it has so many different features (i didnt even test all of them). It is truly a proof that Opensource can reach high standards and can compete with commercially software.

    Chubaso

  82. As most people, I'm so excited by the release of 2.5 alpha... but not too much. 2.5 Alpha is good for geeking, for speculating, to advance what we can do next year with Blender, but not much more. I think now more than ever we should keep our feeds on the ground about the productivity-aware level of current 2.5 official versions. I think that expectations are a litlle bit overshift.
    Only my thoughts...

  83. Hmm.. I haven't had time to dig through all configuration settings but is it possible yet to customize the mouse settings so I can get other ways of tumbling the viewport? Namely I want alt+left mouse button to rotate the view and alt+middle to pan and alt+right to zoom and also middle mouse scroll for incremental zoom.

  84. @jdub I have had the same issue on Vista. Blender seems to auto saves settings when it crash. This might mean that some Vista-unfriendly settings gets saved upon crashing.

    I'm not sure about this but I tried to run Blender on Vista over 2 monitors. It crashed and the kept giving the same Error you describe. I cleared my 2.5 Directory and extracted the Blender files from the downloaded zip. It works fine now. I'm not sure which file the settings is saved in, but it must be one in the Blender Directory.

  85. I didn't think the work-flow could get much faster... I'm impressed. I'll have to do some tutorials now:) Now if those drop down boxes just could be operated by "mouse-over + scroll wheel" :)

  86. well i will like it juste like i liked 2.4 series...great gui and no matter how buggy it might be it's a lovely piece of design!
    ubuntu 8.04 here btw...

  87. Can someone help me with how to set up background images properly Please. I know i have to open the image in uv editor. i'm having problem setting up two views with two different images(front and right). This is making my hair fall off, Please help.

  88. I have no doubt that the new windows arrangement would be a benefit overall. However without a good documentation it will be a guessing game of how to do stuff. Imagine to model, texture,rigging and then animate your work without a clue where all those commands are ! Imagine a Pianist playing a keyboard where all keys have a new location....pretty much all his skills are gone forever....trying to unlearn something is a very hard task. Three options I would suggest:

    1) Write a Solid documentation about the interface
    2) Make a quick button to keep using the old interface for old Blender users, so we can switch back and forth until we get the whole point.

    3)If you have to unlearn..then why no to invest all this time learning the interface of 3D max or Maya?

    I do not want to be offensive but the truth, just splitting windows will take you some time in Blender 2.5 for previous users, sometimes it splits, some times it joins? It seems that the new interface where made to keep happy Maya users? 3D max users?...what about old blender users who have bought books and CDS learning it...now..PUFF ! all is gone...starting again?........ I do not think so. Imagine people around the world that do not speak English? For them it would be a lot harder....you are kicking then out.

  89. @blenderguy2008 as i started first time the new blender i hit several times the spacebar and was wondering that i didn't get the admenue. Meanwhile i know it is the shift-a key to get it.Do the new window concept make it easy for max and maya people to switch over ? Fine - more prof for the community and blender!
    I use only a small part of blenders possibilities and it took a lot of my time to get there.But i think the are going the right way with the new blender -also if it will take me again a lot of my rare free time to get trough.
    ....and i call it life-long-learning!

  90. @Anber
    Hi there... thanks for the reply. I'll have to keep an eye out on the autosave folder. I just deleted my 2.5 folder and re-extracted the folder in a different location and so far, I've been able to re-open Blender!

    Thanks for your help and happy Blending :)

  91. works on ubuntu 9.04
    strange why it worked the first time on ubuntu 8.04 then would not work anymore although i re-extracted files several times...well it is just a start after all

  92. Really exciting work fellow blender brothers :D you've made one fantabulous piece of software! keep up the incredible work :D

  93. Ladies and gentlemen

    I hope you will all reach for your nearest mug of coffee or tea, beer or whatever and join me in a toast to the developers.

    It's a monumental release, thankyou.

    :-)

    (And a lot of my stuff is rendering twice as fast!)

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