Blender 2.77 Release Candidate 2 is out

Bart · March 5, 2016

The second release candidate for Blender 2.77 is ready for testing.

Please report bugs to the Blender bug tracker.

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 Community Lead at n8n.

7 responses

Daniel

6 March 2016 at 02:49

What’s the plan for Ptex support? Has it been decided when that will be merged with the master build?

Name

6 March 2016 at 07:20

I am offer to all people around the world to not buy proprietary 3d software and donate to blender. May be next version will kill all proprietary 3d software

Brian Lockett
6 March 2016 at 08:56
Such delusional fanboyism is inaccurate and unnecessary.
1. Donating to Blender won’t kill all proprietary 3D software. Blender users supporting Blender doesn’t and won’t drive away other people from the other software they prefer. Many people simply prefer other software more than Blender–and that’s fine.
We have options in life–as we should. Options are generally good. Most MODO users are content with MODO. Most Maya users are content with Maya. No one software meets everyone’s preference or needs. Blender is no exception.
Though, why would you even want to get rid of competition, anyways? Competition drives innovation and effort. It’s healthy. You don’t need to rid of other software just to feel good about Blender.
~
2. Nearly all of the graphics industry doesn’t use Blender. Nobody in industry really uses Blender, other than some found in a couple movies. Nobody’s abandoning established industry pipelines just to jump aboard using Blender.
Industry at large uses proprietary 3D software for a good reason: Proprietary 3D software is industry-ready. They don’t have to wait for so-and-so to add such-and-such to the software–it’s already available, standard and ready-to-buy. Blender is not such, and generally, won’t be such.
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3. Industry need drives newer technologies and newer standards in ways FOSS initiatives struggle to meet. Even the standards that folks like Sony and Pixar release as FOSS were first developed from industry need. Necessity drives the 3D software industry–not software philosophy.
Over the years, Ton has made it emphatically clear that Blender is community-focused, first and foremost. Blender dev may see some newer standard formats adopted during development, but Blender’s aim has never been geared for industry need. It lives for the people–people where working professionals are the minority.
With this, Blender keeps to its own pace and priorities–not those aligned to rapidly-changing industry. If Blender suddenly put industry as its primary focus, the community would backlash. Blender is a great development, but let’s not confuse its great community as compatible with the priorities and rate of industry need.
Even if Blender support jumped 100%, and helped accelerate Blender development, Blender still wouldn’t be industry-ready by just the next version. Not even within a couple years, even. Closed development benefits from being motivated by commerce and focused solely to the needs and prospects of industry class.
To keep pace with industry standards, it requires focused unified development, placing professional needs as the chief priority, with the singular goal of being marketable. Open-source development by its very nature is ad-hoc, open to community priorities, and independent of singular priorities.
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4. Even if Blender were to somehow “kill” other options from market, then Blender would simply become the very kind of software tyrant many Blender users attribute to folks like Autodesk. You’d be a hypocrite, in principle, to think that one lone software has to exist, while stomping out all others.
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5. Finally, people have been donating to Blender for well over a decade now, saying this exact same thing. When third-party developers express interest in supporting Blender, the community lashes out to defend Blender as community-oriented. But when the community feels insecure about Blender, they suddenly rally for Blender to kill other software. No other community behaves this way. This community-wide hubris is embarrassing.
Reply
1. Konstantins
  6 March 2016 at 17:08
  …maybe… But the industry definitely does use Blender. Industry is bigger than Hollywood.
  Reply
2. Grady
  7 March 2016 at 23:49
  “2. Nearly all of the graphics industry doesn’t use Blender. Nobody in industry really uses Blender, other than some found in a couple movies. Nobody’s abandoning established industry pipelines just to jump aboard using Blender.
  Industry at large uses proprietary 3D software for a good reason: Proprietary 3D software is industry-ready. They don’t have to wait for so-and-so to add such-and-such to the software–it’s already available, standard and ready-to-buy. Blender is not such, and generally, won’t be such.”
  As a 3D artist who works professionally using Blender for a large commercial company to produce visualisations, I can assure you that Blender is definitely industry ready and in the 3 years which I’ve been working with it, there has not yet been a moment where Blender was less than capable of meeting our needs. The thing which my employers have been most impressed by is how fast Blender can produce results for them. It is a large company, the visualisations I produce are for contracts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, my employers can afford any software they wish but have been very satisfied with my recommendation of Blender thus far.
  Oh and I make regular donations to Blender as well. It’s definitely worth it for me, this lovely software has helped me in my line of work considerably and saved me great expense in addition to being wonderful to work with.
  Reply