Archive notice: This article was originally published on July 23, 2010. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The 2.53 beta version is the first in some time and promises the culmination of several years of development. Among other things, menus and functions have been reorganised and packaged in a new interface. Anyone who does not like it can now adapt it to their own requirements using Python scripts. These scripts, which also provide other hooks into the functionality, can be managed conveniently through an add-on controller.
Another innovation for users is customisable shortcuts – allowing everyone to assign their most frequently used tools and processes to keyboard shortcuts.
The brush system is also among the new features – painting brushes, their presets and handlers have been completely refreshed and are now intended to work better and faster.
The thickness of materials can now also be influenced easily – making modelling faster and saving a great deal of time, particularly in technical work.
The animation components were also a major construction site – one of the goals was to make “everything animatable”, and considerable work produced the following changes:
Individual properties can be modified, grouped, multiplied and arranged in layers through F-curves, all nondestructively with the “NLA Editor”.
Effects can be added to animation curves and continue to be edited there.
Spline IK is another new feature – a series of bones can be arranged along a curve, improving biological animation of skeletons as well as structures such as ropes and much more.
In physics, Blender 2.5 has a new engine for smoke and particles, which is also intended to handle collisions, multiple particle sources and interactive control options. During the “Google Summer of Code”, ray tracing for rendering was completely revised and is now many times faster while also supporting new functions such as instancing.
Also new is a first version of colour management, although it is still tied to the linear workflow in rendering. Values entered using gamma values are linearised before rendering, and the renderer and compositor then work purely in RGB mode.
All further information, new features and the download can be found behind the link.
Further links:
- Development area f
