Linux for Designers

Blender 2.46 RC5 is available now!
Blender 2.46 final will available on May 17 or 18.
The Big Buck Bunny DVD will ship on May 20
Internet release of the Big Buck Bunny movie will be on 30 or 31 May.

JiriH has created a very cool squash and stretch ball rig demonstrating the animation features of Blender. The rig only works with Blender 2.46 RC and above. More details and Downloads at Blenderartists.org.

If you like to use Eclipse for web development you should definetly try out Aptana Studio Community Edition. Aptana Studio Community Edition is really amazing and adds so much nice and cool features to Eclipse:
* A normal file tree
* FTP support
* AJAX development
* Validation
* Help and references
* additional plugins for Ruby, Adobe AIR and Php
A howto to add Aptana to your existing Eclipse is available too.
If you haven't Eclipse installed yet take as a base the Php Developer Tools (PDT).

I discovered htis interesting video about Wine-Doors 0.2, which is a software management tool for Windows applications on top of Wine at the Gnome Desktop.



For supporting this simple way of installing the Internet Explorer the developers of Wine-Doors use code from the original IEs4Linux script.

The Peach project, that will show the 2nd open source movie soon, has published the first trailer



Sweet!

A first release of a SVG texture plugin for Blender is published. So you can map your Inkscape work directly on 3D objects in Blender. You can download the VecTex plugin at the Google code page. Like procedual textures all is 100% scalable - that means no more oversized textures for logo types and typos. It is a first public release so it's not 100% bug free.
Check out the demo video:
More about the VecTex 0.9 plugin can be read at Blenderartists.org.

Before Blender 2.50 will hit the streets the next version will be 2.46. That is now scheduled for April/ May this year and will be full of nice, new features besides the bugfixes and improvements like ever. Blender 2.46 will earn the required features of the open movie project Peach and bring that to the public:
* New Image File Browser
* Skinning Improvements
* Rendering Features (FSA, Zmask, Cubic shading)
* Mesh Deform Modifier
* Pole Target for IK
* Glossy Reflection/Refraction
* Raytraced Soft Shadows
* QMC Sampling
* Approximate Ambient Occlusion
* Weight paint visualization and Multi Modifier
* Render Baking and Normal Mapping
* Particles and Strands
* Constraint Improvements
* Armature Drawing Improvements
* Sequencer changes
* UV Editing
* Pose Libraries

Again a lot of features based on the open movie Peach project found there way to the SVN of Blender. Read all about the changes that are coming and take a look at the two new:
* Sequencer changes: blend abilities for strips
* UV Editing without Face/UV mode

Dennis Ippel has created a script which export scenes of Blender as Flash ActionScript 3.0 objects for various Flash 3D engines like Papervision3D. That is a real cool addon to bring 3D into the web using Flash.
For details visit the official exporter webpage.

After last year the conference of the content management system Drupal, the DrupalCon, took place in Spain, this year the Drupal Association announced it for 2008 in Boston.