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.

Yesterday was the world premiere and after party of the 2nd open source movie made with Blender "Big Buck Bunny". It seems it was a big success for the Peach team. Can't wait to watch it with my one eyes



More Impressions of Martin Pyka about the premiere.

Blender 2.46 will ship with a cloth simulation. The Blenderhead nudelZ created a cool video about this feature:

The wait comes to an end, on April the 10th then secound open movie has its premiere in the Studio/K in Amsterdam. Read more about the premiere and the party at the Peach Movie Blog.

Synfig 0.61.08 hit the streets, the list of changes is long and includes a lot of improvements and bugfixes. Synfig is a vector-based 2D animation software package.
If you like to talk to developers of Synfig you can meet them this year at the Libre Graphics Meeting in Poland.

Well any open source application needs the input of the users as feature requests, patches and bug reports. So do Blender too.
Watch this funny video of Chris about how to submit a bug and what it is a good bug report:

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.