Linux for Designers

Some days a ago the first stable release of Blender 2.5 has been published. Again with a lot of fixes and feature improvements. Blender 2.5 is really a great piece of software, but at the moment the capabilities for importing and exporting files are limited to *.3ds, *.obj, *.dae, *.ply, *.x3d, *.stx, *.bvh.
A lot of the old export and import formats are missing and will hopefully ship with Blender 2.58.

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 Elephants Dream and Big Buck Bunny - Durian is the third Blender movie project. The movie will based on a script of Martin Lodewijk, a comic author from the Netherlands. Colin Levy from the USA will be the director and David Revoy from France will create the concept art. Ton Roosendaal will be again the producer and Brecht van Rommel will be again one of the developers. Check out the team page for more details.
If you are a Blender pro and artist or a developer then polish your portfolio and submit your profile up to the 10th of June 2009.

At the last days a lot of interesting news about Blender poped up:
* First: There will be soon a version 2.49 including improvements and new features: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=152631

* Second: The documentation of the new particle system has been completely updated:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Physics/Particles

* Third: The Blender Foundation released some guidlines about the logo and name usage:
http://www.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/logo/

Once i wrote a post about loading XCF files into the 3D suite Blender. A comment on this getting my attention and redirecting me to the amazing Multilayer XCF importer for Blender. Thanks Guillermo Espertino (Gez) for the hint.

Blender 2.48a is just three weeks old and the next upcoming features are at the development pipeline.
So we will get Texture Nodes for the Node Editor and Video Textures for the Game Engine. Of course mor will come

InnerWorld, a landscape generator running inside the 3d suite Blender and uses internal noise functions and external height fields, is now available as alpha 0.0.4. New are:
* Multiple meshes can be handled in one scene
* The material of a mesh is preserved during recalculation of the meshes geometry...
* You can add a simple coloring schema to generated meshes...

Whoo-Hoo - Blender 2.48 is available and it comes with a lot of amazing features. Again a stunning release of the open source 3d suite. Check out the release logs of Blender 2.48:
* Improved real-time GLSL materials
* Grease pencil (sketch annotations)
* Better animation tools
* Improved Game Logic (thanx to the Apricot Opengame Project)
* Updated Bullet physics library
* Sun, sky & atmosphere renderer
* Colored shadows
* Great additions to the builtin Python editor
* Fluid simulation can be controlled using particles
and much, much more...
Hopefully the Blender Nurbs Project can collect enough donations so we get nice NURBS in Blender soon too.
Besides that the GI renderer Yafray is back from death and released as Yaf(a)ray 0.1.0 (which is the successor of Yafray 0.0.9). This version is rewritten from scratch. After two years of development, it already features a complete set of lighting and rendering options. Yaf(a)Ray 0.1.0 is a perfect addition to Blender.
UPDATE:
You can grab an DEB archive of Blender 2.48 for Ubuntu at GetDeb.net.

The Blender Nurbs Project looking for donations to finish the integration of the libNurbana (From Emmanuel Stone's GSoC project, based on Justin Shumaker's Nurbana application).
You can support it via Paypal or the Blender Foundation fund raising tools.

Yes! Yes! Yes! Textured area lights will come to Blender is really cool and will help so much creating cool indoor scenes. Thanks to Davide Vercelli (UncleZeiv) and his GSoC 2008 Lightcuts project!