Blender 2.5 Alpha

Another short and sweet post. This isn't news to Blenderheads like myself, but just thought I'd throw out there that the much-anticipated Blender 2.5 is in it's public alpha stage. The 2.5 version is a near-complete rewrite of the software (I think).

Blender, for those of you who don't know, is an (free and) open source 3D modeling and animation program. It is quite possibly the most full-featured 3d program out there, free or commercial. I'm not being a fanboy, and I'm not using hyperbole. It's amazing. Previous versions had a lot of these features, but let me just take a minute to tell you all the things Blender 2.5 will do:

-Full physics simulation, including fluids, softbodies, and now volumetrics (for smoke and clouds)
-Particle system
-Multiple armature systems for rigging
-Amazing system that allows you to save motions and actions and apply them wherever you want (I love this system!).
-Ray tracing, shadows, subsurface scattering
-Built in game engine
-You know what, just look here. Seriously, Blender can do a lot. (link lists current features. Here's a look at what 2.5 will do)

Oh, and it also has a node compositor, supports texture nodes, can edit images, can edit video, and runs on nearly every platform (Windows, Mac OS X [PPC and Intel], Linux, FreeBSD 5.4 [i386], SGI Irix 6.5, Sun Solaris 2.8 [sparc]). There was even a build that ran on PDAs a while ago.

Those of you who've tried the program and hated the interface will love 2.5--it's extremely customizable, to the point where you should be able to get it to mimic the 3d program you're most comfortable with. And I have to add, if you don't like the interface, that's really too bad because although it's a little odd at first, it's designed for speed. Now that I've learned it, I love it.

Just had to spread the news,

David

PS - I just realized it's a little odd to say Blender's in public alpha, all the code is public, duh.