Hi, again several hundred commits since my previous build. This build has of course a whole slew of fixes, new features and such. See the file with the log containingchanges from 25772 to 25969 for all the details.

For those interested in COLLADA there’s a fix by Arystan that addresses some rotation issues and naming issues.

Further there are fixes for crashers (opening properties window could crash, projection painting on subsurf or multires could crash. And there’s fixes for existing, but broken functionality, like edge slide after loop cut when face select mode was enabled.

Download the version you need for your Windows and give it a spin.

• Blender 2.5 r25969 – 32bit Windows
• Blender 2.5 r25969 – 64bit Windows

Remember, comments and other feedback (bugs, other issues) are always welcome!

Six days, 162 commits. As always, lots of fixes and new things. One of them being work on the keymap editor.

keymap editor

It represents the available keymaps in a hierarchy that shows in a nicer way than the old version. Just give it a good spin. As always give everything a good spin

You should be able to find the links to the builds on the right side of my blog →

With Blender 2.5 alpha 0 we’ve seen the first release in the 2.5 series, boasting a great many new features on top of the all-new event system – a major overhaul of one of the most central parts of Blender. As one can expect, many problems were readily found during the first few moments after the release. I’ve tried to summarize most of the problems that users may run into that are easy to fix or work around.

Incomplete/gray GUI

Some users reported that the GUI would look incomplete. This turned out to be a problem with paths that contained non-ASCII characters. Although it should be fixed in recent builds (as of this writing), if you still experience that, move Blender to a location that contains only ASCII characters in the path. So no accented or non-latin characters like ë, é, µ and so on.

Incomplete GUI

If you want to see for yourself how broken this looks like, go into the .blender/ directory and rename scripts/ to something like xripts/ and run Blender. You’ll see something like the above image. Rename back to scripts/ to get your nice Blender 2.5 back.

Crash while starting Blender

In some situations Blender would not even start. This would happen where the user had PYTHONPATH in the environment variables, pointing to an older Python version, most often Python 2.6. This could’ve happened either manually, to get Blender 2.49(b) working, where in some cases it could get confused or not find the proper Python installation. Or another program might have added the PYTHONPATH variable and set it to some older, pre-Python 3.1 installation.

The net result of this would be an instant crash? The reason for it is pretty simple: Python 3.1 is incompatible with previous Python versions. If you start Blender 2.5 from a command-line and have that PYTHONPATH pointing to Python 2.6 (or even older, if you have it installed), then you’ll see from the error output in the console that it tries to load Python 2.6 modules, and fails miserably.

To easily work around this, and without touching your environment, create a new file called blender.bat next to the blender.exe and add:

set PYTHONPATH=
blender

Next time you want to start Blender 2.5, start blender.bat instead. It will ensure that Blender 2.5 will run properly. For now you’ll have to do it for each Blender 2.5 installation you do to a separate directory (if you install over your existing Blender 2.5 that already has the above created blender.bat you don’t have to bother, otherwise just copy the file to the new installation, too).

GUI going gray after a while

This is most likely a problem with your driver. Make sure you have the latest for your videocard. If that really doesn’t seem to help, and you have played with the OpenGL buffer drawing type in the Blender user preferences for the system (triple buffer or any of the others) to no avail, try turning of hardware acceleration. Often using Windows Classic theme will turn of those effects and Aero (on Vista and Windows 7 at least). If that helps the drivers are your problem – waiting for a better driver version is then your only option, unfortunately.

Other problems?

If you know of other problems and work-arounds, please don’t hesitate to tell so in the comments!

I have uploaded 32bit and 64bit builds to graphicall.org that have SSE optimisation for the renderer enabled. This is not a default setting, but I thought it’d be good to get some testing results out of it – whether it causes render artifacts or not, and such.

To use any of the optimisations, check the Performance panel in render settings. The Auto setting tries to select the best optimisation strategy, but you can choose any of the other ones too. Octree is what we know from the previous Blender series, all the new names are from the GSoC work done by André Susano Pinto (jaguarandi).

• win32 build
• win64 build

Blender development has surpassed 25000 commits! Mike Pan shows a nice graph of the development on his blog. I had yesterday created some builds to celebrate r25000, but I “forgot” to upload and publish them. So for those who still want r25000 win32 and win64 builds, do download here:

• Blender 2.5 r25000, win32
• Blender 2.5 r25000, win64

These are 7z self-extracting archives, built with the same settings as Blender 2.5 alpha 0.

I would also like to thank all the people who took the time to comment on the Blender 2.5 alpha 0 message. Most of the problems will be solvable, and I hope that we can get the fixes into SVN soon.