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!

It’s been only a few weeks since my previous builds, but between that post and this there have been over 300 commits. Please refer to the commit logs to see what has been changed, added, removed.

As always, the packages are self-extracting 7z-archives (you can still use your locally installed 7z if you are so inclined – just right-click on the archive and choose the proper action from the 7z context menu), and scanned for viruses with AVG Anti-Virus 9.0.725.

• Blender 2.5 r25772, Windows, 32bit
• Blender 2.5 r25772, Windows, 64bit

As interesting extra information: I have now bought Windows 7 Ultimate retail, and the install went smooth. At least my Blender development and build environment is up and running! Although I’ve got this covered now, you are still free to donate (I’d like to be able to get the next Visual Studio when it comes out, for instance). Check the Blender Development page elsewhere on my blog.

At any rate, enjoy these new builds!

/Nathan

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 →

Anyway, I’ve uploaded 32bit and 64bit builds to Graphicall.org again, so grab them, test them, and keep the reports coming in!

• 32bit Blender 2.5 for Windows
• 64bit Blender 2.5 for Windows

Note, I have also links to my builds on Graphicall on the right of my blog ->

Make sure you follow them

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 re-uploaded 32bit and 64bit builds to graphicall.org that now have SSE optimisation for the renderer enabled.  You should now be able to successfully use SIMD QBVH and SIMD SVBVH, which would print that SSE was disabled during compile time when using the previous builds I posted.

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

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

• Minimum size for windows: Blender windows (system level, ie. the application window of Blender) can’t be resized below a minimum size. This is to prevent buggy behaviour of the Blender window manager, where all areas would go bonkers when Blender window would be resized very, very small.
• Preparation for Drag and Drop: Matt D. adds support for drag and drop on the GHOST level, the OS-layer library that Blender uses to get events, manipulate windows etc. from the OS. Further of no usage to the user, but I bet that the prospect makes users drool with wild fantasies.
• Last, but not least: Continuous Grab. This will allow you to execute translations without having to worry for the mouse pointer to go out of the 3dview. Just start your transformation and drag, drag, drag until your happy. You’ll see the mouse pointer warp around the 3dview. This feature is by default enabled, but if you’ve been mucking about with the user preferences, make sure you haven’t accidently disabled it.

Again, great work by Matt D.! You can grab your build from Graphicall of course!

• win32 build, r25059
• win64 build, r25059

• 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.

Thanks to the hard work of many developers Blender has now an amazing array of new features and improvements, like editable keymaps, new animation tools, improved and unified data API, and so on.

Grab your copy if you’re up for some alpha release testing (note: alpha means incomplete, features may change, and potentially unstableness. Yet, I think we have done quite a great job for an alpha release!)

I have had yet again the honour of creating the packages for Windows, both 32bit and 64bit. For now I have decided to do only .zip archives, as the installer is another project all by itself. The old one had so many issues, that I didn’t want to have it annoy people more than it should. It will be worked on, but for now it is not a main target. A new script for creating an installer has been submitted by Bobalicious, but it needs testing and improving before it can be called stable and usable with confidence.

Hopefully the packages work out for all users. If you experience any problems, then please, comment on my blog. I’ll try to address all arising issues and answer them as soon as possible.

/Nathan

Build configuration:


CCFLAGS = ['/Ob1', '/J', '/W3', '/Gd', '/wd4244', '/wd4305', '/wd4800', '/wd4065', '/wd4267', '/MT', '/openmp']
WITH_BF_FFMPEG = False
WITH_BF_OPENAL = True
WITH_BF_JACK = False
WITH_BF_SNDFILE = False
WITH_BF_PLAYER = False
WITH_BF_GAMEENGINE = True
WITH_BF_VERSE = False
WITH_BF_YAFRAY = False
WITH_BF_QUICKTIME = False
WITH_BF_COLLADA = True

BF_DEBUG=False
BF_BSC=False

BF_NUMJOBS=5

BF_MSVS = False

BF_BUILDDIR = ‘..\\build\\blender25-win64-vc’
BF_INSTALLDIR=’..\\install\\blender25-win64-vc’

As always, the package is a self-extracting 7z-archive. The archive has been scanned with AVG 9.0.707 for viruses.

1. svn co https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/trunk/blender c:\dev\blender
2. svn co https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/trunk/lib/windows c:\dev\lib\windows
3. start Visual Studio 2008 command prompt
4. set PATH=C:\Python26;%PATH%
5. cd c:\dev\blender
6. python scons\scons.py WITH_BF_COLLADA=1 WITH_BF_QUICKTIME=0

PS. I’m still writing the detailed tutorial

So, we decided it would be great to have also a pastebin for images! We present you (proudly): Pasteall for Pictures.

Apart from pasting images, you can also download them and hotlink! Just check out for instance http://www.pasteall.org/pic/4 :

Image hotlinked from pasteall

So grab your build and start testing and reporting!

Before you start reporting issues:

NOTE 1:

his redmine installation has a copy of the users from http://projects.blender.org. If you have already an account there, you need to reset the password here (forgot password). This to make sure that a proper password is generated for your user account.

NOTE 2:

If you managed to create several accounts on projects.blender.org using your email address, contact me.

Today, I managed to create working 64-bit builds of OpenCOLLADA. The libraries I have committed to our repository, along with the necessary changes in trunk source to get proper win64 builds done with Blender.

I have uploaded the build based on r24264 to Graphicall.org: my 64-bit build for Windows.

If people want to know how to create 64-bit builds for Windows, please leave a comment. If there’s enough interest, I’ll write up an article explaining my development and build environment, and how I create my builds (and official releases).

First, many days were wasted in figuring out why during linking of the first library of OpenCOLLADA the build process would go in an eternal loop, issueing linking commands for the same library over and over again. After having tried different SCons versions, and several futile hacks of the SCons-files of the project, I took a harder look at my own environment.

We have had some talk about having ie. gstreamer as a replacement for FFMPEG. This means some new dependencies that traditionally are pretty hard to build on Windows (ignore FFMPEG here, it’s even harder). I found the OAH project. I decided to give it a spin – after some fiddling around, no good luck. I forgot about it. So yesterday I finally looked at my environment and noticed that the OAH linker would always somehow be used. After uninstalling the thing, I finally got through to linking and beyond! Then it was just a matter of doing some small fixes and picking the right settings for the libraries.

Last night I uploaded all libraries and their headers, necessary for Blender 2.5 to build with COLLADA support on Windows (32bit). I have uploaded the binary release of my build on Graphicall.org as build 1159.

Give the build a spin and report any problems with it to our bug tracker.

At least it now imports Sketchup-files (note: get the COLLADA format, not .skp)! For instance, below a model from Google 3D Warehouse:

New Compound model from Google 3D Warehouse

/Nathan

Durian Preorder Sales Campaign graph

The graph presents the data as follows: The green area are the preorders that have been payed, the orange cummulatively on top of the green represents the preorders that haven’t been payed yet. Together they form thus the total amount of preorders.

On the horizontal scale we have time. Each vertical gray line here represents the start of each day in UTC time at 00:00:00. The first measure was done 11:50 of the 31st, July. The entire image width represents the running time for the campaign. It officially ends on the 15th, September, but I’ve used UTC time of 2 o’clock in the morning on the 16th to give some extra space. The height of the graph represents 2000. Each dark gray horizontal line represents 500, where the lighter gray are 250.

Big Buck Bunny campaign for preorder sales + credit got around 1100 sold preorders. I haven’t done any estimation, but I heard that expected amount for Durian is around 1200. I’m sure that as a community we can do much better! Remember, more funding here means more money to fund developers and artists working on the movie and the improvement of Blender 2.5…! (hint hint).

Rafaëlla decided to enter our world at 14:42 Finnish time, today August 13th, 2009.

I’m very happy that we together with my wife are allowed to experience this second miracle of life. Just holding my daughter fills me with a profound feeling of pride, just as it did when I held my son Rasmus for the first time in my arms.

The little fingers, the kicking, small feet, the EVERYTHING. It’s just amazing. I thank my beautiful and lovely wife (jesterQueen) for giving me these immensly wondrous gifts.