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 … Continue Reading

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 … Continue Reading

I have uploaded a new build for Windows 64bit of Blender 2.5 to graphicall.org

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’

Assumed: Visual Studio 2008 installed, Python 2.6 installed, subversion installed.

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

I have created a 30-minute screencast in which I briefly show how Blender 2.5 can be compiled using the SCons/msvc toolset. This screencast is as a quick gap-fill until I have written out more detailed notes.

As I wrote in my previous message, I’ve been working on getting OpenCOLLADA libs built for Blender 2.5. Yesterday I managed to get the problems solved for getting good builds on win32.

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 … Continue Reading

Arystan Dyussenov has finally managed to merge the GSoC COLLADA branch to trunk. I have been fighting with a broken-ish build environment and the OpenCOLLADA libraries since then.

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 … Continue Reading

Marco Ardito has sent me a new version of the Manual PDF, which is based on the wiki. This version brings Blender Manual PDF up-to-date with 2009.01.29.

• Wiki Manual PDF (26MB), updated 2009.01.29
  • This is the PDF version of the Manual from the http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual

Again a big thanks to Marco Ardito for his efforts.

One of the potentials of the new event system that is being
worked on for Blender 2.5 is better threading and event handling. In
this short screencast you see a render being started and still the UI
in action! No more blocking.

Check out the screencast on YouTube at:

Interactive UI during render – Blender 2.5

The PDF updates seem to become a nice monthly deal! Marco has uploaded new versions of 4 PDF files:

• Wiki Manual PDF (26MB), updated 2008.12.01
  • This is the PDF version of the Manual from the http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual
• Script Catalog PDF (6.9MB), updated 2008.12.01
  • This is the PDF version of the Script Catalog from http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Scripts/Catalog
• Reference PDF (6.6MB), updated 2008.12.01
  • This is the PDF version of the Blender Reference from http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Reference
• Release Logs PDF (3.8MB), updated 2008.12.01
  • The release logs all the way to 2.48a from http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs

Again … Continue Reading