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

Tonight I applied a very nice patch, written by Matt D. (matd in #blendercoders). This patch adds several new features, specifically for Windows users:

• 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 … Continue Reading
  

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 … Continue Reading

It’s official. The very first release in the Blender 2.5 series is a fact. The first lines of code for it were coded back in 2007/2008, with the development pace picking up since Wintercamp 2009.

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 … Continue Reading

I’ve created a win32 build of joeedh’s bmesh branch. See his call for testers for more info (note the redmine link for bug reports!).

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, … Continue Reading