• Blender installer for Windows 32
• Blender installer for Windows 64

The fixes in these binaries are:

• win64 version had default install path pointing to C:\Program Files (x86)
• links from start menu weren’t properly removed
• update to later vcredist, so there won’t be temp files hanging around after install

I’ve also enabled the blenderplayer, so you should be able to find that too!

Again, please test drive them and report back.

Enjoy!
/Nathan

I still need to check out on Jack, libsamplerate and sndfile -support, as those are still disabled in my builds.

Other than that, enjoy as usual!

/Nathan

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!

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.

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.

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

Despite the missing dependencies, this build is ready for testing. It is created on revision 18787 from the Blender SVN repository.

Download the binary from graphicall.org.

/Nathan