Blender 2.5, – Got flexible? from Pablo Vazquez on Vimeo.
In case the last post didn’t give you enough Blender goodness, here’s more for your pleasure.
Version 2.5 is coming of the open source 3D suite that’s also a nodal compositing engine and a video editor and a real-time game engine — basically, a visual operating system in which you can make just about anything. 3D software in general hasn’t been gifted with especially slick interfaces. But 2.5 changes that: check out the elegant pop-up menus and Spotlight-style menu searching. Every little detail can be Python scripted, which sounds geeky but could be an easy way to just tell the software what it is you want to do – and Python is a lovely language to dip your toes into as a beginning coder, too.
All that’s well and good. But the real highlight of the video above is the fact that working in Blender now happens much more in real-time. For those of us used to working with visuals in performance, this means our “studio” workflow can be dynamic and live, too. Whether you render and remix video later, export 3D objects, or move to the Blender Game Engine to take your Blender work onstage, that is likely to appeal to visualists.
And if you’re just getting started, here’s a tutorial on using video textures in the Blender Game Engine, even if you’re new to the whole environment:
Beginner’s tutorial: Using video textures in the Blender Game Engine
Via comments from Samuel Gaehwiler – thanks!
At the moment (<2.5), Blender follows the “do everything in one window” paradigm.
As jeff clermont stated above: Blender 2.5 will be the first blender release which will allow multiple windows. Hopefully, one can show the output of the game engine on one monitor in full screen while manipulating it on the other screen. The new event system in 2.5 might allow some nice possibilities for visualists. Pablo Vazquez has done a nice of manipulating a running animation (in the 3d view), which isn’t possible in Blender <2.5.
Stay tuned. We’ll see if multi-screen output becomes practical.