I’m only about a week late, but I might as well do the customary ‘New version released!’ post, so here we go: Blender 2.43 is released! There, that’s better.
A challenge leading up to this release was getting the new website together. I’d pretty much finished the design last year, but it took a while for the admins to get the new server hardware ready, and for Bart to do the work integrating the templates with the CMS, Typo3.
The release provided as good an incentive as any to get the site ready, and thankfully this time with the new hardware, the website was pretty solid, despite it being thoroughly barraged by visitors via various news outlets around the web. There’s still a fair bit to do though, there are plenty of stale old pages in need of a refresh, and the forums and wiki design still needs to be integrated.
As far as the release itself goes, here’s another little list of my favourite contributions this time around.
- Tapering 3D curves with radius per CV, with shrink/fatten tool
- Tablet pressure and tilt support in Mac OS X, and tilt support in Windows and X11
- New UV test grid generated image, designed to be easier on the eye and to show distortion clearly
- Proportional edit mode random falloff option
- Object level view/select/render restrictions in the outliner
- Upgraded the User Prefs OpenGL lights section to use nice modern vector and colour picker UI controls
- Dynamic icon fie loading and themability
- Compositor Displace node, Combine RGBA node
There’s one bit of disappointing news though. The next release was planned for a while to be a UI-centred Blender 2.5 release, for which Ton would do the huge and time consuming necessary internal upgrades that would allow features that I’ve been working on such as drag and drop in the outliner, a customisable toolbar, and radial menus to be implemented.
It seems now that once again, it has been decided for this work to be postponed in favour of a version 2.44 with smaller projects, meaning that it’s going to be at least May or June before any of these UI projects can be integrated. It’s a lot of difficult work for Ton to do, and it’s up to him to decide what he wants to work on, but it’s also frustrating and demotivating for me, because I’ve been waiting so long, being prevented from working on these sorts of improvements release after release. I offer my apologies to any of you who are waiting too.
First of all, congratulations on the new Blender site, and also your code contributions.
Regarding Tons plans, this is truly unfortunate. Seeing the UI constantly being under-prioritized when it’s in glaring need for improvement is sad.
However, you keep saying you need the events refactor in order to commit all these lovely UI changes. They seemed to work very nicely in the form you already coded them, without any events refactor. Are your initial implementations flawed without the refactor? If it’s just a matter of clean code, how about committing most of the changes soon-ish in their current form (which is still a gigantic improvement), and then implement it in a cleaner way whenever Ton decides to do the refactor?
Hiya, and thanks!
Yes, those things did seem to work ok, but they were more like proofs of concept, to be further developed into something more stable and permanent. Some of it was a bit hackish, and some of it was using temporary short term fixes that would not be so flexible or sustainable in the long term (perhaps causing similar types of problems as we are facing now, due to Blender’s design which was focused on the short term needs of NeoGeo in the mid 90s).
These structural issues need to be dealt with properly, the problem is that Ton’s the only one who really knows the insides of Blender well enough to be able to do it well, and he is a finite resource.
In any case, although those features I made do work, and I’m happily using those tools to this day, I’ve been told they’re not in a state to be committed at the present time. Just as I’d hope that coders would listen to me for design advice, if an experienced programmer advises me it’s not good to commit, I’m more than happy to defer to his or her knowledge, particularly in a collaborative team project such as this. Of course this has down sides, such as the one we’re discussing 🙂
Heya Matt…
Check out Elephants Dream website, it looks like it has been hacked or the server move didn’t went as expected …
— Rui —
Rui: Ick, I’ll raise the alarm with the admins. Thanks for the note!
Hey there Matt,
I was really looking forward to seeing a lot of your excellent T3 UI work being piped into Blender immediately after the 2.43 release – giving Blender the skin that you designed for the various components really would help both make it far more professional looking ( the visual style was excellent ), and easier to use ( more whitespace due to rounded corners, faded out controls when disabled etc ).
The other major contribution you put in ( just as important IMO ) was your patch-in-progress for a) adding objects and not entering edit mode, and b) adding objects in perspective mode, in non-rotated mode ( perhaps with the exception of text ). I have taught a few Blender / GE classes, and this is vitally important.
Keep up the great work, and be sure that many people are waiting to see all of your hard work integrated into Blender 2.5!
MAl
Great idea to use Maya Marking menu style Popups in Blender, I believe it is the only efficient way to organize commands in a reasonable amount of hotkeys (you sitll run out of keyboard space but get 8 times more commands ). Not to mention that it is a UI system that helps in speed increase. I will definitely give blender a try soon.