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Blender is a full functional integrated 3D creation software suite. It lets users create high quality 3D graphics, movies and replay real-time, interactive 3D content. Over the last decade, Blender has evolved as an in-house tool for a leading European animation studio. Blender is powerful technology used for creating broadcast quality 3D content.

Blender is being released with source codes under the GNU Public License. Blender therefore is fully free to use and distribute within any educational, professional or commercial environment. Artwork created with Blender - including python scripts - is the sole property of the creator.

Platforms: Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP,Vista | Mac OS X | Linux | FreeBSD | SGI Irix | Solaris

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Blender 3D: Noob to Pro
(mega-awesome Blender Tutorials)
This wikibook is the Book of the month for July 2005!



http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_N...anced_Tutorials

Collada is the open standard for the interactive 3D industry that defines an XML-based schema. This makes it possible to combine multiple tools into extremely powerful tool chains. For more info check www.collada.org

Collada plug-in for Blender
COLLADA Plug-in for Blender exports and imports: Meshes, Materials, Textures, Lights (Hemi, Lamp, Sun and Spot) and Cameras. Additional features are export of animation, selected objects only and export of baked transforms.

Features
import skinned Geometry!

Bugfixes
Bugfix 0000055: Use Blender.sys.sep instead of \ in colladaImEx/cstartup.py

View the complete history of changes»

Download: @ SourceForge»

Blender 'Commander' Released
July 27, 2008

Christian Storay has released Blender Commander, a GUI for Blender's command-line interface. It's not open source, but free to use. At this moment, it's Windows-only but a Linux version has been planned.

"Blender Commander is an easy to use GUI front-end for Blender's console
commands. It was written to make it easier for someone to render their projects
on multiple computers. You could copy your projects and BC on all of your
systems, and provided Blender was installed, span the project between them. For
example, you could have computer one render frames 1 to 1000, and computer two
render frames 1001 to 2000, and so on.

BC makes this easier by putting a GUI over the console command arguments you would normally want to use, and with BC, you don’t have to use the Blender interface if you don’t know how to use the console arguments. This way, you can reap the benefits of running from the command line with the ease of a simple GUI interface."

Dowload is at BlenderArtists.org

Blender for Windows 2.48

Blender 2.48 includes all the work done on the Blender Game Engine and the Apricot Open Game "Yo Frankie!", with much better functioning game logic editing, character animation, and Blender Material based real-time shaders. And as last minute surprise a Bullet physics update with Softbody support.

We also included a lot of new development in this release; Windows 64 bits support, Grease Pencil for sketching annotations, Sun/Sky/Atmosphere rendering, new modifiers, and an improved text editor with Python API support. And last but not least, an enormous list of open bug reports were handled.

Release Notes

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Blender 2.48a released
Oct 28, 2008

"It can never be good enough! A couple of crucial bugs were reported and fixed after the 2.48 release."

Blender 2.48 includes all the work done on the Blender Game Engine and the Apricot Open Game "Yo Frankie!", with much better functioning game logic editing, character animation, and Blender Material based real-time shaders. And as last minute surprise a Bullet physics update with Softbody support.

Also in this release; Windows 64 bits support, Grease Pencil for sketching annotations, Sun/Sky/Atmosphere rendering, new modifiers, and an improved text editor with Python API support. And last but not least, an enormous list of open bug reports were handled.

Blender 2.48a update:
A couple of important bugfixes has been done in Blender since the release, especially for using the Game Engine and GLSL.
Quick fixes in 2.48

• GE: Sensors could access removed objects via Scenegraph, causing crashes
• GLSL: ATI drivers crashed on "show pivot" for rigid body constraints
• GE: using Bullet could cause memory leaking
• UI: Panel cleanup in Constraints.
• Python: Epydoc cleanups
• Python: now better compatibility with Python 2.3
• Python: on script errors, Blender objects didn't get correct cleared memory, causing crashes
• Import: PLY files didn't read vertex colors
• Export: VRML script didn't export with images.
• Updated X3D and VRML importers
• Armature editmode: "Switch Direction" could cause infinite loop
• SSS render: with render option SSS disabled, textures didn't show up
• Added undo saving for Vertex Group operations
• New option for pressing NumPad-0 didn't work properly in all cases
• Animation: Pressing I-key (insert key) crashed when no Object was active

Downloads - All systems»

Notes:
1) The download package contains a blender.html file with installation instructions and a quick survival guide for new users.
2) Users with Intel on-board graphics: some graphics operations (menus or border select) don't show due to driver bug.

Blender's user manual is available online in several languages in wiki format, and is constantly updated by a worldwide collaboration of volunteers every day.