Release 2.40 of Blender 3D Graphics

Version 2.40 of Blender animation suite was announced recently. (Thanks to Tom Musgrove.) "Blender has had another long development cycle resulting in a release packed with rewrites, new features and improvements. The major additions this release are the Character Animation rewrite, the added Fluid Dynamics system, improved editing and rendering of Particle Based Hair, and the Modifier Stack."

Blender is a fairly complicated application, the documentation for just the changes in this release is quite voluminous. One can get a good idea of the capabilities of the system by looking over the change list. Some of the interesting new features include:

• The animation recode project, a major rework of the animation system.
• The Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) which improves dependency calculations.
• Improved Skin Weighting for modeling Deformation by Armatures.
• New Armature Display Modes which adds new model views.
• Advanced Stride support for walking simulations.
• Shape Keys give improved access to shape modifications.
• Ipo Drivers allow the linking of objects to each other.
• Animation Curve Interpolation for smoothing movements.
• Fluid Simulations for representing liquid/solid interactions.
• New Hair Strand Rendering capabilities.
• An improved 3D Text System.
• Numerous User Interface improvements.

Blender has an active community, as shown by the recent Blender Conference 2005. A number of interesting demo animations were produced for the event. Blender can definitely be counted as one of the more complicated Linux-based power tools. We look forward to the production of some interesting animation clips.