Blender 3.1 released

[Posted March 9, 2022 by corbet]

Version 3.1 of the Blender artistic suite is out. The list of changes is long and can be seen in the video-heavy announcement page; it includes Apple Metal support, a new "point cloud" object, and much more.

Blender 3.1 released

Posted Mar 10, 2022 0:46 UTC (Thu) by calumapplepie (guest, #143655) [Link] (2 responses)

I suppose the website is so video-heavy to ensure anyone able to actually download Blender is guaranteed a performant experience.

Blender 3.1 released

Posted Mar 10, 2022 17:44 UTC (Thu) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link]

Blender (and animation in general) is extremely complicated. There's so much information to convey that video tends to be a pretty efficient delivery mechanism. If you're a sysadmin, there's plenty of helpful information on the web and in email. Text, in other words. If you're an animator, artist, rigger, etc, text isn't nearly as efficient as video at conveying information. For that reason, it's likely that the Blender project feels its community is fine with video announcements.

Blender 3.1 released

Posted Mar 12, 2022 8:37 UTC (Sat) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link]

FWIW, my default browser profile has Javascript excised (yeah, I'm one of those). The Blender page shows fine (except those black holes with a sad video face, but that's the way I like them).

Instead of being a "black hole" or "white hole" page (NASA, I'm looking at you -- or rather, no, not anymore).

So kudos to the Blender team. It's understandable that their page is video heavy: after all, that's their core business, and they want to show off.

Blender 3.1 released

Posted Mar 10, 2022 19:11 UTC (Thu) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link]

I've been working on learning Blender for, what, 20 years now, off and on. At it again. It blows me away how much new stuff is in each release!

Blender 3.1 released

Posted Mar 10, 2022 23:27 UTC (Thu) by jd (guest, #26381) [Link]

It looks great! The problem with 3D CAD is that I find it very non-intuitive, and although Blender is getting better, there's a limit to how idiot-proof you can make it. Nonetheless, the quality of the work produced by it is astonishing.