Blender 2.53 Beta released!!!!!!

For those who are interested and know what I'm talking about, yesterday (Thursday, July 22, 2010) the 1st beta version in the 2.5x series of Blender versions, Blender 2.53 Beta, was officially released on blender.org!!!! For those who are interested & don't know what I'm talking about, Blender is a free, open-source 3d modelling & animation software that is distro'ed under the GPL (Gnu General Public Liscence). It can be downloaded at http://www.blender.org for just about whatever OS your computer is running (even FreeBSD and Solaris). (It has a built-in Python API and built-in Python scripting support.) The current stable install is 2.49b and the most recent dev install is what I just discussed above. It also has a built-in game/physics engine which makes use of the Bullet physics libraries, so it can be used to model physics & also to create physically accurate (or inaccurate, your choice) 3d video/computer games.

That sounds pretty epic, if ya ask me.

Lockheedmartin

So, you are a Blenderhead of sorts too, yes?

I have been messing with it for a bit. I actually created my first animation yesterday. I made a sphere inside a cube, and had a donut go through the side of the sphere, and come out of the top, almost like the circle was a hole or something similiar.

Nice job CTI! I guess I'm a little bit of an oddball Blender-wise. My first ever Blender creation is an animation. Not only that, but it's a fluid anim of wine pouring into a wine glass that is so ray-trace intensive, due to modelling of materials for wine and glass, that I can't get a decent render time without rendering it on a distributed computing renderfarm!

Well, maybe your computer just doesn't have the software? Honestly, I don't know what the problem is...

Has nothing to do with the software, CTI. It has everything to do with the hardware! The computers that I have use of are stuck running archaic, single-core, intel pentium 4 processors; probably with no more than 1Gb RAM. Basically, it's partly because the hardware sucks, and partly because I made very intensive use of raytracing.

Sucks to be you on your single-core. When I get me a new computer, I'm going to get one with a Quad Core Pentium Processor.

I'm planning on getting a MacBook Pro with 15" screen; 2.66GHz, quad-core, hyperthreaded Intel i7 desktop processor; 8Gb RAM; 500Gb HDD; and a standalone graphics card. Costs like you wouldn't believe, though! But it's definitely worth it!

How much will that cost

Close to 3 grand!!!!