My Updated Blender 2.5 Review
I’ve been using Blender 2.5 for a while now and beginning to find its flaws and strengths while the time past’s by, Its very surprising how powerful blender it truly is a great program for any artist from beginner to professional artist.
Interface Improvements
Blender has greatly changed the whole interface which has really made blender stand out better and less scary looking compared to it’s older 2.49 versions. With Blender 2,5 you can pretty much create any layout you prefer to work from and save it as the default settings, which is also extremely easier to access from file-> user preferences and click save as default. If you feel the screen is to cluttered you can hide parts by clicking the window corners and dragging them over the window you which to erase, you can even hide and show the toolbar and properties bar by pressing T (toolbar) and N (properties) on the keyboard
Default settings
When opening blender 2.5 for the first time I find the settings to feel extremely strange like as if it was a different language to my own, for example to select you right click instead of click. These few problems can be fixed pretty fast under the file->user preferences, you can change the view type to turntable, select with left click, rotate around selected and many other settings.
Missing Features
There is a few problems with blender that I’ve came across which most likely keeps blender from becoming big time main steam program.
One of the problems is extruding along normally, when selecting a bunch of polys on mesh like a sphere you may wish to extrude them in the direction they are facing. Now normally in 3D max I would just select and hit extrude and it’s done but that’s not the case here in blender, instead you have to extrude face by face and then fix any problems you may run into.
Second problem is Bevel weights is not working at all in blender 2.5 however the modifier remains so any new user will become extremely confused fast.
There are many more problems in blender and if we get lucky and thanks to the large user community which blender has these problems most likely will be fixed soon.
My summary
Blender is a great program to model with and come pretty much with every thing you ever need, the program is also free and can easily fit on to a memory stick and run from a simple folder. Blender can be used on many systems such as Windows, Mac, FreeBSD and Linux (if you like using old fashion command lines) this means the program is very portable and could be used at a friend’s house or on a laptop when applying for jobs to show your work in full 3D instead of flat paper prints.
It’s worth keeping on a stick or using it even to start your own free studio.
I’ve got big hopes for Blenders future.
