Blender 2.5 is Coming…

The new Blender version they’re working on is looking seriously badass.

The modeling program has been re-coded from the ground up, and from the look of things, it’s going to be significantly less awful to use.  A lot of the pointers I handed out near the beginning still hold: I don’t think they’ve changed a lot of those oddball conventions, but the genuinely ugly things like the tool jumble and the (frankly, hopeless) button panels are being fixed.

Animation multithreading might not be the most thrilling thing in the world for solid modeling, but the improvements to the modifier stack and the operation stack look like really sweet tools.

Meanwhile, there is a Blender 2.49 release which has a few nice features added like booleans anywhere in the modifier stack and natively supported bolt generation which might actually help solid CG users.  As an occasional user of Blender’s art capabilities I’m really really grateful for the painting tools, but that’s just me.