Blender 3D 2.50 Alpha 0 for architectural visualization
As you may have saw on all Blender 3D related web sites the first release of Blender 3D 2.50 is available to download! This is indeed a milestone for all the hard development efforts made in the past months and shows that all changes are going on the right direction. If you want to download Blender 2.50 Alpha 0, visit this link and here you will find the release notes for this version. Despite the hype around this release, there is something concerning me a lot and I don't mean only comments I read on user forums or social networks. Even my students and friends are willing to drop Blender 2.49 right now and use only 2.50 as their main production software.
If you have the same plans, I would suggest considering another solution, where you use both versions for a while. Yes, use both 2.49 and 2.50 in your daily bases. The reason is pretty simple and it's related to the “alpha 0” label of the next 2.50 releases. It means that this release is not stable yet and the purpose of those releases is testing and finding bugs. Use alpha version software for production environment is very dangerous and could result on problems such as missing deadlines or even worse, lose money!
In my case, for all my architectural visualization projects I will use Blender 3d 2.49 as my main production environment, and only by the time 2.50 gets stable I will make the jump. But, it doesn't mean that I couldn't use the software for testing and use old projects to study and learn more about this release. I'm giving this advice for all my students and colleges and discussing it a lot on my Twitter.
How about you? Will you make the jump right now? Or wait until a stable release is available?
There is still a lot to come, like the B-Mesh system that will be released in a later alpha version of Blender 3D 2.50. So, don't find odd that you miss a feature that was showed here on the blog, or on another web site and wasn't added to this first alpha.
For artists using Mac Os X, it seems like the problems with Blender and Macs using Intel video devices are solved. I'm using it here on my macbook and the performance is great!
I hope all exporters for renders like YafaRay, LuxRender and Indigo start to appear for this release. It would be great to test 2.50 using them.
i’ll test my projects made with 2.49 in 2.5, it already proved that renders faster in most cases, but until ti is alpha i don’t see necessarily to do all in it.
At the same time, it will be very useful for the gradual transition from 2,49 to 2,5
I’ve been a noob for a couple of years; I would like to learn Blender as a hobbyist and have built up a fairly good-sized library of Blender books that are based primarily on the 2.4 series of the application.
I can tell from the reaction of the community that Blender 2.5 is a big deal and substantially different from earlier versions of the program. As a hobbyist, should I be concerned that the money I have spent on various Blender books would be wasted if I moved to 2.5 once a stable build is released? Or are the changes mostly “under the hood” and/or things that only a competent user will benefit from?
Hi Jeff,
Don`t worry about that too much. You can still study and learn the 2.4x series and migrate later to 2.50. The interface is different, but most of the concepts are the same. For instance, the use of the 3d cursor is almost the same on both versions. For others like the curve editor, things will really be different. But, once you know how to use the tools in 2.4x the learning curve for 2.5x will be a lot shorter.
Regards
Blender for my hobby, so I quietly moved to 2.5. Bad that there Yafaray and the interface is not quite accustomed.
Sorry for my English
I have been using Blender to do visualisations for about a year and a half after I learnt using great video tutorials by Vaclav (http://blender-house.spaces.live.com/) having come from Vectorworks. As per the tutorials I import the plan as a background image and ‘trace over’ it. In 2.50 I find this technique doesn’t work because the background image changes size and jumps all over the place when you zoom in and out. I am on an Intel Mac. So I use both. On the whole, 2.50 is great though.
I agree. The alpha 0 release is cool but not complete. Even though I want to make the jump, (especially if I am going to do tutorials,) I am uncomfortable with the new (and incomplete) environment. So, Blender 2.49b it is for now, with keeping up and learning on 2.5, and probably some projects and tutorials as well.
No .deb package? This is an outrage! (Heh, Heh.) just kidding.
I agree and it’s very clear: Alpha is lower than Beta and even Beta versions NEVER are for production use.
I’m curious how the developlement of the full integration of V-Ray is going on 🙂