selectparks - Blender 2.42 Released

As the title suggests, a new version of the powerful open-source modeling, animation and game development suite Blender has been released.

For game developers, this spells good news. The physics engine, 'Bullet' is now the default physics context, there are also several speed and stability increases to the engine itself. For modelers and animators Blender continues it's march into direct competition with the expensive, disk-munching and proprietary 3DSMax and Maya.

A full list of the new features is available here.

Also worth noting that for some time now Blender has supported hardware shaders in the game engine. Check out this and new features in the demo files.

You can freely download Blender for Linux, Windows or Macintosh or SGI on this page. At less than 10 MB for a suite so powerful, you really can't go wrong with time invested in learning it. Blender has served me well for years and meant I could finally leave the expensive, RSI prone shackles of Maya and 3DSMax.

To learn Blender see this introductory manual or if you're a paper person, go out and buy the book.