Blender 2.65 released … a couple days ago. What's in it for Game Developers?

Whoops.  I generally keep on top of new Blender releases, but this one slipped past my radar.  So, this new is a bit dated.

Blender 2.65 splash

 

Anyways, Blender 2.65 was released a couple days ago.  This post takes a look at what’s in this release of interest for game developers.  At first glance, not too much.  At second glance, quite a bit actually.  At third glance, you are glancing too much and it’s time to simply look!

 

 

First off, stability.  Over 200 items were knocked off the bug list.  More stability is always nice.

 

Stuff not really all that gamedev related

  • Fire simulation and smoke flow force field added
  • Open Shading language support added to Cycles renderer
  • anisotrophic shading node added
  • anti-aliased viewport drawing

 

Game dev related additions

  • decimator modifier rewritten and now preserves UV 
  • new smooth modifier that can preserve edges and volumes
  • triangulate modifier which can be used for creating baked normal maps
  • bevel now includes round and no longer sucks
  • a symmetrize tool was added
  • a tool for transferring vertex weights between objects

 

Bevel

There is not a ton to the bevel controls:

Blender Bevel

 Basically you have offset and segment.

 

 Offset is the amount to bevel by

 

 Segments is the number of iterations or edges to use when composing the bevel

 

 

More impressive are the results, before bevelling multiple edges was… ugly.  Now:

Bevel Results

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Symmetrize 

So how exactly does Symmetrize work in Blender?  Remarkably well actually…  Check this out.

 

Before:

Blender Symmetrize Before

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After:

Blender Symmetize After

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Too damned cool.  So, basically it’s like a mirror modifier… that you can apply after the fact.  I like.  Options are pretty simple over all. 

 

Mirror Direction

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Basically you just pick the axis and direction you want the symmetry applied along.  Again, very cool.

 

Great job on the release Blender team.  Head on over and download it here.

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