I have been working with 2.5 quite a bit over the last week or so and I am finding that I really like it. As first I was dreading having to figure out where everything was moved to and if doing something was going to be wildly different. I probably should have known that the creators wouldn't do that, but I was still worried. In any case, I think the changes are fantastic. Barring a few things that do not work quite yet, which is totally fine because it is an alpha build, everything is so much better and not just because of the UI.

For instance, I have been rewriting my tutorials and I am finding the for almost every single one they became shorter because some little steps that you take to do something in 2.49 are now eliminated. The main one that pops to mind is with hair. If you wanted to comb, puff, cut, and do whatever to it I had to make it editable and then go to the particle mode and remember how to make the particle hair panel pop-up. Now it is as simple as going into Particle Mode and all of the tools are on the left hand side-and you just start using them. To be honest though, it's still taking me a bit to actually get used to looking at the tool shelf for these kind of things but once I get used to it, all of the relevant tools are right there without opening little panels or anything.

I've also noticed that some things have been moved a bit. Once again I had to get over 2.49 but everything that was moved is in a place that makes more sense and is more intuitive. More intuitive means easier to learn. The biggest one that comes to mind right now is with the texture settings. Previously, there was a panel with three tabs (texture, map input, map to) and all of those tabs had to do with textures. Now those settings are within the texture settings panel. I like the better organization and I find that if I am looking for something it seems easier to find in 2.5.

Of course, there are the things that have been advertised all over the place. I especially noticed the faster rendering. The smoke is a nice thing too, I've been hoping for something like this for a while now. I guess I could talk about all the new stuff, but I would just be repeating everything everyone else has said.

With all that being said, there is still some things that Blender seems to be lacking. For one, I wish it would ask me if I want to save when exiting, I've lost stuff because of that. Yes, I know there is auto-save, but for whatever reason auto-save has never seemed to work the way I would expect it. I could work for hours on something and it never gets auto-saved. The other thing that bothers me is in the right hand pop-out panel in the 3D viewing window. For whatever reason, the rotation has to be in radians. I think more people are used to degrees. It's also easier to throw in, say, 90 rather than pi/2 (That's pi divided by 2, it's the same as 90 degrees). At the very least I would think I could choose between radians or degrees. It also brings up the fact that when editing otherwise, degrees is used. Can't we keep it uniform throughout? This has been changed in version 2.5 Alpha 1, now it appears to default to using degrees. Minor complaint, quickly fixed. Yay!

Anyways, those are my thoughts. What do you guys think?

 

Category: blender Tags: save, radians, smoke, hair, 2.5, blender

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