New Release: Blender 2.5 Alpha 0

After a long time in development, the Blender Foundation have deemed Blender 2.5 ready for serious testing. It is, however an alpha, unstable and incomplete. The finished result is slated for late summer next year, but there is already a lot of kewl stuff to play with=)

What´s done so far:

UI makeover - If you´ve come directly from earlier versions of Blender, you might feel a little lost. However it´s all for good, even if it will take some time to get used to. The UI has seen some love to make it more logical, alot of reorganization has been done and a new toolbar (envoked by the key ´T´ in the 3d view), will make sure you have all tools settings close at hand. The basic Blender identity, I´m happy to say, is still preserved, though. Another interesting direction is that the UI is programmable through Python, which opens up alot of possibilities for designing your own UI. Examples of programming your own context-sensitive popups, ala the spacebar-popup in 2.4x has been shown already. It´s far from finished though, and a lot is bound to change. Looking good so far, though.



Customizable keymaps - No more complaints about migrating from Max, Maya etc. No you can make Blender behave pretty much in the same way. Right now, there´s pretty basic support, and changing all the keys you want is a chore (I would like something like what Wings 3d has), but improvements are expected as this is very early work.

Also in this release is a new animations system with the goal to make everything animatable, spline-ik, volume rendering, smoke simulation, particle enhancements, raytrace optimizations and better normalmapping.

For all the changes, and of course a download, go here.