It’s over a week ago (May 7) that Blender released a new version: 2.67. I just noticed.

Blender Download – Use the Archive version for better compatibility with previous versions.

New in this Release

Free Style

This may seem odd to you, but Blender just got a Free-Style Render Engine that renders non-photorealistic images. See: Blender Free Style for more examples.

Blender 2.67

Paint System

The paint system has improvements. Brushes work in more modes and have more features. Bugs in the system have been fixed. 

Gaia Clary of Machinimatrix.org the home of AVASTAR has a new Release Candidate out: 834. I just installed it. The fix I wanted is not yet in it. Gaia tells me I won’t see that until after the next release. But, there are fixes and improvements.

You need your special URL to get the download. But, you can see the release notes here: RC5-834.

The default Second Life animations have odd pivot points in the animations. If you are using them for import to SL then that is a good thing. If you are trying to use the animations for other purposes, like I am to pose the avatar for weighting clothes, it is a problem.

If you import the default SL animation into Blender, the feet are at the Blender 0,0,0 position. If you change to EDIT mode the hip is at the 0,0,0 position. In POSE more, again the feet are at the 0,0,0 position. See the image.

The problem with Default SL Animations

That does not really matter for our use for making Second Life clothes. But the T-pose only being available in EDIT mode makes it hard to position the imported animation with our clothing avatar.

New Blender Feature – Transfer Weights

You will find that the Weight Copy script that many of us have been using with our clothes building doesn’t work in Blender 2.66a. (Some say it does. I’m not sure.) Gaia Clary is not going to be updating the script for newer Blender versions. She doesn’t need to. Blender now has the ‘copy’ function built in.

This new feature is only visible when you are in Weight Paint mode. The picture shows the Weight Paint Tools panel open. The eighth position is Transfer Weights (and that links to a short tutorial). This takes the place of Gaia’s script.

This new feature gives us way more control than Gaia’s script did. But the selection order for transfers is the same. Select the SOURCE first and the TARGET second.

You may notice some additional tools there too; Blend, Limit Total, Fix Deforms, and Weight Gradient. Look at Blender.org’s documents page: Weight Paint Mode. There you’ll find explanations of the tools and how they work.

When modeling I am often looking for just the right texture. I skip looking for textures in Second Lifeâ„¢ simply because it is too hard to look at what is there. Some Third Party Viewers have better tools for managing textures and there are texture managers for sell in SL and the Market Place. But, I find them slow and awkward.

I usually browse over to CG Textures. They have an easy to browse collection of textures. Some are great and some are crap. Most require some serious work before they can be used and many lack the supporting files; normal, specular, occlusion, etc. But, they are free, with a daily download limit.

RenderTexture.com

A new site I came across is RenderTextures.com. They also have free textures and Terms of Use I can live with. 

This is a 15 minute video on Dynamic Topology. It shows the difference in how we work with and without it.

This tool can be used for adding AND REMOVING polygons.

This tutorial also shows using the Symmetry tool that is part of dynamic topology.

Once you see the tool in action, you’ll understand how handy it will be.

(There is a bug in the current Chrome Developer. The URL does not always update. It depends on how you move from page to page. On YouTube the URL sometimes fails to update. I’ve been able to reproduce the failure, but not consistently. So, I got the wrong YouTube ID for the original posting and didn’t preview the post. It was short. Sorry.)

A new version of Blender came out March 6: 2.66a. You can download Blender here. If you are not using the Archive Version install, save yourself some hassle in the long run and use that install.

There are release notes for Blender 2.66a. The notes are mostly about bug fixes. The release notes for Blender 2.66 are about the new features in this version of Blender.

New Blender Release 2.66a

One of the new features is the addition of: Dynamic Topology Sculpting. Previous versions have sculpting tools that only allow you to move existing vertices. The dynamic tool will allow the addition of vertices as you sculpt. I have yet to try it, so I am not sure how it works. I imagine this will be handy for modelers targeting Second Lifeâ„¢.

I came across an article on a new way of building 3D virtual worlds. (Thanks Hamlet NWN) Well, may be not so new, it came out in 2011 I think. But, the process, new to me, is being used to create the independent adventure game: Rustclad. The development team has a video out showing the process they are using and early scenes from their game.

You can see they are using a more organic style than we typically see in Second Life™. Sculpties were introduced to Second Life to enable the creation of this more organic style. I am not sure we have ever taken advantage of sculpties as intended by the creator of them: Karl Stiefvater (Qarl Fizz, formerly Qarl Linden). May be I’ll ask him some day.