Thursday, April 14th, 2011 Posted by Jim Thacker

Blender 2.57 ships

The Blender Foundation has released Blender 2.57, the first ‘stable’ 2.5x release for the popular open-source 3D package. While previous beta releases have included the software’s latest functionality, 2.57 is the first in which it is fully updated and bugfixed.

According to the Foundation’s official statement:

“This is the first stable release of the Blender 2.5 series, representing the culmination of many years of redesign and development work.

“We name this version ‘stable’ not only because it’s mostly feature complete, but especially thanks to the 1000s of fixes and feature updates we did since the 2.5 beta versions were published.

“The next 2 months we will keep working on finishing a couple of left-over 2.5 targets and we expect to get feedback and bug reports from users to handle as well. If all goes well, the 2.58 version then can be the final release of the 2.5 series, with a massive amount of new projects to be added for an exciting cycle of 2.6x versions. Target is to release updates every 2 months this year.”

Partly developed for work on last year’s ‘open movie’, Sintel, new features in the 2.5x series include a redesigned GUI, rearchitected Python support, a radical overhaul of the animation system, improved sculpting tools, new smoke simulation and volume rendering systems, and much faster raytracing.

All excellent news for Blender users. The only fly in the ointment? As BlenderNation points out: 2.57 boasts the ugliest splash screen the software has had in years.


View the Blender 2.57 release logs

Download Blender 2.57 (Win, Mac OS X, Linux or FreeBSD)