A preview release of Blender 2.30 is now available (note: as a preview release, there still may be some bugs). Some of the more regulars of the forum may already know what blender is; for those who don’t know, blender is a Free cross-platform 3D authoring application. More information about blender, as well as the download, can be found at http://www.blender.org
for more about the 2.30 release see the release notes here:
http://www.blender.org/docs/2.30_release/2.30.html
…Most of the work has been in good old code cleaning and reorganizing, in adding complete new UI functionality and in a thorough information design process to make both navigating and learning Blender easier. The “looks” has changed as well, matching better with contemporary desktop environments. Work on all of this is still in progress, expect more updates in upcoming releases.
But this is not all! We now have real Undo in the modeler, improved functionality for our Grabber/Rotate/Scale tools, improved drawing of 3d models, a Knife tool, new interactive methods for selection and subdivision in Meshes, fixes and new functionality in the Python API, and a lot more…
Probably one of the most substantial changes is the interface which should be much more usable for beginners and even familiar to those having used Macromedia’s MX line of products (with dockable, collapsable panels).
This recent release came as a result of the Blender Conference 2003
http://www.blender.org/modules/bc2003/conference_program2_03.html
Below you can see the look of the new interface (more can be seen in release notes)
