I mentioned we were contemplating a switch to 2.5 ( we are experimentally using 2.5 right now with minor ‘dips’ back in 2.49) in a previous post. We thought it would be fun to show some of our ‘versus’ tests until we stick with one or the other. First up: Bump mapping. We used the exact same .blend file in both versions, no cheating.

The .blend is here

I’m in the middle of considering whether switching tube to 2.5 is a good idea or a terrible one; on the one hand, there are many goodies there that would make our lives much, much easier, and more planned on the durian timeline; tops on my list are the new animation system, impoved python api, and the planned improvments to the library/linking/proxies system, and later down the line, all the render improvements and speedups.

On the other hand, Blender 2.5 simply isn’t ready at this point in time for a production this size; too many things aren’t done (even in the above list) and even some 2.49 stuff still isn’t ported. In addition, there are crashes, hangs, segfaults, you name it… not a safe thing at all. In order to make this transition make sense, we have to commit to a ‘durian +1’ schedule: that is: take Durian’s schedule and add one month.
Benefits of this is I really don’t have much scheduling to do! i’d take advantage of Ton’s excellent organizational abilities, in addition to his (and the rest of the team’s) new code. Downside is that Durian is a bigger project, and I don’t think I need the entire production time of Durian to finish tube… we’ll see.

To make things even harder, Aligorith (Joshua) has just added a great new feature on the durian wishlist.. spline IK.. making it even more tempting.

Jamal and I have made builds on our machines with the new spline IK in them. Be aware that Jamal switched his 2.5 build to use the new cocoa port to 64 bit, so he’s making (lets see if I get it right) a universal binary which will use 64 bits on 64 bit machines. Both are available in the downloads section of this site.