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.
On the download page, it says the mac version is for Snow Leopard, but it works on Leopard to. Maybe you should mention it, because I wasn’t sure before trying it.
Interested in all these new features additions, I’ve also for the first time tried/am trying to really do something in 2.5 with the builds in this site (thanks).
My feelings so far is that, basely, I was used to have my strong wood desk that was messy (but I knew where things were) and now the cleaning lady came, replaced it by a paper desk and organized everything 😀 making work a little troublesome for the moment.
Looks like 2.49 still has is place in my hard drive for a couple months more 🙂 …but I’m really anxious to start working on 2.5 exclusively.
hehe, nice simile, rogerio
Philipe, thanks for the feedback, I’ll edit the download page. We’re not expert builders, so I wasn’t sure the version built on snow leopard would work for leopard.
Phillipe- Thanks for noticing that, we’ll be sure to make a note of it in the downloads section.
Rogério- I feel the same way about 2.5. It is such a nicer environment to work in, but I am too deep in a few projects right now to take on learning how to use 2.5. I’ll have to set aside some time to get my feet wet with it. I play around a little in it now, but even though we’re building it on our machines, I’m still not using it much at all.
Besides, I learn something new everyday about Blender with Bassam and Jarred around anyway, my head would implode if I were to take on 2.5 at the same time! But will soon. 😀
Heh, looks like you beat me to reply by 2 minutes!
I really want to start using 2.5 for everything too- It’s the stability and the lack of feature ports, as already said, that’s hindering me. But the new animation system is so tempting… /drool
well, personally I am not contemplating using 2.5 for ‘everything’ especially not commercial/client work. But for some things it is a possibility.