IMPORTANT POLL: Continuing support for Blender 2.49

[Doug Armand]

Hey Doug,
the knife is still there, it just works a little different: I think you need to hold the "k" while dragging your knife with the mouse. Not completely sure, don't have a copy of blender here. Works faster and more intuitive actually .

I like 2.5, it feels good! One thing though: the wind-force field doesn't seem to affect my clothes anymore, even with highest powers. Anybody knows what I am doing wrong?

Hey thanks for that tip - seems to work but how do you choose between the different knifes? like midpoint, etc

[Headroom]

True, it's still there in some rudimentary form but it's generally lacking.

After evaluating modo I find what is even more lacking is the presence of a really solid tool set for chamfering/beveling and filleting. It totally eludes me that such a wonderful tool that Blender generally is that it does have exacty nothing to offer in that department.
I guess though that is the difference between a commercial professional tool and open source. It is sooooo much cooler to work on the latest enhancement to sculpting or camera tracking rather then to provide users with a solid (boring ?) set of modeling tools.

Yes, you can put a Subdivision modifier on it and ad edge loops if you want a nice fillet but that does wonders to UV mapping and sometimes is simply not desireable. Heck, A Sketchup plugin provides better abilities in that area than Blender.

I am also missing the propotionality setting for edge loops we had in 2.49, so even adding edge loops does not always get it done.

For modeling technical items where I'd like to have crisp features and defined radii the those are features I am sorely missing.

On the other hand the new 2.5 interface feels so much more fluent (not sure thats the best or even right term) and intuitive. The loop tools addon is absolute killer! (So is Blendigo but I took that for granted )

[Headroom]

Hey Doug,
the knife is still there, it just works a little different: I think you need to hold the "k" while dragging your knife with the mouse. Not completely sure, don't have a copy of blender here. Works faster and more intuitive actually .

I like 2.5, it feels good! One thing though: the wind-force field doesn't seem to affect my clothes anymore, even with highest powers. Anybody knows what I am doing wrong?

Hey thanks for that tip - seems to work but how do you choose between the different knifes? like midpoint, etc

You don't! It's a rudimentary free hand tool. I guess we have to wait for Bmesh, which appears to be more of a running joke

[Doug Armand]

Hey Doug,
the knife is still there, it just works a little different: I think you need to hold the "k" while dragging your knife with the mouse. Not completely sure, don't have a copy of blender here. Works faster and more intuitive actually .

I like 2.5, it feels good! One thing though: the wind-force field doesn't seem to affect my clothes anymore, even with highest powers. Anybody knows what I am doing wrong?

Hey thanks for that tip - seems to work but how do you choose between the different knifes? like midpoint, etc

You don't! It's a rudimentary free hand tool. I guess we have to wait for Bmesh, which appears to be more of a running joke

Hmmm then I guess thats still one of my reasons to be using 2.49 then?

[Doug Armand]

Ok decided to give 2.58 a shot today - very nice. But there seem to be some serious bugs with blendigo atm. Can't seem to use any external file references - no textures, no NK data. This makes it unusable atm

for your info Dougal - Blender 2.58a x64 and Blendigo 3.0.14

[Polinalkrimizei]

yeah, the nk-path is wrong. Workaround: copy indigo's nk-data manually "one folder up". This should be fixed easily dougal

the latest blendigo (3.0.14) seems to have a problem with texture paths, I had to downgrade to 3.0.10.

Apart from that, you are doing a great job dougal, blendigo is now so nicely and tightly integrated to blender that it is a pleasure! thanks!

[Doug Armand]

Thanks for the info Polinalkrimizei - will try those suggestions out.

[solarray]

It seems that different people have different model techniques. Switching from blender 2.49 to 2.5 wasn't a big deal for me, anyway I feel quite the same like Headroom the last time. I know the developement goes forward with blender but some really simple features are missing from the beginning. And the bug tracker has still around 170 known bugs since a year. The bugs get constantly eliminated but they get the same amount of new bugs every day. It feels like they lost a bit the roadmap.

Unfortunately if you are learned to work with blender for years its really hard to switch to another software like 3ds max which I tried some month's ago.

[dougal2]

HI,
I know the path references got screwed up in the last release; I think I've fixed it and will have a new release available in the next few days.

[Headroom]

To get back to the original topic, while I am frustrated with certain areas that are lacking in Blender I have moved away totally from the 2.4 branch and will not be going back. It is very unlikely that there will be any continuing development or even bug fixing for Blender 2.4. Also the longer you wait for the transition the more catching up you'll have to do.

I find the new interface provides a much more intuitive workflow. In order to accomplish certain tasks in 2.49 I often had to find a specific tutorial just to find out some convoluted associations between certain panels/buttons/settings. A good bit of that in 2.5 is intuitive enough to eliminate some of the information hunting.

Seeing how well Blendigo is already integrated in Blender 2.5 my suggestion would be to define a period of time when Blendigo support for 2.49 will simply be stopped in order to give users time to transition to 2.5.
Due to that tighter integration of Blendigo in 2.5 I can imagine a whole host of features to be added to Blendigo that would simply not be possible with Blender 2.49.

It would for example be really neat to have the Indigo output(s) be handed back into Blender for some compositing. Or automatically baking Blender Internal textures for use as Image textures.