Just in time for Christmas, Blender 2.40 has been let loose on the internet, leaving a wake of destruction and bringing web servers to their bleeding knees. It’s a ripsnorter of a release, with goodies from Google’s Summer of Code sponsorship like fluid dynamics and re-written inverse kinematics and booleans, along with the usual swag of features and improvements, including all the outstanding work Ton has been doing on the animation system re-write and his work for us at Orange.

I’m very proud to have been able to contribute to this release, not only as crash-test dummy at the studio, but also in a practical sense, being behind many of this release’s interface improvements such as the 3D object visualisation and UI text/number field editing functionality, sequence strip cutting, assorted other fixes and stupid little things like the generated UV test grid. As always, I’m very glad and humbled to have been able to do my little part towards pushing forward Blender’s ever-escalating usability and utility. Onward to the next release!

It looks like our Orange project has made it into the voting list for the CG Society Top 20 most influential moments in CG for 2005. We’re sitting there side by side with very humbling things like the VFX for Sin City, King Kong and more, Autodesk acquiring Alias, controversy like the hot coffee mod for Grand Theft Auto, and mundane boredom such as Nvidia releasing some new graphics card (wow, who would have expected that).

Anyway, if you have a CGTalk.com login, (or would like to make one!) here’s the talk thread and the voting form. You can make your own mind up about what to vote for. ;)

Aaron tells me today that the Video Ezy site we worked on just got plugged in the news box of Australian In Front, one of the big cool dude design websites. Not bad!