Blender 2.49a

Blender 2.49a is a mighty admirable 3D graphics creation suite allowing modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, realtime interactive 3D and game creation and playback with cross-platform compatibility - all in one tidy, easily and free downloadable package!

While one half of the developers were busy with the 2.5 project, the other half happily continued working on directly usable and useful features in Blender. Especially advances in the Game Engine justifies having a well tested, bug fixed and stable 2.49a release.

Major Features:

1. Video Texture: The Game Engine now supports multiple streams of video textures for interactive playback in environments. You can use video files (also from URLs), image files, video captures, memory buffer, camera render or a mix of that.
2. Real-time Dome rendering: This feature allows artists to visualize their interactive projects within an immersive dome environment. Blender supports Fulldome, Truncated domes (front and rear), Planetariums and domes with spherical mirrors.
3. Game Engine speed-up: Significant speedup has been achieved in several areas;
   • Scene Graph optimizes static objects
   • View Frustum culling
   • Occlusion culling
   • Faster Bullet physics initializing
4. Bullet Physics: The Bullet library upgrade in this release includes brand new generic 6dof constraint with run-time configurable limits, motors and springs to allow for physics-based vehicles, forklift, robots and ragdolls. And more...
5. Game Engine Modifier support: Support for non-time dependent modifiers in the GE: no need to apply the modifiers before running the game! Works for physics shape too.
6. Improved Game Logic and Python API: Improve stability, documentation and completeness for the python API.
   • Attribute access
   • GameObject properties of any type.
   • OpenGL and Geometry modules
   • New logic and the rendering functions
   • Better error feedback
7. Texture Nodes: Next to Compositing and Materials, Blender Textures now support Node editing. You can use it to create advanced procedural textures, including fractal based systems. And even better, a Texture Nodetree can even become a Brush for painting.
8. Projection Painting: Painting in the 3D view has been improved to support projection painting which allows you to paint directly onto your model without having to worry about UV mapping or seams.
9. Etch-a-ton armature sketching: Etch-a-ton is a development snapshot for sketching techniques applied to rigging. It can be used both for creating chains of deformation bones through various subdivision techniques or through retargetting templates
10. Boolean improvements: In 2.49 you can put a Boolean Modifier on any level in the stack, allowing you to intersect deformed or subdivided models too. You can also insert multiple Booleans in one stack now.
11. JPEG2000 support: Blender now supports the new high quality JPEG format. It has much better compression, supports Alpha layers, and HDR color up to 16 bits per channel. JPEG2000 support is available in Blender everywhere, including Sequencer, Compositor and UV texture editor.
12. Python Script extensions: New scripts have been added, tools such as Landscape or Bolt generators, and the importer/exporters had several updates and fixes. Also worth visiting is the very complete (over 300) Scripts Catalog
13. Featurettes & Fixes: A lot of smaller features and bug fixes were done for 2.49 as well. Hundreds of reports were handled the past 6 months.

Enhancements:

1. Various Bugs:
   • Dozens of bugs fixed based on "Coverity Scan" (automatic code testing)
   • The .deb Linux builds didn't include FFMPEG
   • Windows: Reading DV-AVI now works with all files, including from Movie Maker
   • Negatively scaled objects resulted in incorrect boolean output.
   • Surface option for Force Fields crashed on non-mesh objects, so hide it if not applicable. Also made it support surf, curve, font objects.
   • DXF import/export: several fixes and update
2. Render Bugs:
   • AO render gave wrong pixels on first sample it takes in a tile
   • Texture nodes noise function was not correct for Bricks node
   • Texture nodes translate node works now
   • Particle hair strands missed first segment when rendering as regular geometry (not strand render)
   • Particles using modifiers/UV slowed it down unnecessary
3. Game Engine Bugs:
   • Anisotropic friction with zero values caused objecs to jump to infinity
   • Materials using Object texture coordinates caused crash
   • light in skinned object only work properly after running the action once.
   • Avoid crashing BGE on Mobile Intel GMA 950/945 Express GPU
   • Lights in non-glsl mode didn't move anymore, missing matrix update.
   • Changing the scale of a sleeping object wasn't working with bullet.
   • Dynamically added sensor objects didn't have their physic shape synchronized with movement.
   • Loading older blend files (from the blender Gamekit 1.0 demos) that use Sumo crashed on playback
   • Shadow face flag ignored object's scale.
   • Sound Actuator negative events would play a sound when no sound had played yet.
   • Sound Actuator with loop-end  stop on negative events.
4. Game Engine Python Bugs:
   • Camera functions getScreenPosition, Ray and Vect fixes
   • Bug in KX_GameObject.get() and ListValue.get() returning python types float/int/string.
   • Pythons sys.path creation was broken in windows (caused YoFrankie game to not start)
   • Action Actuator setChannel() function was broken in a number of ways.
   • Deprecation warnings were printed twice.
5. Game Engine Bullet Bugs:
   • Fix for Torque and 6DOF constraints
   • Applied torque breaks rigid bodies in game engine
6. Sequencer Bugs
   • Scrubbing sound could create an echo
   • Fixed two cases with crashing FFMPEG
   • "duplicate strip" always increase the user count for ipo now.
   • Work around crash in dv-reader of ffmpeg, that can happen, if some frames don't contain audio
   • free_imbuf_seq() didn't free all scenes. That will lead to steady memory growth in case of nested timelines with several scenes.
   • Big Proxy fixes, addressing hopefully most complaints on mailing list and in tracker
   • Fixed color balance tool
   • Syncing audio to 3D window works again
7. New:
   • Compositor: UV Map node now has better handling of edge cases (where UV values meet sky background)
   • Wavefront OBJ support to import & export curves as OBJ native curves (rather then a bunch of edges)
   • Wavefront OBJ X90 option for export to write files without rotation.
   •  Sequencer: effect strips had no filter option, which was therefore added. So you can apply color balance on effect filter output
   • GE Python support for __contains__ "prop" in gameOb and "OBCube" in scene.objects syntax.
   • GE Python support for dictionary style get() cont.actuators.get("key", default), works for sensors and object controllers too.
   • Action actuator getChannel("name") function to get the bone loc,size, quat for a bone.