[Reason]

I think like a lot of people, the only thing putting me off trying this powerful program was its rather unique interface. Well, after over 2 years of active development, it looks like Blender 2.5 will finally be released next month. The main feature of this version, apart from rewriting much of the existing source code, is a fully customizable interface. This means that it should be possible to make Blender behave just like Maya, Max, or whatever your favourite 3D app is.

There's been a lot of talk about doing a female bodybuilder game lately, and the the Blender game engine got some major upgrades last year thanks to the open game Yo Frankie! It's got features like blend shapes, for doing realistic muscle deformations, and normal maps for adding muscle and vein detail, so it would be ideal for such a project. Just check out this example of a muscular game character (male) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcLDhZzGrrg.

Also, from the high-end point of view, this muscle system looks ideal for creating believable muscular female animations http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9pwBEKvTBg&feature=related.

Just one more thing, to validate Blender 2.5 as being production ready, there is another open movie underway with codename Durian http://durian.blender.org. It's going to be in the fantasy genre, so it might feature some strong female characters in a realistic style. Anyway, it'd be cool if some artists from here could contribute some concept art to nudge it that way. What's cool about these projects is you have professional 3D artists developing high-quality characters and animations and all of the source files get released to the public for us to do whatever we want with!

[10-4]

In all the updates I've gone through with Blender, the one annoying thing has been the changing of various key combination from older versions like Undo and Redo. Otherwise the changes, for me, have been pretty small, and not particularly note worthy. I'll let others, here and elsewhere, beta test it before I make the jump to 2.5

[Reason]

In this version, you'll be able to set the key combinations for Undo and Redo and anything else to whatever you like and they'll remain independent of future updates. To me this is a stroke of genius and could really make Blender competitive with the high-end commercial apps.

[Author]

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