Blender 2.56 beta released - Update

The Blender Foundation and associated online developer community have released Blender 2.56 Beta, the fourth official beta release of the Blender 2.5 series. On final release this development code will become Blender version 2.6.

This beta is for the most part feature complete and over 440 bugs have been fixed since the 2.55 beta, although a very bad bug in "undo" for the Cloth / Fluid sim was discovered the day after the initial release. This bug has now been fixed and the developers say they will probably release a 2.56a update including the fix, soon.

The developers say there have been extensive changes in the Python API, most notably in naming conventions and in the creation and access of properties. They also point out that extensive renaming operations between version 2.53 and 2.56 have considerably changed the scripting API; this effects loading 2.53.blends with animation into 2.56. Users are also instructed to try the FCurve / Driver 2.54 fix entry from the Help menu.

The usual provisos apply for a beta and it is not recommended that this release be used in mission critical and production environments.

Blender is the free open source animation and 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GPL2 licence and version 2.56 beta is available for download from the Blender web site.

Update (06-01-11): The Blender developers have now published a minor update to the fourth Blender beta, the promised version 2.56a, to address the Cloth / Fluid undo bug.

See also:

• Blender 2.5 Beta 3 released, a report from The H.

(trk)