Blender 2.5 series update improves stability

After two months of development, the Blender Foundation and its associated online developer community have announced the arrival of the second stable release of the Blender 2.5 series. According to the project's roadmap, the next stable update to the open source 3D content creation suite, Blender 2.59, is expected to arrive in August, after which development on the 2.6x cycle will begin, targeting new updates every 2 months.

Blender 2.58 is a maintenance update that includes more than 200 fixes for bugs found in the previous versions, affecting everything from rendering and the Blender interface, to tools, compositing and animation, as well as various crashing bugs. The latest version also allows users to move the camera using normal view port navigation by enabling "Lock Camera" in the "View" panel; it includes a "mesh inset" add-on to inset individual faces or a selected region and updates to sculpting, render baking and the wrap modifier. Users can now also assign images directly to empty objects to use as reference images.

A full list of changes and bug fixes can be found in the release log and in the change log. Blender 2.58 is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and FreeBSD (32- and 64-bit) from the project's official Get Blender download page.

Update 06/07/11: The Blender.org developers have published a bug fix release for version 2.58. According to the developers, a couple of fixes for 2.58 required them to release an "immediate update". Blender 2.58a addresses a total of 25 issues and includes "various small improvements".

Blender is released under version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2) and is sponsored by the non-profit Blender Foundation based in Amsterdam. It has been used to create several animated movies, such as Sintel, Big Buck Bunny and Elephants Dream, that are available for free download.

See also:

• First stable Blender 2.5 series arrives, a report from The H.
• Blender on sale in alleged violation of GPL, a report from The H.

(crve)