That was quick, but expected. It's really just a bug fix release so the developers can freeze CVS for the major changes coming in the next version. Anyways...get downloading =)
Here's the original post at the Blender Foundation.
And the release notes.
And of course the link to download it.
SirDude has posted to the Blender Foundation news that he has created a few new plugins. Go to the Blender Plugin Repository and have a looksee.
Unfortunately there's no precompiled binaries for OSX. When I try a make I get a whole lot of error messages. Time to hit the forums.
I just read about edo in this elysiun forum post, and headed straight over the site.
Edo is a high-performance and high-quality image compositing application designed for maximum flexibility. Edo lets you combine and manipulate video files, 3D sequences and still images in a non-destructive way using a powerful node graph visual interface. The use of modern video card graphics processors (GPUs) enables true realtime performance, and support for industry standard file formats helps integrate Edo into many kinds of workflow.
At the heart of Edo is the composition tree, a graph that offers a unified view of all the operations that result in the final image. Operations are represented by nodes with inputs, outputs and parameters. Each node takes data from its input ports, processes it in some way and outputs the new data from its output ports. A simple mouse drag is enough to create or modify connections between nodes.
The node graph makes the compositing process more transparent and more easily modified. The entire process is visible at once, making it easy to insert or modify operations at any stage. You can also preserve an unlimited number of variations and alternative versions as separate "branches".
Although images are the kind of data that you're most likely to use in Edo, there are other useful data types that can also be processed in an Edo composition tree: scalar values (plain old numbers), drawings (resolution-independent video card drawing operations), and geometry (2D shapes or 3D polygon meshes). For example, you could use a scalar value obtained from audio data to drive the opacity parameter of an image processing node.
Because 3D operations are integrated directly into Edo's node graph architecture, you can animate an image in three-dimensional space by simply dragging a new 3D Layer node into your composition. 3D calculations take full advantage of your video card's 3D acceleration features, so nodes can perform very complex operations and still run in real-time.
There's often parts in your video material that you don't want to include in your composition. Edo lets you trim and time-stretch the clips within the composition (tip - use Ctrl- or Alt-click on the timeline in the Source node inspector to easily set In and Out times for the clip).
If you're familiar with Photoshop or After Effects, you'll probably appreciate that Edo offers many of the same blending modes (multiply, screen, overlay, soft light, etc.) and they produce the results you'd expect. In some respects Edo also goes beyond: for example, the Scale node offers the choice of high-quality Mitchell-Netravali and Lanczos algorithms that produce noticeably sharper results than bilinear and bicubic scaling.
This is some seriously well-written and -thought out software. According to the about page of the site, it's all written by one guy [Pauli Ojala] in Finland. So much good code comes from northern Europe and it's often overlooked. Thanks Pauli and keep up the good work.
Piovra is...
Piovra 1.2 it' s a python scripts set that allow you to distribuite a rendering process on a local network. It can be used from a shell or a GUI, and it is possible to execute other applications or commands. To better understand how to use piovra and what it can do have a look to the QUICKSTART section.
Sounds interesting doesn't it. And right on the heals of DrQueue, Piovra now has it's own project as well. I'm still lacking the time to check either of these out, but am dead keen. I'm going to have to dedicate a few days to this.
There's been a fair bit of talk on eiysiun lately about render farms, and even a group that's thinking of setting up a farm for the Blender community, but it's going to cost, which so far hasn't gone down too well.
Here's some more info on Piovra.
Piovra has many feaures that can be used simultaneously because it is divided into 4 scripts. This mean that during rendering, you can receive rendered frames; add, disconnect, run commands on, and shutdown slaves; and purge slave rendered-frame repositories. You can do all of these procedures on the render farm as a whole, or address each slave specifically, giving you total control over the render farm at every moment.
And there's more on the website.
K-Rich has created a Blender Theme Respository.
If you would like to see your theme here either use Blender 2.35 or add this script to your blender scripts directory or if you must you can use you .B.blend file. Then choose 'Save Theme' from the export menu. Send the resulting file to my email address and I will add it as soon as I can.
Nice.