This version now is fully 64 bits compatible, new modifers were added, a couple of composite nodes were added, and a revamp of the old mesh primitives was done. But most relevant to mention is Blender 2.44's new long-awaited but unexpected feature: subsurface scattering (SSS) support!

http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/

wow niiiiice!

woot it's released! *downloading*

Cool!!!

fantastic! i'm trying it out now. i had no idea it would be coming out so soon (compared to 3.42->3.43 release; or perhaps it feels quicker now that i'm more comfortable with blender?)

thanks for the heads-up

julz

this is a smaller release mostly for bug fixes. it has some nice new features nevertheless though.

the next version (2.5) will be awesome! there will be a gui overhaul and the event system recoding starts now which will enable custom hot keys, tool bars, tutorial recording, macros,... hopefully also bmesh (ngons) will be done then. a lot of other great stuff is planned for 2.5.

I also heard of the GUI revamp, shame tho, since I already got used to the current gui system

i don't think it will change that much. the strengths will be kept and the inconsistencies will be cleaned up a bit. the advantage will be that everything will be more customizable. i think it will be possible to define your own button panels for example.

did someone had the same problem that the importer didn't work anymore ?

(lightwave and 3dgs)

cheers

you are right. i tested my exporter and it doesn't work anymore. i think the reason is that blender uses python 2.5 now and some necessary modules aren't directly included in blender's python.dll anymore.

http://python.org/download/
please download and install python 2.5.1 and tell me if it works then!