But it remains the top notch tool for low poly modeling and animation for me.
An it's free.



I've tested the sculpt mode :
good improvments , but
it 's very slow when you subdivide, or if you drag the brush over your model quickly : Blendre freezes caus it is calculating what vertex shoud be moved !
Far away from Zbrush speed and power caus it's not a tool
optimised specially for that only.
If you plan to do high level sculpting , it can't compare to 3D Coat or Zbrush and this is simply not the appropriate tool !
Juts my opinion.

it doesn't freeze for me and is very fluid for sculpting. the new poly counts i can reach are awesome and easily enough for me. no need for zbrush at all.

the new indirect lighting is nice too.

once bmesh will get merged in, blender will totally rock!

@frank: alpha and beta versions usually come towards the end of a project. the graph doesn't mean that only 20% of blender 2.5 are done.

Yes, the speed of the sculpting mode from version 2.49 to 2.5 alpha-1 is awesome!
Maibe not the speed of zbrush (I've never tested zbrush) but good enough to create great sculpted models.

Are there any presentation videos of those volumetric particles?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yZ8DAuu3Kg

haha, the new 3dsmax looks like an old blender version now.

haha, true.

the google summer of code projects this year:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=185631

i am most looking forward to the bullet construction kit.

sintel trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOfdboHvshg

not bad. I realy like the animations. But i don't like the character-style. But the the dvd durian/sintel will be great, i am shure. To learn how to model, animate, render movies/szenes in a professional quality using blender 2.5... i will buy this dvd for shure!

Funny how I found out the other day that the Blender headquarters is one block down my street... I'm gonna say Hi to them sometime