Do not use these releases! Too many bugs, especially with particle systems. Your Blender will crash anytime you hit Alt-A or Render with particles in your scene. Repeat, do not use RC3 or RC4 for Blender 2.46.
The whole purpose of those releases is to hunt bugs before the actual release. If people don’t use them, bugs don’t get caught and end up with the final release. Thus what you’re telling people to do is quite silly. I think most people understand that you’re not supposed to use test releases for production work.
no need to be nasty about it
I’m sorry if I came across blunt, but what I said still stands. 
I can not use particle system in any version of Blender… 
Is there any tutorial for actual version?
I have a Dell Intel 2 Quad CPU running Windows XP and I tried the particles with RC4 and the scene rendered using both key stroke and menu button and also played the scene using the alt + A and timeline. I have not had any problems with it crashing. Endi, here are some tutorials I’m starting to work through and have found useful: http://users.xplornet.com/~gimble/blender/tutorials/jahka/harmonics/harmonics1.htm http://users.xplornet.com/~gimble/blender/tutorials/jahka/explode/explode.htm http://users.xplornet.com/~gimble/blender/tutorials/jahka/collision/collision.htm http://users.xplornet.com/~gimble/blender/tutorials/jahka/boids/boids.htm Also there are some good links of video tutorials for 2.46 on Blendernation. One direct link here: http://blenderclan.tuxfamily.org/html/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=12659&forum=7 You don’t need to know French as there is no sound. Just follow along. There are several ones that show how to work with particles. Small file sizes and worth the download, especially for a 56ker. cheers, gaiamuse
artistic_kelly
very useful statement - serves the cause perfectly.
The particle system works perfectly in RC3. What OS are you using? Computer specs? I can make hair comb hair cut hair lengthen hair, can use emitters, explode odifier but sometimes it gets slow.
Ok, as I say a dont find some tutorial. For example I cant render billboards or objects on the particles.
How you use RC4 is up to you, but if you want to use it for real work, don’t complain when there are bugs.
That said, I’ve been using it for real work since RC1, and I haven’t had a problem with particles. Maybe it’s your system, or perhaps you’re using a setting I’m not. In any case, just wait till the 18th, and you’ll have a relatively bug free 2.46.
RC3 works great for me!
Till now, haven’t got any crash with any Blender’s versions, features or tools (OSX MacPro Octo 8 Gb FBDIMM)
Well, I’m not using any release candidates but I’ve been having segmentation faults while trying to render animations on the Linux SVN build. Had to restart about 20 times to get the animation finished. Not sure if it’s a bug or not.
I guess I should try rendering it with the RC to see if there’s problems there, huh?
Maybe tomorrow…
Hm, now I try particle system again and now I can use billboards and objects… strange. But it has many errors, for example needs to restart playing to re-initialize the particle emitting and moving correctly…
I will post this in bugtracker when I can write down it…
I have had problems with one project that would not render under 2.46. It didn’t have any funky particle effects though. If you deleted the armature, it would render fine. It went through fine on 2.45 with no problems.
On my F1 Challenge entry, I had loads of problems rendering at 1280. No problems on rendering at 800 x 600, but the minute you upped the res, Blender would bail out.
I reported the first problem on the bug tracker and it was closed without action.
I can use the particle system in animations. The only time I’ve ever had a crash from the Release Candidates, is when I go insane and put to many particles. I like the RC’s. They have a couple of the features they took out of the build that I like. Also, I’m on a system with only 244MB of RAM, and I can use the Particle System just fine.
Oops first crash this afternoon… In fact i was tweaking around hard since a while WITHOUT savings and asked for a render to watch an anomaly in a large subdivided mesh + having some DVD mounting and burning and other stuff in the same time… So i guess it can be considered as natural…
Just in case you hadn’t noticed yet: http://download.blender.org/release/Blender2.46rc/ has now RC5 builds for Windows. (ok, ok, I just 1 minute ago uploaded them).
/Nathan
Sneaky… Downloading.