I’m just curious to get a few impressions from the community about this topic.
With the release of 2.63 just days off, And with such a major change to internal code (Bmesh for modelling) How many of you will skip this release and wait for 2.64. vs how many of you will jump straight in.
I’m a huge advocate for upgrading immediately on all things like this. However, I have suddenly become cautious for this upcomming release, simply because modelling is such a pivotal part of my usage of Blender.
I’ve been following BMesh for a while and love how it seems to work, and what it offers me, but have some reservations about taking the risk. (Cycles however, I was straight into the development builds)
Have I become crazy, or are others feeling the same way?
im a little scared as well…,
but its better if we all start testing it and reporting bugs then 2.64 will be better…
the developers squash bugs fast when reported properly.
In my opinion, if you’re interested by modelling, the sooner you start learning to use the features and new methods brought in Blender by the Bmesh merge, the better.
And with the ability to have multiple versions of Blender on your system, you’re not going to lose anything anyways.
I’ve been using it through all of development. Any really important files I have backed up just to be safe, but 2.63 really seems to be safe to use. My favorite release of Blender since the 2.5 UI overhaul stuff.
My only hesitation is around the fact that I use Blender commercially, so can’t afford to lose files or data if something is not quite right. (time is literally money)
So far this seems to be the largest change since to file formats and modelling since i started using Blender at 2.23.
Of course I always assume that everything has been tested, but know that there were some fun times for animators during the major overhaul of the animation system a while ago.
The question is, is Bmesh stable as is, or is it still under development.
I would say yes, but there are going to be niggles to work out for everyone, like just a little while ago we found out that you have to enable verts to be dissolved as well as the edges in the operator panel, otherwise the verts are left behind. Little things like that, learning curve.
Some of the modeling tools may feel incomplete, but there’s been a lot of work to make sure that nothing actually crashes Blender.
But Bmesh is already very usable and there’s already a bit more modeling functionality than what was in 2.5 with editmesh (when you look at what is actually hardcoded and not an addon). There should be a number of addon ports coming real soon as everyone moves to 2.63.
The good thing with blender is that if you find 2.63 lacks things you need and you want to go to 2.62 until those things are fixed, then you can export your work for 2.62 (legacy format). Compare this with other softwares where every version can’t be opened with a former version, that is MAXimally frustrating!
It just is impossible to test everything-absolutely, period, especially if people don’t report bugs. It is my feeling though that Blender has more and more savvy users who file bug reports. To me that is the explanation for the high number of bugs in the bug tracker. Also, AFAIK, 2.63 is the most debugged version to date. Campbell and co have been on it like hawks over chickens for a month+.
Now, I do test a lot while working professionally with Blender. I set auto-save to 1 minute and 10 versions. Never felt a lag, never lost more than one minute of work and it happened only once. Fixed the same day.
