So, I found out today (a bit late in fact) that Blender 2.46 was released in May. Now being the Blender fanboy that I am, I should have known this, but in truth, I've been a little out of the loop the past few months as I've focused on work. Anyhow, you can download it from http://www.blender.org/

What is awesome about this release is that my 2nd and 3rd favorite simulation types in Blender have been revamped! (The 1st favorite is fluid simulation, which has always been pretty awesome). So, I decided to do some quick tests on these two features to share with everyone before I actually made a project worth looking at.

My 2nd favorite simulation type is Cloth simulation, which up until now has been something of a pain. You would have to set a mesh as a soft body, and although this worked a bit, the collision detection between that mesh and anything else was pretty awful (even if you had tons of verts on both meshes, it would still tend to fall through). So I decided to give this cloth thing a try.

It was pretty good! The collision detection was much better than I remember, and it had tons of options with which to control the cloth (not to mention presets for about 7 different kinds of cloth). Here is a test rendering with the cloth type set to silk, on about frame 100:

I should mention I used Ray Transparency on the cloth, and it's opacity is at something like .8. Since this was a test, wasn't really that important. On my PC it took about 6 -8 minutes to bake 120 frames, but I had several thousand verts on the cloth, and a few hundred on the surface. Additionally, I had self collision turned on so the cloth would react to itself. Sweetness.

My 3rd favorite simulation type is particles! They completely redid how particle rendering works in this version of blender, which I've not delved into just yet, but they also added an exclusive particle type for hair! Which is pretty sweet. Now, you could fudge hair before using the existing particle system, by making the particles it emits static and then playing with modifiers until it worked the way you wanted it to, but that was a pain. Now it works more simply, you get several control options, and even can set child particles to emit from the ends of the hair particles, to give you even more hair. Below are some test renders:

Weird alien claw thing I cooked up in 7 minutes via a bit of box modeling and the help of subsurf:

Weird alien claw thing with a whole bunch of hair added to it:

Please pardon the default blue background, I didn't have a lot of time, and decided not to change it.

Anyhow, I hope everyone has enjoyed this quick demonstration. Hopefully I'll have some time to make something really nifty in the near future!