However, the real gems are hidden away towards the end of the tour: blender’s UI options are now implemented in pure Python, and you can code, press a refresh key, and have new options appear in the UI straight away. This is the feature I’ve been hoping for in blender for ages now. 2.4′s roadmap included an updated UI, and I proposed something like this, so I was pretty disappointed to see that nothing much happened on the UI front. For a while there, it looked like 2.5 would be equally intransigent.

That has NOT been the case though. Now, it’s possible to write python plugins for blender, and have them be fully integrated, as if they were part of the core code. They’ve even gone a step further, and made it very nice and standardised to use; you don’t need to specify buttons for the UI, so much as specify variables and their types. The rest is done for you, via Blender’s RNA type system. Seems they’ve setup fairly rich datatypes/widgets, too.

The upshot of all this? The whole thing seems nice enough now that I’m a lot more tempted to write blender plugins. It’s occured to me now and then that blender would be much cooler with 3D audio objects — speakers, dampeners, echoers/reflectors, and microphones in the scene used to produce animated positional audio, just like it currently has lights, materials, reflectors, and cameras to produce animated video.

I expect too, that, since plugins are much more integrated now, there’ll be an exponential increase in their use and development by others.

Congrats to everyone who’s worked on 2.5. It’s been a while coming now, but 2.5 looks amazing.