But not much ; )

For those of you who aren’t aware of it, Blender is an incredibly full-featured 3d modelling and animation program that also happens to be free and open source. It is available on nearly all platforms, it’s very capable, it’s free. What else do you need to hear?

Okay then, it’s got a sculpt mode, a video editor (with audio support) node compositing, an awesome new particle system (in newer SVN builds), fluid system, a physics system/game engine, and a million other things that make it completely worth having. I plan to write many, many articles about Blender, but this one is just to point out a new addition: clothing. It doesn’t affect me much with what I use it for, but it’s still pretty cool. Before the closest thing Blender had was softbodies, which meant objects could act sort of like cloth, or jello, or rubber. Now they have proper cloth, which seems a lot better than softbodies–for that purpose, anyway.

For a bunch of videos of this new cloth, check out this page. The cloth is only in SVN, which means it’s a feature added in-between official releases and therefore won’t be officially supported until the next release. You can, however, find copies of Blender with cloth compiled in at GraphicAll.org

Hat tip to BlenderNation