Blender 2.59, now with Ocean Simulation

Ok, so I have been tinkering with Blender of late, even going so far as to enroll in an online course (The Nature Academy).

Over the course of various tutorials, lessons, etc, it became necessary to update Blender from the 2.49 release currently found in Natty (Ubuntu 11.04) to something more recent. Initially, I used the most excellent PPA Blender SVN maintained by Ralf Hölzemer.

This was great, up to the point where it seemed each commit broke one of the lessons or tutorials I was working on. Of course, this was to be expected, as the PPA provided a daily build for the in development 2.59 series.

Now that Blender 2.59 is released, I felt it was time to make a stable build. That was pretty easy, take the 2.59 package snapshot from Oneiric (Ubuntu 11.10) as a starting point and backport to Natty. Update it to use the official 2.59 source tar.gz from Blender.org. Add in a little flavor from the Blender SVN package, and voila, you have a nice 2.59 build.

While this was going on, I was also still working on the lessons from my online course, and the most recent lesson came out on Oceans. Unfortunately, this lesson required downloading a special build from Save the Ocean Sim. This was sub-optimal, I had just built 2.59 and now needed to use an earlier build and for one not built for Natty.

After going to the Save the Ocean Sim site, I downloaded the most recent patch and applied it to my build for 2.59. With much happiness (and minimal fiddling), it all compiled and tested fine with the ocean test blend from their site.

So,

open up a terminal, and do the following to get this new Blender build:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:roderick-greening/blender

Cheers and happy blendering,

Rod.