The importance of Blender 2.5 to War of the Worlds

I cannot put enough emphases on how big a deal Blender 2.5.0 beta is to this project. In many ways the project was designed around the release of 2.5. It has more to do with it's feature list than it's new UI (which I'll admit I am both dreading and looking forward too). I am one of those artists which looks for features more than anything in a product and Blender 2.5 is set to break the roof. The War of the Worlds will eventually become a child dependent purely on the 2.5 release because of these features. Real time editing, new animation features, rumored automatic rigging, volumetric textures (can't underestimate this one) but more importantly an addition that means so much to the character of the story.

The Black Smoke. Yes I am going to admit to being very shallow here. The new smoke feature in Blender 2.5 is going to be one of the key tools required for the War of the Worlds project. In fact the Black Smoke is, perhaps, the weapon more feared than the Heat Ray. Before now, creating realistic smoke was the auspice of fine tuning particle emitters, but Ihave nevr been satisfied with the results of artificially "guessing" the frame work behind real smoke, and this is the core reason for Blender 2.5's imminent release. if anything I hope The War of the Worlds will showcase this feature to it's fullest. With fire, biological wepaons, cannon fire, hydrogen accelerator cannons, martian technology, etc, etc, you're going to see Blender's physics engine pushed well and truly to it limits.