The game engine can only be used for stand alone games, as far as I know. There used to be a web plugin but that was abadoned before Blender went open source.
I have no idea if there are any plans to pick up the web player again.
You can do 2D animation in Blender, but if you want to save time there are probably better options. Even so, you can still fit Blender in the production process. Belgian studio "Digital Graphics" used Blender for creating parts of their Oscar nominated short "Secret of the Kells" http://www.blendern...
2.49 is the production stable version but the interface wil be abadoned for future versions. 2.5 is the future, and if your just getting started in 3D the 2.5 beta will have enough to keep you busy until the stable version arives.
The last 2 days Blender is sluggish in editmode, no problems in object mode. I'm not even pushing the limits when it comes to polycount, the problem is present even with older scenes that never gave me any trouble. In editmode (shaded) the problem is the worst, in wireframe its not to bad just a few...
Currently, in Blender 2.49b and older, getting rid of datablocks means saving your file under a different name. Usually you need to restart Blender and save again. This does the trick, I havent tested this with newer Blender version.
There is a GSoC Raytracing optimization project but its not GPU related. However the new Blender 2.5 architecture should make it easier to write/script exporters to external renderes that do support GPU rendering.
You need a minimum of 2 scenes, in your case the original scene you want to render and a newly created empty scene. This new empty scene wil serve as a placeholder for you original scene where you can change the scene layes. Step 1. Create a second "empty" scene. Step 2. Select the new empty scene a...
In the buttons window press f10 to go to the render options and find the "output" tab. In the output tab there is a pulldown menu where you can select a scene to use as a "set".
I hope I understand you problem correctly. You want different scene layers settings for each render layer, but when you change the scene layers it affects all render layers. The way around: Create an empy new scene and use the scene you want to render as a "set" in the render panel, now you can use ...
I'm trying the new indirect lighting feature in the new Blender version. Unfortunately, if I change one parameter in the indirect lighting settings then every following render crashes Blender. The first render always works fine. This pretty much makes tweaking and experimenting impossible. I find th...
I dont know if Blender is better for fur or rendering. I would love to have Mental Ray in Blender the way it is in Maya.
Anyway, getting a fully rigged and animated model from Maya to Blender is damn near impossible. FBX comes to mind, but Blender can only export to that format.
Blender doesnt directly support many CAD formats. My best experiences importing files into Blender are with the OBJ format. So you can export OBJ from Solidedge, if Solidedge doesnt have this feature you need a third party 3d converter to transfer your files to Blender.