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Blender (software)

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Blender is a free program used for modelling and rendering three-dimensional graphics and animations. Blender is available for several operating systems, including FreeBSD, IRIX, GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, SkyOS, and MorphOS. In addition, Blender's recent burst of new features in the last few versions has actually brought it close in feature set comparison to high-end 3D software such as XSI, 3D Studio Max and Maya. Among these features and user interface ideas are, for example, Bullet rigid body dynamics, complex fluid and cloth effects, a comprehensive and well-thought out hotkey program, which rivals that of most higher end applications, and a wide range of easily accessible and creatable extensions using Python scripting.

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History

Blender was developed as an in-house application by the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo (not to be confused with the Neo-Geo game console) and Not a Number Technologies (NaN); the main author, Ton Roosendaal, founded NaN in June 1998 to further develop and distribute the program. The program was initially distributed as shareware until NaN went bankrupt in 2002.

The creditors agreed to release Blender as free software, under the terms of the GNU General Public License, for a one-time payment of €100,000. On July 18 2002, a Blender funding campaign was started by Roosendaal in order to collect donations and on September 7 2002 it was announced that enough funds had been collected and that the Blender source code would be released. Blender is now an open source program being actively developed by the Blender Foundation.

Features

Blender has a relatively small installation size and runs on several popular computing platforms. Though it is often distributed without documentation or extensive example scenes, the software is rich with features that are characteristic of high-end modelling software. Among its capabilities are:

Advanced features

However, a ".blend" file is less a structured specification of a objects and relationships and closer to a direct binary dump of the program's memory space. This makes it practically impossible to convert a ".blend" file to another format.

User interface

Blender has had a reputation as a program that is difficult to learn. Nearly every function has a direct keyboard shortcut, with the amount of functions Blender offers resulting in several different shortcuts per key. Since the open-sourcing, there has been effort to add comprehensive contextual menus as well as make the tool use more logical and streamlined, and also visually enhance the user interface further, with the introduction of color themes, transparent floating widgets, a new and improved object tree overview and other small improvements (color picker widget, etc.).

Blender's user interface has the following distinguishing concepts:

Although Blender (as of Version 2.41) still lacks features found in current proprietary systems (e.g., ngon based modeling workflow), Blender's workspace management is considered to be amongst the most innovative GUI concepts for graphical tools and is believed to have inspired proprietary software vendors' interface design (e.g., Luxology's Modo).

Development

Since the opening of the source, Blender has improved and experienced substantial refactoring of the initial codebase. This made the addition of features easier. Although Blender is a full featured program, professional users of other programs may find certain areas to be missing, such as the lack of NGon based modeling workflow and some missing or incomplete modeling tools, numerical measuring and manipulation methods, the inability to customize keybindings, limited compatibility with other 3D file formats, lack of a robust cloth dynamics system (currently under development) and bundled libraries of material presets. Blender also tends to lack up-to-date and complete documentation although that has been largely solved by the wikification of the blender documentation project and the recently announced Blender Summer of Documentation [link].

Blender 2.40 features

Blender 2.40 adds many new features [link], including: also added were with the sponsorship of Google's Summer of Code.

Blender 2.41 features

Blender 2.41 added a number of improvements [link]. especially to the Game Engine, including:

Blender 2.42 features

Blender 2.42 adds many new and updated feature. It was released July 14 2006. The release notes can be found [here]. This release adds a greater amount of new features than an average release. This is due in large part to the development of the short film Elephants Dream [link]. (See #Elephants Dream.) A list of improvements and new features includes:

Support

The popularity of Blender has reached approximately 250,000 users using Blender worldwide, and support is widely available. Most users learn Blender through tutorials that various users have written; others learn Blender through many discussion forums on the topic. A popular forum for Blender discussion is Blender Artists, previously known as elYsiun (http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/).

Artists using Blender

Notable artists using Blender as their main or only tool are

Usage in the movie industry

The first large professional project in which Blender was used was Spider-Man 2, where it was primarily used to create animatics and previsualizations for the storyboard department.

"As an animatic artist working in the storyboard department of Spider-Man 2, I used Blender's 3d modeling and character animation tools to enhance the storyboards, re-creating sets and props, and putting into motion action and camera moves in 3d space to help make Sam's vision as clear to other departments as possible." [link] - [Anthony Zierhut], Animatic Artist, Los Angeles
Friday or another day was the first 35mm feature film to use Blender for all the special effects, made on Linux workstations [link]. It won a prize at the Locarno Film Festival. The special effects were by [Digital Graphics] of Belgium.

Elephants Dream

In September 2005, some of the most notable Blender artists and developers began working on a short film using primarily free software, in an initiative known as the Orange Movie Project. The resulting film, Elephants Dream, premiered on March 24, 2006.

External links

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