 Blender is an Opensource 3D Modeling and animation package with a huge online community behind it. Blender is a 3D animation program released as free software. It can be used for modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, skinning, animating, rendering, particle and other simulations, non-linear editing, compositing, and creating interactive 3D applications.
Blender is available for several operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, IRIX, Solaris, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD with unofficial ports for BeOS, SkyOS, AmigaOS, MorphOS and Pocket PC. Blender has a robust feature set similar in scope and depth to other high-end 3D software such as Softimage|XSI, Cinema 4D, 3ds Max, Lightwave and Maya. These features include advanced simulation tools such as rigid body, fluid, and softbody dynamics, modifier based modeling tools, powerful character animation tools, a node based material and compositing system and Python for embedded scripting.
Our own Blender 3D Creation.
Blender is easy to use and a great way to quickly build models in a 3D world. The community behind it is very helpful and a mass of information is available online.
The Blender Foundation is a non-profit organization responsible for the development of Blender, an open-source program for three-dimensional modeling. It is most notable for producing Elephants Dream, an animated short film that premiered in March 2006.
Chaired by Ton Roosendaal, the software's original author, Blender is funded by donations which are used to employ Roosendaal full-time as its lead developer. The foundation identifies as a wider goal, "to give the worldwide Internet community access to 3D technology in general, with Blender as a core."
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 contains features that are characteristic of high-end modelling software. Among its capabilities are:
- Support for a variety of geometric primitives, including polygon meshes, fast subdivision surface modeling, Bezier curves, NURBS surfaces, metaballs, digital sculpting, and outline fonts.
- Versatile internal rendering capabilities and integration with YafRay, an open source ray tracer.
- Keyframed animation tools including inverse kinematics, armature (skeletal), hook, curve and lattice-based deformations, shape keys (morphing), non-linear animation, constraints, vertex weighting, soft body dynamics including mesh collision detection, LBM fluid dynamics, Bullet rigid body dynamics, particle based hair, and a particle system with collision detection.
- Modifiers to apply non-destructive effects.
- Python scripting for tool creation and prototyping, game logic, importing and exporting from other formats such as OBJ, FBX, DXF, COLLADA and task automation.
- Basic non-linear video/audio editing and compositing capabilities.
- Game Blender, a sub-project, offers interactivity features such as collision detection, dynamics engine, and programmable logic. It also allows the creation of stand-alone, real-time applications ranging from architectural visualization to video game construction.
Additional features
- A fully integrated node based compositor within the rendering pipeline
- An internal filesystem that allows one to pack multiple scenes into a single file (called a ".blend" file).
- All of blender's ".blend" files are forward, backward, and cross-platform compatible with other versions of blender, and can be used as a library to borrow pre-made content.
- Snapshot ".blend" files can be auto-saved periodically by the program, making it easier to survive a program crash.
- All scenes, objects, materials, textures, sounds, images, post-production effects for an entire animation can be stored in a single ".blend" file.
- Interface configurations are retained in the ".blend" files, such that what you save is what you get upon load. This file can be stored as "user defaults" so this screen configuration, as well as all the objects stored in it, is used every time you load blender.
However, a ".blend" file is less a structured specification of objects and relationships and closer to a direct binary dump of the program's memory space. This makes it very hard to convert a ".blend" file to another format using external tools, although dozens of import/export scripts that run inside Blender itself, accessing the object data via API, make it possible to inter-operate with other 3D tools.
Usage in the media industry
The first large professional project in which Blender was used was in Spider-Man 2, where it was primarily used to create animatics and pre-visualizations 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." - 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 GNU/Linux workstations. It won a prize at the Locarno International Film Festival. The special effects were by Digital Graphics of Belgium.
Blender has also been used for shows on the History Channel, alongside many other professional 3D graphics programs.
Elephants Dream/Project Orange
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. In response to the success of Elephants Dream the Blender Foundation has founded the Blender Institute to do additional projects with two announced projects Project Peach (A 'furry and funny' short open animated film project) and Project Apricot (an open game in collaboration with CrystalSpace that will reuse some of the assets created during Project Peach).
Plumíferos
Plumíferos, a commercial animated feature film created entirely in Blender,[6] is currently in the works at the Argentina-based Manos Digitales Animation Studio. Trailers of the movie were shown at the 2005 and 2006 Blender.
Big Buck Bunny/Project Peach
As of October 1, 2007, a new team is working on a second open project, "Peach", for the production of the short movie "Big Buck Bunny". This time, however, the creative concept is totally different. Instead of the deep and mystical style of Elephants Dream, things are going to be more "funny and furry" according to the official site. The movie is planned to be finished in April 2008.
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