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Blender (software)

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Blender
Developer(s)The Blender Foundation
Stable release
2.42a / July 25, 2006
Preview release
2.43 RC2 / January 23, 2007
Repository
Operating systemCross-platform
Type3D computer graphics
LicenseGNU GPL
Websitehttp://www.blender3d.org/

Blender is a free software program used for modelling, rendering three-dimensional graphics and animations, Non Linear Editing, Compositing, and creating interactive 3D applications. Blender is available for several operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, IRIX, Solaris, FreeBSD, SkyOS, 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, 3D Studio Max and Maya. These features include advanced simulation tools such as rigid body dynamics, fluid dynamics, and softbody dynamics, modifier based modeling tools, powerful character animation tools, a node based material and compositing system and an embedded scripting engine based on Python.

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). It was primarily authored by Ton Roosendaal, who had previously written a ray tracer called Traces for Amiga in 1989. The name "Blender" was inspired by a song by Yello, from the album Baby.[1]

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 a free/open source program being actively developed under the supervision of the Blender Foundation.[1]

The Blender Foundation initially reserved the right to use dual licensing, so that, in addition to GNU GPL, Blender would have been available also under the "Blender License", which did not require disclosing source code but required payments to the Blender Foundation. However, this option was never exercised and was suspended indefinitely in 2005.[2] Currently, Blender is solely available under GNU GPL.

Features

Blender has a relatively small installation size and runs on several popular computing platforms.[2] 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.[3] 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 vector 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, fluid dynamics, Bullet rigid body dynamics, particle based hair, and a particle system with collision detection.
  • Python scripting for tool creation and prototyping, game logic, importing and exporting from other formats such as COLLADA and task automation.
  • Basic non-linear video 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.
A 3D rendering with raytracing and ambient occlusion using Blender and Yafray

Advanced 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 premade 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 convert files with little loss of information.

Blender making use of the newly implemented node editor to create metallic materials

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 Blender became open-source, 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:

Editing modes
The two primary modes of work are Object Mode and Edit Mode, which are toggled with the Tab key. Object mode is used to manipulate individual objects as a unit, while Edit mode is used to manipulate the actual object data. For example, Object Mode can be used to move, scale, and rotate entire polygon meshes, and Edit Mode can be used to manipulate the individual vertices of a single mesh. There are also several other modes, such as Vertex Paint, Weight Paint, and UV Mapping.
Hotkey utilization
Most of the commands are accessible via hotkeys. Until the 2.x and especially the 2.3x versions, this was in fact the only way to give commands, and this was largely responsible for creating Blender's reputation as a difficult-to-learn program. The new versions have more comprehensive GUI menus.
Numeric Input
Numeric buttons can directly be "dragged" to change their value without the need to aim at a particular widget, thus saving screen real estate and time. Both sliders and number buttons can be constrained to various step sizes with modifiers like the CTRL and SHIFT keys.
Workspace management
The Blender GUI is made up of one or more screens, each of which can be divided into sections and subsections that can be of any type of Blender's views or window-types. Each window-type's own GUI elements can be controlled with the same tools that manipulate 3D view - for example one can zoom in and out of GUI-buttons in the same way one zooms in and out in the 3D viewport. The GUI viewport and screen layout is fully user customizable. It is possible to set up the interface for specific tasks such as video editing or UV mapping or texturing by hiding features not utilized for the task.

Blender's workspace management is considered to be amongst the most innovative GUI concepts for graphical tools and is believed to have inspired other 3D tool vendors' interface design (e.g., Luxology's Modo).[citation needed]

Comparison with other 3D software

Blender compares favorably with commercial, proprietary, high end and mid range 3D software in terms of breadth and depth of features. A fairly comprehensive comparison between the available 3D software can be viewed at this Comparison Chart. Blender has areas where it is more limited than many of its commercial counterparts such as a lack of Font Preview for text, lack of NGon based modeling workflow and some missing or incomplete modeling tools; and a lack of a standard library of material presets; however, in other areas Blender is on the leading edge such as the advanced algorithms utilized for its UV unwrapping.

Blender also tends to lack up-to-date and complete documentation, an issue that is being addressed through the wikification of the blender documentation project and the recently completed Blender Summer of Documentation project.

Development

Since the opening of the source, Blender has experienced significant refactoring of the initial codebase and major additions to its feature set.

Recent improvements include an animation system refresh [4]; a stack based modifier system; a hair system; fluid dynamics; soft body dynamics; GLSL shaders support in the game engine; advanced uv unwrapping; a fully recoded render pipeline, allowing separate render passes and "render to texture"; node based material editing and compositing.

Part of these developments were fostered by Google's Summer of Code program, in which the Blender Foundation participated both in 2005 and in 2006.

For a more complete and in depth view of Blender's free/open source development history, you can view the release logs.

CVS Builds

For some time now, the site BlenderBuilds has been creating Blender "testing" builds in preperation for blender 2.43. Most of the features they introduce will make it in to Blender 2.43(Such as the "Sculpt" Mode).

Support

The popularity of Blender has reached approximately 250,000 users[5] 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/). Numerous other sites, such as Blenderart Magazine (website: http://blenderart.org, a free, downloadable magazine with each issue handling a particular area in 3D development) and Blendernation (website: http://www.blendernation.com, a site with articles and news on Blender and all surrounding it), provide information on everything surrounding Blender, including the showcasing of new techniques and features and the production of tutorials and other guides.

Artists using Blender

Notable artists using Blender as their main or only tool are

Usage in the media 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." [6] - 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 [7]. 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 in the History Channel, alongside with many other professional 3D graphics programs. [8]

Elephants Dream

Main article: 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.

Plumíferos

Plumíferos [9], a commercial animated feature film created entirely in Blender[3], is currently in the works at the Argentina-based Manos Digitales Animation Studio. Trailers of the movie were showed at the 2005 and 2006 Blender Conferences.

See also

References

  1. ^ Kassenaar, Joeri (2005-05-21). "Brief history of the Blender logo". Retrieved 2007-01-18.
  2. ^ Roosendaal, Ton (2005-06). "Blender License". Retrieved 2007-01-19. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  3. ^ "Blender Movie Project: Plumíferos". 2006-03-08. Retrieved 2007-02-04.
The Wikibook [[wikibooks:|]] has a page on the topic of: Blender 3D
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Blender 3D.

Blender at Curlie

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