Screenshot of Blender 2.32

Blender is open-source software for modelling and rendering three_dimensional graphics and animations.

Development

Originally, the program was developed as an in_house application by the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo; the main author, Ton Roosendaal, founded Not a Number Technologies (NaN) in June 1998 to further develop and distribute the program. The program was initially distributed as proprietary software available at no cost (freeware) until NaN went bankrupt in 2002. The debtors 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 in October. Blender is now an actively developed open source program by the Blender Foundation, the newest version being 2.36 that was published in December 23, 2004.

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:

• Support for a variety of geometric primitives, including polygon meshes, NURBS, metaballs, and vector fonts
• Conversion from and to a variety of 3D application file formats, including Wings 3D, 3D Studio, Lightwave and others.
• Animation tools including inverse kinematics, armature (skeletal) and lattice deformation, keyframes, non-linear animation, constraints, vertex weighting and static or dynamic particles aware of meshes
• Basic non-linear video editing capababilities
• Interactivity features such as collision detection, dynamics engine and programmable logic, allowing the creation of stand-alone, Real time applications ranging from architectural visualization to videogame construction.
• Versatile internal rendering capabilities and external integration with the YafRay open source ray tracer
• Python scripting for automating or controlling various tasks

User interface

Blender has had a reputation as a program that is difficult to learn. The fans of the program, however, claim the program is very usable once it is learned. Since the open-sourcing, there has also been significant effort to improve and streamline the user interface further.

Blender 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 in general, while Edit mode is used to manipulate the actual object data. For example, for polygon meshes, Object mode can be used to move, scale, and rotate the entire mesh, and Edit mode is used to manipulate the individual vertices of the mesh. There are also several other modes, such as Vertex Paint and UV Editing modes.
• Very heavy use of keyboard hotkeys. Most of the commands are given from keyboard. 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.
• Re-alignable viewports. The entire Blender GUI, aside of a rendering window and the console output window in Windows version, consists of a single window, and is primarily designed to be run full-screen. The Blender window is separated in several panes - by default, a menu pane, 3D window pane, and command button pane. However, the functionality of each pane can be individually chosen, and all panes can be split and merged. The pane layouts can be saved, making it easy to create different workspaces for different tasks.

Availability

Owing in part to its open source nature, Blender is officially available for several operating systems, including FreeBSD, IRIX, GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Solaris, as well as several unofficial ports to other systems.

External links

• Official Blender site, aimed at end users (http://www.blender3d.com/)
• Blender developer site (http://www.blender.org)
• elYsiun - Unofficial Blender forum and community website (http://www.elysiun.com/)
• An online Wikibook of tutorials to turn beginners into advanced users (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro)
• Star Trek, Blender style (http://members.lycos.co.uk/stblender/models.html)
• Star Wars, Blender style (http://www.blenderwars.com/)
• Babylon 5, Blender style (http://www.b5-blender.com/)
• Modelling a realistic human from scratch (http://apieceofstring.com/kos/tutorials.htm)
• Blender photo gallery (http://centralsource.com/blenderart)
• Blenderman, model archive for Blender, and targeted at making a Blender Magazine (http://www.blenderman.org/)
• Category at ODP (http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Graphics/3D/Rendering_and_Modelling/Blender)
• Blender Battles - contest and 3d challenging website (http://battles.mudpuddle.co.nz/)