Blender (software)

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Blender
<tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align: center;">Image:Blender node screen 242a.jpg Blender 2.42a</td></tr><tr><th>Developer:</th><td>The Blender Foundation</td></tr><tr><th>Latest release:</th><td>2.42a / July 25, 2006</td></tr><tr><th>OS:</th><td>Cross-platform</td></tr>
Use:	3D computer graphics <tr><th>License:</th><td>GPL</td></tr>
Website:	http://www.blender3d.org/

Blender is a free program used for modelling, rendering three-dimensional graphics and animations, Non Linear Editing, Compositing, and interactive 3D applications. Blender is available for several operating systems, including FreeBSD, IRIX, GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, SkyOS, and MorphOS. Blender has a robust feature set similar in scope and depth to other high-end 3D software such as XSI, 3D Studio Max and Maya. These features include advanced simulation tools such as rigid body dynamics, fluid dynamics, and soft body dynamics, modifier based modeling tools, powerful character animation tools, and node based materials system and an embeded scripting and programming language using Python scripting.

1 History
2 Features
- 2.1 Advanced features
- 2.2 User interface
3 Comparison with other 3D software
4 Development
5 Support
6 Artists using Blender
7 Usage in the media industry
- 7.1 Elephants Dream
8 See also
9 External links

[edit] 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 a free/open source program being actively developed by the Blender Foundation.[1]

[edit] 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, polygon sculpting, and vector fonts.
Versatile internal rendering capabilities and integration with the YafRay open source ray tracer.
Keyframed Animation tools including inverse kinematics, armature (skeletal), hook, curve and lattice-based deformation, 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 scripting logic, file import/export for example 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

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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:

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, for polygon meshes, Object mode can be used to move, scale, and rotate entire meshes, and Edit mode is 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 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.
Very versatile and interactive number input via sliders and number buttons. Number 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 CTRL and SHIFT.
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's viewport and screen layout is fully customizable by the user, making it possible to set up the interface for specific tasks such as video editing or UV mapping and texturing and hiding other features that aren't needed for that specific 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]}

[edit] 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.

[edit] Development

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

Blender has had a number of substantial improvements and additions since it has become FOSS, with recent improvements including an animation system refresh [4]; mesh "modifier stack"; hair system; Fluid dynamics; soft body dynamics; GLSL pixel and vertex shaders for the game engine; advanced uv unwrapping; a fully recoded Render Pipeline; along with node based materials and node based compositing.

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

[edit] Support

The popularity of Blender has reached approximately 250,000 users[5] 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/).

[edit] Artists using Blender

Notable artists using Blender as their main or only tool are

Andreas Goralczyk (@ndy), winner of two subsequent Suzanne Blender Awards (2003 - Best Animation, 2004 - Best Still)
Stefano Selleri (S68) (Suzanne Blender Awards 2003 - Best Still)
Bassam Kurdali (slikdigit) (Suzanne Blender Awards 2004 - Best Animation)
Bastian Salmela (basse)
Endre Barath (endi)
Jean-Sébastien Guillemette (Ecks, formerly X-WARRIOR)
Robert Tiess (RobertT)
Enrico Valenza (Env) (Suzanne Blender Awards 2005 - Best Animation)

[edit] 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]

[edit] 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.