Blender

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Blender is a free software program used for 3D computer graphics modeling, animation, rendering, nonlinear editing, 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.compositing, and interactive 3D applications. Blender is available for several platforms, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, IRIX, Solaris, FreeBSD, SkyOS, and MorphOS. 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 soft body dynamics, modifier based modeling tools, powerful character animation tools, and node based materials system and an embedded scripting and programming language using Python scripting.

License: GPL

Contents

Features

Blender has a relatively small installation size and runs on several popular computing platforms.[1] Though it is often distributed without documentation or extensive example scenes, the software is rich with features that are characteristic of high-end modeling software.[2] Among its capabilities are:

  • Support for a variety of geometric primitives, including polygon meshes, fast subdivision surface modeling, Bezier curves, Nonuniform rational B-spline surfaces (NURBS), metaballs, digital 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 programming language scripting for tool creation and prototyping, game scripting logic, file import/export 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.


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.


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." [3] - Anthony Zierhut, Animatic Artist, Los Angeles

Vendredi ou un autre jour was the first 35mm feature film to use Blender for all the special effects, made on Linux workstations [4]. 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. [5]

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

Retrieved from "http://www.artsoftware.org/wiki/index.php/Blender"
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