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Blender (software)

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Blender
Developer(s)The Blender Foundation
Stable release
Repository
Operating systemCross-platform
Type3D computer graphics
LicenseDual license Blender license[1]/GPL.
Websitewww.blender.org

Blender is a free software 3D animation program. It can be used for modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, skinning, animating, rendering, particle and other simulating, 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, 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 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.

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.[2]

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 under the terms of the GNU General Public License, for a one-time payment of €100,000 (approximately US$147,000 as of January 2008; approximately equal to the amount in euros at the time). 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 an 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.[3] Currently, Blender is solely available under GNU GPL.

Suzanne

Suzanne is the name of the monkey-head primitive in Blender, Blender's alternative to more common "test models" such as the Utah Teapot. Suzanne is often used as a quick and easy way to test material, texture, and lighting setups, and is also frequently used in joke images. The largest Blender contest gives out an award called the Suzanne Award.

The Suzanne model is a low-poly model with only 500 faces.

In January/February 2002 it was quite clear that NaN could not survive and would close the doors in March. Nevertheless, they found the energy for doing at least one more release, 2.25. As a sort-of Easter egg, a last personal tag, the artists and developers decided to add a monkey primitive. It was created by Willem-Paul van Overbruggen (SLiD3), who also named it Suzanne, after the monkey in Kevin Smith's Mallrats movie.

Until version 2.34 (August 2004), a message would pop up saying "Oooh Oooh Oooh", but Suzanne was made speechless on September 23 19:52:50 2004 UTC (without notice).

In version 2.42, the option to preview materials settings on the Suzanne model was added.

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 contains features that are characteristic of high-end modelling software.[3] Among its capabilities are:

File:Blender sculpt.png
A 3D model (of Cerberus) by Giuseppe Canino showing the potentials of the digital sculpting tool.
  • 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.
A 3D rendering with ray tracing and ambient occlusion using Blender and YafRay

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.

Blender making use of the node editor to create metallic materials

User interface

Blender has had a reputation as a program that is difficult to learn. In Blender, nearly every function has a direct keyboard shortcut and, with the number of functions Blender offers, 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. There have also been efforts to visually enhance the user interface, 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 incorporates the following 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. Python expressions can also be typed directly into number entry fields, allowing mathematical expressions to be used to specify values.
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.

Comparison with other 3D software

File:DreamRenderFinal1 1024.jpg
Made using Blender

Blender has a comparable depth and breadth of features compared to commercial, proprietary, high end and mid range 3D software. A fairly comprehensive comparison between the available 3D software can be viewed at the TDT 3D comparison of major 3D packages and 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.

Until recently, Blender has also tended to lack up-to-date and complete documentation, an issue that is being addressed through the wikification of the blender documentation project, the 2006 Blender Summer of Documentation project, and the June 2007 introductory book "Essential Blender", which was published by Blender Foundation. Additionally, a number of other books on using Blender have been recently published by publishers unaffiliated with the Blender Foundation including "Introducing Character Animation with Blender", which was published by Sybex.

However, the Blender installer is only 8 Mb and only requires 20 Mb after installation, whereas software like AutoCAD require around 2 Gb. As such, Blender can be easily downloaded (although some guide books still include Blender on a CD).

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; an updated Particle System (which can also be used to simulate hair and fur); 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 in 2005, 2006 and 2007.

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

The current version is 2.45. It features 64-bit support and subsurface scattering, and many minor improvements and bug fixes.

Support

In the month following the release of Blender v2.44, it was downloaded 800,000 times;[4] this worldwide user base forms the core of the support mechanisms for the program. Most users learn Blender through community tutorials and discussion forums on the internet such as Blender Artists (previously known as elYsiun); however, another learning method is to download and inspect ready-made Blender models, available from resource sites such as the Official Blender Model Repository.

Numerous other sites, for example Blenderart Magazine—a free, downloadable magazine with each issue handling a particular area in 3D development—and Blendernation, provide information on everything surrounding Blender, showcase new techniques and features, and provide 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 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." [5] - 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 [6]. 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. [7]

Elephants Dream/Project Orange

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. 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,[5] 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 Conferences (Link to Google Video)

Project Peach

As of October 1, 2007, the makers of Elephants Dream are working on a follow-up called "Peach". 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.

See also

References

  1. ^ http://www.blender.org/BL/ Blender License
  2. ^ Kassenaar, Joeri (2005-05-21). "Brief history of the Blender logo". Retrieved 2007-01-18.
  3. ^ Roosendaal, Ton (2005-06). "Blender License". Retrieved 2007-01-19. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  4. ^ "Meeting Agenda, April 15th 2007". 2007-04-15.
  5. ^ "Blender Movie Project: Plumíferos". 2006-03-08. Retrieved 2007-02-04.
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