| Blender (software) |
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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 System s, including Microsoft Windows , Mac OS X , Linux , IRIX , Solaris , FreeBSD with unofficial ports for 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 , Cinema 4D , 3ds 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 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 ''.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 under the terms of the GNU General Public License , for a one-time payment of €100,000 (approximately US$102,000 as of September 2002). 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 . {Link without Title} 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. Though it is often distributed without documentation or extensive example scenes, the software contains features that are characteristic of high-end modelling software.[http://wiki.cgsociety.org/index.php/Comparison_of_3d_tools Among its capabilities are:
by Giuseppe Canino showing the potentials of the Digital Sculpting tool. ]]
with Ray Tracing and Ambient Occlusion using Blender and YafRay ]] Additional features
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. lic materials]] User interface Blender has had a reputation as a program that is difficult to learn. Nearly every function has a direct keyboard shortcut, and with the number of functions Blender offers this results in several different shortcuts per key. Since Blender became open source, there has been effort to add comprehensive Contextual Menu s 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. ; 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 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 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. 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 a stack based [http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Blenderdev/Modifiers 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 2.44. It features 64 bit support and subsurface scattering, and many minor improvements and bug fixes. SUPPORT The popularity of Blender has reached approximately 800,000 users {Link without Title} worldwide, and support is widely available. Most users learn Blender through community tutorials; 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 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." - [http://www.anthonyzierhut.com/ Anthony Zierhut , Animatic Artist, Los Angeles . 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. {Link without Title} Elephants Dream/Project Orange See Also: 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 (a open game in collaboration with CrystalSpace that will reuse some of the assets created during Project Peach). Plumíferos '' Talking Animals .--> SEE ALSO REFERENCES EXTERNAL LINKS
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