Blender (software)

From Free net encyclopedia

Template:Infobox Software Blender is a free 3D modeler program. It is used for modelling and rendering three-dimensional graphics and animations. Blender is available for several operating systems, including FreeBSD, IRIX, GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, SkyOS, and MorphOS.

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History

Originally, the program 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 freeware 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 an open source program being actively developed by the Blender Foundation.

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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, fast subdivision surface modeling, Bezier curves and NURBS surfaces, metaballs, polygon sculpting, and vector Typeface fonts.
  • Versatile internal rendering capabilities and integration with the YafRay open source ray tracer.
  • Animation tools including inverse kinematics, armature (skeletal) and lattice deformation, shape keys, keyframes, timeline, non-linear animation, constraints, vertex weighting, soft body dynamics including mesh collision detection, fluid dynamics, hard body dynamics, particle based hair, and a particle system with collision detection.
  • Python scripting for tool creation and prototyping, game scripting logic, or 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 videogame construction.
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Advanced features

  • In Blender, an Object (which represents an entity that interacts with the world) and its Data (the actual shape/function of the object) are distinguishable. Object-data relationships are m:n and dynamically-linkable at all times, allowing for some rapid modelling processes that are unique to blender.
  • 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.
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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 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 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 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.
  • Workspace management. The blender GUI is made up of one or more screens, which each 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, resulting in the strange feature of being able to zoom in and out of GUI-buttons in the same way one zooms in and out in the 3D viewport. The GUI's layout and setup is fully controllable by the users, 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.

Although Blender (as of Version 2.41) still lacks features found in current proprietary systems (i.e. ngon based modeling workflow), Blender's workspace management is considered to be amongst the most innovative GUI concepts for graphical tools and is believed to have inspired proprietary software vendors' interface design (e.g., Luxology's Modo).

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Development

Since the opening of the source, Blender has improved and experienced substantial refactoring of the initial codebase. This made the addition of features easier. Although Blender is a full featured program, professional users of other programs may find certain areas to be missing, such as the lack of NGon based modeling workflow and some missing or incomplete modeling tools, numerical measuring and manipulation methods, the inability to customize keybindings, lack of a robust cloth dynamics system (will be in 2.42) and will likely encounter limitations in the rendering and materials system such as the lack of node based materials (will be in 2.42), bundled libraries of material presets, multipass rendering (will be in 2.42), or tangent space normal mapping. Blender also tends to lack up-to-date and complete documentation although that has been largely solved by the wikification of the blender documentation project.

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Blender 2.40 features

Blender 2.40 adds many new features [1], including:

  • An animation system refresh [2].
  • A mesh "modifier stack" [3].
  • Improvements to the User Interface. [4].
  • New particle options (including hair) and guides. [5]

also added were

  • Fluid dynamics [6], and
  • Improved Boolean modeling tools [7].

with the sponsorship of Google's Summer of Code.

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Blender 2.41 features

Blender 2.41 added a number of improvements [8]. especially to the Game Engine, including:

  • GLSL pixel and vertex shaders for the game engine [9],
  • Subsurf UV Unwrapping [10],
  • and a sculpting tool [11]
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Current Development

Current development to be released for 2.42 includes a node based materials system; multipass rendering; node based compositing; improved UV unwrapping; animatable obstacles and fluid sources - for use in the fluid dynamics system; a faster softbody solver; some modeling tool improvements; and vehicle physics for the game engine.

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Support

The popularity of Blender has reached approximately 250,000 users 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 Elysiun (http://www.elysiun.com).

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Artists using Blender

Notable artists using Blender as their main or only tool are

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Usage in the movie 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."[12] - Anthony Zierhut, Animatic Artist, Los Angeles
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The Orange Movie Project

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.

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External links

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