Blender is a 3D graphics application released as free software under the GNU General Public License.
It can be used for modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, water simulations, skinning, animating, rendering, particle, and other simulations, non-linear editing, compositing, and creating interactive 3D applications, including games.
Blender is available for a number of operating systems, including Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows. Blender's features include advanced simulation tools such as rigid body, fluid, cloth 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 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 .
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 (US$100,670 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 Free Software and it is being actively developed under the supervision of the Blender Foundation.
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. Currently, Blender is solely available under GNU GPL.
Suzanne
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 chimpanzee primitive. It was created by Willem-Paul van Overbruggen (SLiD3), who also named it Suzanne, after the orangutan in the Kevin Smith film Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back .
Suzanne is Blender's alternative to more common "test models" such as the Utah Teapot. A low-polygon model with only 500 faces, 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 Awards.
Features
Blender has a relatively small installation size and runs on several popular computing platforms, including Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows, along with FreeBSD, IRIX, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Solaris. Unofficial ports are also available for AmigaOS, BeOS, MorphOS , Pocket PC and SkyOS Though it is often distributed without documentation or extensive example scenes, the software contains 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, NURBS surfaces, metaballs, digital sculpting, and outline fonts.
- Versatile internal rendering capabilities and integration with YafRay, a Free Software 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, task automation and custom tools.
- 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 fully integrated node based compositor within the rendering pipeline
User interface
Blender has had a reputation as being difficult to learn for users accustomed to other 3D graphics software. Nearly every function has a direct keyboard shortcut and there can be several different shortcuts per key. Since Blender became Free Software, there has been effort to add comprehensive contextual menus as well as make the tool usage 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 (such as a color picker widget).
Blender's user interface incorporates the following concepts:
Hardware Requirements
Blender has very low hardware requirements compared to other 3d suites. However, for advanced effects and high-poly models, a fast system is needed. The minimal specifications on the Blender website are:
- 300 MHz CPU
- 128 MB Ram
- 20 MB free hard disk Space
- 1024 x 768 px Display with 16 bit color
- 3 Button Mouse
- Open GL Graphics Card with 16 MB Ram
For the average user, however, these specs are recommended:
- 2 Ghz dual CPU
- 2 GB Ram
- 1920 x 1200 px Display with 24 bit color
- 3 Button Mouse
- Open GL Graphics Card with 128 or 256 MB Ram
File format
Blender features 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.
The actual ".blend" file is similar to the EA Interchange File Format, starting with its own header that specifies the version, endianness and pointer size (for example BLEND_v2.48), followed by a collection of binary chunks storing the data blocks, and all the type and struct definitions also known as DNA. Although it is hard to read and convert a ".blend" file to another format using external tools, the readblend utility can do this. 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.
Jeroen Bakker documented the blender file format to allow inter-operation with other tooling. The document can be found at mystery of the blend. On this site also a DNA structure browser is available.
Blender organizes data as various kinds of "data blocks", such as Objects, Meshes, Lamps, Scenes, Materials, Images and so on. An object in Blender consists of multiple data blocks - for example, a polygon mesh has at least an Object and Mesh data block, and usually also a Material. This allows various data blocks to refer to each other; there may be, for example, multiple Objects that refer to the same Mesh, allowing the mesh to be duplicated while only keeping one copy of the mesh data in memory, and allowing subsequent editing of all duplicated meshes at the same time. Data block relationships can also be changed manually. Data blocks can also be referred to in other .blend files, allowing the use of .blend files as reusable object libraries.
Comparison with other 3D software
Blender has a depth and breadth of features comparable 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 a
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