Blender
Blender is a free 3D animation studio. It includes tools for modeling, sculpting, texturing (painting, node-based shader materials, or UV mapped), UV mapping, rigging and constraints, weight painting, particle systems, simulation (fluids, physics, and soft body dynamics and an external crowd simulator), rendering, node-based compositing, and non linear video editing, as well as an integrated game engine for real-time interactive 3D, and game creation and playback with cross-platform compatibility.
| Tags | multimedia Graphics 3D Modeling 3D Rendering Scientific/Engineering Video Non-Linear Editor Games/Entertainment |
|---|---|
| Licenses | GPL |
| Operating Systems | OS Independent |
| Implementation | Python C |
Recent releases
- 04 Jun 2009 12:39
Changes: This release highlights major improvements in the performance and featureset of the Blender internal game engine.
- 23 Feb 2009 18:39
Changes: This release includes all the work done on the Blender Game Engine and the Apricot Open Game "Yo Frankie!", with much better functioning game logic editing, character animation, and Blender Material based real-time shaders. There is a Bullet physics update with Softbody support, Windows 64-bit support, Grease Pencil for sketching annotations, Sun/Sky/Atmosphere rendering, new modifiers, and an improved text editor with Python API support. Many open bug reports were handled.
- 16 May 2007 11:19
Changes: This release adds subsurface scattering, improved sculpting tools, ffmpeg support for additional platforms, a number of animation tool improvements, and a huge number of Python scripts and API enhancements.
- 20 Feb 2007 03:07
Changes: This release features sculpting meshes that work as if they were clay, render passes, retopology painting, multi-resolution meshes, texture map and light map baking, support for multiple uv sets, fast 3D painting, defocus blur node, multi-layer image read/write, painting in video sequences, matte, key, and difference composite nodes, a number of improved 3D animation tools such as proxy objects, walk cycles, simulation tool improvements for fluid dynamics, hard body dynamics, and cloth and softbody dynamics. There were also additional compositing and video editing improvements.
- 06 Aug 2006 06:25
Changes: This release is the result of work done for the Elephants Dream short film. It includes major feature additions such as node based materials, node based compositing, a renderer rewrite, improved UV tools, improved character tools, an array modifier, and a host of other improvements.
- All comments
Recent commentsBest of the Best
Blender is not only the first and only fully integrated 3D graphics creation suite allowing modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, realtime interactive 3D, game creation and playback with cross-platform compatibility, but it's also global phenomena in many ways! On short: The best open source software ever!!
Blender dependencies
http://www.blender.org/cms/Getting_Dependencies.135.0.html
As of januar 2006 the dependencies are:
Python 2.3: www.python.org
libjpeg: www.ijg.org
libpng: www.libpng.org/pub/png/
zlib: www.gzip.org/zlib/
OpenAL: www.openal.org (for Linux/Windows)
SDL: www.libsdl.org (for OpenAL)
Quicktime: developer.apple.com/quicktime/
ODE: opende.sourceforge.net (also available from blender/extern/ode!) Blender ODE implementation not currently maintainted
Blender 2.40 has been released
Blender 2.40 has been released in december 2005
Use for animating
This is very impressive software. 3D animation is a very complicated technology and this software did a wonderful job encapsulating all the minor details.
I like how it can import .wings files and .3ds files all into one scene. This is the perfect environment for putting together a sophisticated 3D animation. I especially like the options of creating a variety video files as the final output.
I would suggest using Wings3D to create any complicated subjects to animate. Together, these products are as good as any professional product that I've used.
Re: Huh?
> What an uncomprehensible mess. Starting
> from the homepage (which makes chaos
> look organized) to the uncompilable
> source which includes zilch
> documentation and some lovely hardwired
> Makefiles.
>
> Wonder what the dependencies are?
> I guess you just have to look at the
> source:
>
> All 784 .h files and...
>
> [....]
Since 2.26 was released on February 11 that (not unnecessarily constructive) comment is no longer accurate. I just finished compiling Blender 2.26 using the configure script as explained in the documentation. Compilation was uneventful and the result runs although it is still beta quality. I don't know enough about Blender to test it more thoroughly. This is on PPC, not x86, too.