Blender (software)
Blender (software)
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Blender 2.76
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| Developer(s) | Blender Foundation |
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| Initial release | 1995 |
| Stable release | 2.76b / November 3, 2015[1] |
| Written in | C, C++, and Python |
| Operating system | Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, AmigaOS |
| Size | 53.3 – 120.9 MB (depending on operating system)[2] |
| Type | 3D computer graphics software |
| License | GNU General Public License v2 or later[3] |
| Website | blender |
Contents
History
The desktop scene in version 2.63
On July 18, 2002, Roosendaal started the "Free Blender" campaign, a crowdfunding precursor.[5][6] The campaign aimed for open-sourcing Blender for a one-time payment of €100,000 (US$100,670 at the time) collected from the community.[7] On September 7, 2002, it was announced that they had collected enough funds and would release the Blender source code. Today, Blender is free, open-source software that is—apart from the Blender Institute's two full-time and two part-time employees—developed by the community.[8]
The Blender Foundation initially reserved the right to use dual licensing, so that, in addition to GPLv2, Blender would have been available also under the Blender License that did not require disclosing source code but required payments to the Blender Foundation. However, they never exercised this option and suspended it indefinitely in 2005.[9] Blender is solely available under "GNU GPLv2 or any later" and was not updated to the GPLv3, as "no evident benefits" were seen.[10]
The following program developed in each version:
| [show]Version | Release[11] | Notes and key changes |
|---|
Suzanne
Suzanne
Suzanne is Blender's alternative to more common test models such as the Utah Teapot and the Stanford Bunny. A low-polygon model with only 500 faces, Suzanne is often used as a quick and easy way to test material, animation, rigs, texture, and lighting setups and is also frequently used in joke images.[citation needed] Suzanne is still included in Blender. The largest Blender contest gives out an award called the Suzanne Award.
Clones
Due to Blender's open source nature, other programs have tried to take advantage of its success by repackaging and selling cosmetically-modified versions of it. Examples include IllusionMage, 3DMofun and Fluid Designer,[19] the latter recognized as Blender-based.Features
Steps of forensic facial reconstruction of a mummy made on Blender by the Brazilian 3D designer Cícero Moraes.
- Support for a variety of geometric primitives, including polygon meshes, fast subdivision surface modeling, Bezier curves, NURBS surfaces, metaballs, multi-res digital sculpting (including dynamic topology, maps baking, remeshing, resymetrize, decimation..), outline font, and a new n-gon modeling system called B-mesh.
- Internal render engine with scanline rendering, indirect lighting, and ambient occlusion that can export in a wide variety of formats.
- A pathtracer render engine called Cycles, which can take advantage of the GPU for rendering. Cycles supports the Open Shading Language since Blender 2.65.[23]
- Integration with a number of external render engines through plugins.
- Keyframed animation tools including inverse kinematics, armature (skeletal), hook, curve and lattice-based deformations, shape keys (morph target animation), non-linear animation, constraints, and vertex weighting.
- Simulation tools for Soft body dynamics including mesh collision detection, LBM fluid dynamics, smoke simulation, Bullet rigid body dynamics, ocean generator with waves.
- A particle system that includes support for particle-based hair.
- Modifiers to apply non-destructive effects.
- Python scripting for tool creation and prototyping, game logic, importing and/or exporting from other formats, task automation and custom tools.
- Basic non-linear video/audio editing.
- The Blender Game Engine, 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 accelerated with OpenCL.
- Procedural and node-based textures, as well as texture painting, projective painting, vertex painting, weight painting and dynamic painting.
- Realtime control during physics simulation and rendering.
- Camera and object tracking.
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Using the node editor to create anisotropic metallic materials
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Rendering of a house
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The main character from the Blender Sintel open film
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A simple fluid simulation done with Blender
User interface
Blender's user interface underwent a significant update during the 2.5x series
- 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 Sculpt Mode.
- Hotkey usage
- Most of the commands are accessible via hotkeys. There are also comprehensive GUI menus.
- Numeric input
- Numeric buttons can be "dragged" to change their value directly without the need to aim at a particular widget, as well as being set using the keyboard. 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 specify values.
- Workspace management
- The Blender GUI builds its own tiled (non-overlapping) windowing system on top of one or multiple windows provided by the underlying platform. One platform window (often sized to fill the screen) is divided into sections and subsections that can be of any type of Blender's views or window-types. The user can define multiple layouts of such Blender windows, called screens, and switch quickly between them by selecting from a menu or with keyboard shortcuts. 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 using similar controls 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 used for the task.[24]
Hardware requirements
| Hardware | Minimum | Recommended | Production-standard |
|---|---|---|---|
| Processor | 32-bit dual core 2 GHz CPU with SSE2 support | 64-bit quad core CPU | 64-bit eight core CPU |
| Memory | 2 GB RAM | 8 GB | 16 GB |
| Graphics card | OpenGL card with 256 MB video RAM | OpenGL card with 1 GB video RAM (CUDA or OpenCL for GPU rendering) | Dual OpenGL cards with 3 GB RAM, (i.e. FirePro 3D or Nvidia Quadro) |
| Display | 1280×768 pixels, 24-bit color | 1920×1080 pixels, 24-bit color | Dual 1920×1080 pixels, 24-bit color |
| Input | mouse or trackpad | Three-button mouse | Three-button mouse and a graphics tablet |
File format
Blender features an internal file system that can 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, with the
following exceptions:
- Loading animations stored in post-2.5 files in Blender pre-2.5. This is due to the reworked animation subsystem introduced in Blender 2.5 being inherently incompatible with older versions.
- Loading meshes stored in post 2.63. This is due to the introduction of BMesh, a more versatile/featureful mesh format.
- All scenes, objects, materials, textures, sounds, images, post-production effects for an entire animation can be stored in a single ".blend" file. Data loaded from external sources, such as images and sounds, can also be stored externally and referenced through either an absolute or relative pathname. Likewise, ".blend" files themselves can also be used as libraries of Blender assets.
- Interface configurations are retained in the ".blend" files.
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, what the user would describe as a polygon mesh consists of at least an Object and a Mesh data block, and usually also a Material and many more, linked together. This allows various data blocks to refer to each other. There may be, for example, multiple Objects that refer to the same Mesh, and making subsequent editing of the shared mesh result in shape changes in all Objects using this Mesh. Objects, meshes, materials, textures etc. can also be linked to from other .blend files, which is what allows the use of .blend files as reusable resource libraries.
Video editing
Video Editor (VSE)
WebGL authoring
Blend4Web, an open source WebGL framework, can be used to convert whole Blender scenes with graphics, animation, sound and physics to work in standard web browsers. Export can be performed with a single click, even as a standalone web page.[26]Cycles
Cycles is a ray-tracing render engine that is designed to be interactive and easy to use, while still supporting many production features.[27] It comes installed as an add-on that is available by default and can be activated in the top header.GPU rendering
Cycles supports GPU rendering which is used to help speed up rendering times. There are two GPU rendering modes: CUDA, which is the preferred method for NVIDIA graphics cards; and OpenCL, which supports rendering on AMD graphics cards. Multiple GPUs are also supported, which can be used to create a render farm – although having multiple GPUs doesn't increase the available memory because each GPU can only access its own memory.[28]| Feature | CPU | CUDA | OpenCL |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic Shading | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Transparent Shadows | Yes | Yes | No |
| Motion blur | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Hair | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Volume | Yes | Yes | No |
| Smoke/Fire | Yes | No | No |
| Subsurface Scattering | Yes | Experimental | No |
| Open Shading Language | Yes | No | No |
| Correlated Multi-Jittered Sampling | Yes | Experimental | No |
| Branched Path integrator | Yes | Yes | No |
| Displacement/Subdivision | Experimental | Experimental | Experimental |
Integrator
The integrator is the rendering algorithm used for lighting computations. Cycles currently supports a path tracing integrator with direct light sampling. It works well for various lighting setups, but is not as suitable for caustics and some other complex lighting situations. Rays are traced from the camera into the scene, bouncing around until they find a light source such as a lamp, an object emitting light, or the world background. To find lamps and surfaces emitting light, both indirect light sampling (letting the ray follow the surface BSDF) and direct light sampling (picking a light source and tracing a ray towards it) are used.[30]There are two types of integrators:
- The default path tracing integrator is a pure path tracer. At each hit it bounces light in one direction and picks one light to receive lighting from. This makes each individual sample faster to compute, but typically requires more samples to clean up the noise.
- The alternative is a branched path tracing integrator which at the first hit splits the path for different surface components and takes all lights into account for shading instead of just one. This makes each sample slower, but reduces noise, especially in scenes dominated by direct or one-bounce lighting.
Open Shading Language
Blender users can create their own nodes using the Open Shading Language although it is important to note that there is no support for it on GPUs.[31]Materials
Materials define the look of meshes, NURBS curves and other geometric objects. They consist of three shaders, defining the mesh's appearance of the surface, volume inside, and displacement of the surface.[27]Surface shader
The surface shader defines the light interaction at the surface of the mesh. One or more BSDFs can specify if incoming light is reflected back, refracted into the mesh, or absorbed.[27]Volume shader
When the surface shader does not reflect or absorb light, it enters the volume. If no volume shader is specified, it will pass straight through to the other side of the mesh.If one is defined, a volume shader describes the light interaction as it passes through the volume of the mesh. Light may be scattered, absorbed, or emitted at any point in the volume.[27]
Displacement shader
The shape of the surface may be altered by displacement shaders. This way, textures can be used to make the mesh surface more detailed.Depending on the settings, the displacement may be virtual, only modifying the surface normals to give the impression of displacement (also known as bump mapping) or a combination of real and virtual displacement.[27]
Demo reels
The Blender website contains several demo reels that showcase various features of Blender.[32]Physics
Blender can be used to simulate smoke, rain, dust, cloth, water, hair and rigid bodies.[33]Cloth Simulation
A cloth simulation made in Blender
Fluid Simulation
Physics Fluid Simulation
The fluid simulator can be used for simulating liquids, like water hitting a cup.[34] It uses the Lattice Boltzmann methods to simulate the fluids and allows for lots of adjusting of the amount of particles and the resolution.Particle Fluid Simulation
The particle physics fluid simulation creates particles that follow the Smoothed-particle hydrodynamics method.[35]Development
Game engine GLSL materials
Improvements include an animation system refresh;[36] a stack-based modifier system;[37] an updated particle system[38] (which can also be used to simulate hair and fur); fluid dynamics; soft-body dynamics; GLSL shaders support[39] in the game engine; advanced UV unwrapping;[40] a fully recoded render pipeline, allowing separate render passes and "render to texture"; node-based material editing and compositing; and projection painting.[41]
Part of these developments were fostered by Google's Summer of Code program, in which the Blender Foundation has participated since 2005.
Support
Blender is extensively documented on its website,[42] with the rest of the support provided via community tutorials and discussion forums on the Internet. Professional support, provided by the Blender Network, contains support and social services for Blender Professionals. Additionally, YouTube is known to have a great many video tutorials available for either Blender amateurs or professionals at no cost.Use in the media industry
Blender started out as an inhouse tool for a Dutch commercial animation company NeoGeo.[43] Blender has been used for television commercials in several parts of the world including Australia,[44] Iceland,[45] Brazil,[46][47] Russia[48] and Sweden.[49]Blender is used by NASA for publicly available 3D models. Many 3D models on NASAs 3D resources page are in a native .blend format.[50]
Experience Curiosity: taking a Selfie
The first large professional project that used Blender was Spider-Man 2, where it was primarily used to create animatics and pre-visualizations for the storyboard department.
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- 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 Raimi's vision as clear to other departments as possible.[56] – Anthony Zierhut,[57] Animatic Artist, Los Angeles.
Blender has also been used for shows on the History Channel, alongside many other professional 3D graphics programs.[60]
Tomm Moore's The Secret of Kells, which was partly produced in Blender by the Belgian studio Digital Graphics, has been nominated for an Oscar in the category "Best Animated Feature Film".[61]
Plumíferos, a commercial animated feature film created entirely in Blender,[62] was premiered in February 2010 in Argentina. Its main characters are anthropomorphic talking animals.
Special effects for episode 6 of Red Dwarf season X were confirmed being created using Blender by half of Gecko Animation, Ben Simonds. The company responsible for the special effects, Gecko Animation, uses Blender for multiple projects, including Red Dwarf.[63] The episode screened in 2012.[64][65]
Open projects
Big Buck Bunny poster
Sintel promotional poster
Tears of Steel promotional poster
Elephants Dream (Open Movie 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 hosted by the Netherlands Media Art Institute (NIMk). The resulting film, Elephants Dream, premiered on March 24, 2006. In response to the success of Elephants Dream, the Blender Foundation founded the Blender Institute to do additional projects with two announced projects: Big Buck Bunny, also known as "Project Peach" (a 'furry and funny' short open animated film project) and Yo Frankie, also known as Project Apricot (an open game in collaboration with CrystalSpace that reused some of the assets created during Project Peach). This has later made its way to Nintendo 3DS's Nintendo Video between the years 2012 and 2013.Big Buck Bunny (Open Movie Project: Peach)
Main article: Big Buck Bunny
On October 1, 2007, a new team started working on a second open project, "Peach", for the production of the short movie Big Buck Bunny. This time, however, the creative concept was totally different. Instead of the deep and mystical style of Elephants Dream, things are more "funny and furry" according to the official site.[66] The movie had its premiere on April 10, 2008.Yo Frankie! (Open Game Project: Apricot)
Main article: Yo Frankie!
"Apricot" is a project for production of a game based on the universe and characters of the Peach movie (Big Buck Bunny) using free software. The game is titled Yo Frankie.
The project started February 1, 2008, and development was completed at
the end of July 2008. A finalized product was expected at the end of
August; however, the release was delayed. The game was released on
December 9, 2008, under either the GNU GPL or LGPL, with all content being licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.[67]Sintel (Open Movie Project: Durian)
Main article: Sintel
The Blender Foundation's Project Durian[68] (in keeping with the tradition of fruits as code names) was this time chosen to make a fantasy action epic of about twelve minutes in length,[69] starring a female teenager and a young dragon as the main characters. The film premiered online on September 30, 2010.[70] A game based on Sintel was officially announced on Blenderartists.org on May 12, 2010.[71][72]Many of the new features integrated into Blender 2.5 and beyond were a direct result of Project Durian.
Tears of Steel (Open Movie Project: Mango)
Main article: Tears of Steel
Derek de Lint in a scene from Tears of Steel
Filming for Mango started on May 7, 2012, and the movie was released on September 26, 2012. As with the previous films, all footage, scenes and models were made available under a free content compliant Creative Commons license.[75][76]
According to the film's press release, "The film's premise is about a group of warriors and scientists, who gather at the 'Oude Kerk' in Amsterdam to stage a crucial event from the past, in a desperate attempt to rescue the world from destructive robots."[77]
Cosmos Laundromat (Open Movie Project: Gooseberry)
Cosmos Laundromat – First Cycle
See also
- Noesis (software):[81] an open-source tool that can import/export between many formats (no editing though)
- Open 3D Model Viewer:[82] another (yet less advanced) open-source tool that can import/export between many formats
References
Further reading
- Van Gumster, Jason (2009). Blender For Dummies. Indianapolis, Indiana: Wiley Publishing, Inc. p. 408. ISBN 978-0-470-40018-0.
- "Blender 3D Design, Spring 2008". Tufts OpenCourseWare. Tufts University. 2008. Retrieved July 23, 2011.[dead link]
- "Release Logs". Blender.org. Blender Foundation. Retrieved July 23, 2011.
External links
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Wikibooks has a book on the topic of: Blender 3D: Noob to Pro |
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to Blender (software). |
- Official website
- Blender Wiki
- Blender Stack Exchange (Questions & Answers)
- Blender Artists Community
- BlenderNation: Blender news site
- Blender at DMOZ
- BlenderArt Magazine: A bi-monthly Blender magazine for Blender learners
- Blender NPR: Dedicated to Stylize and Non-Photorealistic Rendering
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Motion graphics and animation software
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Categories:
- 1995 software
- 3D animation software
- 3D computer graphics software for Linux
- AmigaOS 4 software
- Blender Foundation
- Computer-aided design software for Linux
- Cross-platform free software
- Dutch inventions
- Formerly proprietary software
- Free 3D graphics software
- Free computer-aided design software
- Free software programmed in C
- Free software programmed in C++
- Free software programmed in Python
- Global illumination software
- IRIX software
- MorphOS software
- Motion graphics software for Linux
- OS X graphics-related software
- Portable software
- Technical communication tools
- Video game development software
- Windows graphics-related software
[Blender's Toni Roosendall:] "Blender is also still "GPLv2 or later". For the time being we stick to that, moving to GPL 3 has no evident benefits I know of. My advice for LibreDWG: if you make a library, choosing a widely compatible license (MIT, BSD, or LGPL) is a very positive choice."
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