Blender! It's 3D!

Hi, long time no blog, sorry sorry. (In case anyone is particularly offended by my non-bloginess).

Well... wow, I just found out about a program called Blender.
It's a 3D modeling package and it does EVERYTHING. It's also free and open source, it's been around for 10 years, and I'm completely baffled.

I'm baffled because I don't know how I've managed to successfully avoid finding out about this program for ten years. Now that I have, I've also discovered that basically everybody else already knew about it, and simply assumed I did too.

This annoys me for one reason: Blender is one of the most amazing, powerful, useful and free (did I mention free?) programs I have ever seen. I've been using the free-and-also-amazing-but-in-light-of-recent-discoveries-far-less-so raytracer POV-Ray for about 8 or 9 years now. POV-Ray has been great - I've made heaps of cool stuff with it including some images and movies, my media film for which I won the special effects award, and two school productions worth of background video. But never once have I, say, made a real character with it, or done anything like that.

Everything pales into insignificance next to Blender - I've been using Blender for three days now and already I've surpassed mostly everything I did in POV-Ray, even creating a quite realistic human head. The environment is great - for the first time I'm able to play with the polygons rather than typing in values for locations of primitives.

So sadly this looks like the end for POV-Ray for me... and a whole world of 3D image opportunities! (Now I really dont see the point for forking out $7000 apparently for Max if this is free, even if Max may be a bit better, it cant be much better than this ;)

Thanks to Jono for being the one to finally point this out to me!

Professor Frink: "Here is an ordinary square."
Chief Wiggum: "Whoa, whoa! Slow down, egghead!"
Frink: "But suppose we extend the square beyond the two dimensions of our universe, along the hypothetical Z axis there. This forms a three-dimensional object known as a 'cube', or a
'Frinkahedron' in honor of its discoverer, m'heh!"

Win-dows

A real short one... just a quote that I found on Wikipedia BJAODN:

Win·dows

Noun.

A thirty-two bit extension and graphical shell to a sixteen-bit patch to an eight-bit operating system originally coded for a four-bit microprocessor which was written by a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition.