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!"
posted by Eat_My_Shortz @ 11:29 pm
6 comments
6 Comments:
* nods and smiles .. predicts you will be a full on linux 3d modelling and animation geek in months *
Oh yes I am using it in Linux by the way... but actually its really annoying me (like a lot of things tonight... its that kind of night).
Because the Windows version actually has the program running inside a window which can be sized/maximized/etc, and shows the windows taskbar at the bottom. The Linux version runs in fullscreen and cannot be used side-by-side with other programs such as chat or tutorials. Which is annoying.
I guess just a nasty side-effect of the multitude of window environments in Linux - they thought it best if it just runs in fullscreen to be done with it.
Wow, so that's great that Blender exists then. I'd only heard of the name of it. But that head sure looied good. :) Good luck and happy uni times ahead, I predict, despite the crappy mix-ups with schedules.
And timetables...
Blender is a really great tool! In fact, we at the GoAC(Guild of Age Crafters) are using it to make our game :) Drop by the GoAC forums for more info :)
That screenshot looks much btter than I remember blender.. But I would maintain that apps like Max (and softimage, I quite like that one) are undoubtedly worth it for those who are their target customer base (professional game & movie design houses). But yes, for the hobbyist blender is indeed an awesome thing.
And hopefully they might have fixed up the UI a bit since it went OS ;)
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