Blender (program)
Screenshot of Blender 2.3.2
Blender is open-source software for modelling and rendering three-dimensional graphics and animations. It has a highly idiosyncratic user interface, which has been criticized as unintuitive but defended as very efficient. Once the initial learning curve is over, modelling with blender is faster than alternatives such as 3D Studio Max or Lightwave 3D.
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2 Features 3 Portability 4 External links |
Originally, the program was developed as an in-house application by the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo; the main author, Ton Roosendaal, founded Not a Number Technologies (NaN) in June 1998 to further develop and distribute the program. The program was initially distributed as proprietary software available at no cost (freeware) until NaN went bankrupt in 2002. The debtors agreed to release Blender as free software, under the terms of the GNU General Public License, for a one-time payment of €100,000. On July 18, 2002, a Blender Funding Company was founded by Roosendaal in order to collect donations; on September 7, it was announced that enough funds had been collected and that the Blender source code would be released in October. Blender is now an actively developed open-source program.
Blender has a relatively small installation size (less than 10 megabytes), and is not distributed with documentation or extensive example scenes, but the software is rich with features that are characteristic of high-end modelling software. Among is capabilities are:
Development
Features
Portability
Since becoming open source software in 2002, blender has been ported to the following operating systems:External links