BLENDER
Today is the 25th birthday of Blender! Fxguide would like to congratulate all the artists and TDs who have donated their time and energy into this marvellous open source project. Congrats and Happy Birthday !
It was in this week of the xmas holidays of 1993, that Ton Roosendaal started working on the Blender software, based on original designs he made in the course of 1993.
Today, Blender is run by the Blender Foundation, which is a Dutch public-benefit corporation, established to support and facilitate the projects on blender.org. It’s continuing mission is to build a free and open source complete 3D creation pipeline for artists and small teams.
On January 2nd, 1994, the first Blender version was running, with the subdivision-based windowing system working. That memorable date was restored from an old backup of Ton’s SGI Indigo2 workstation – now marked as Blender’s official birthday.
It then took 15 months before the software was ready as in-house tool for production in the animation studio NeoGeo in the Netherlands. Blender then was released publicly online as SGI freeware on January 1st 1998.
The Linux and Windows versions were released shortly after. After the internet bubble bursted early 2000s, the sources became available as GNU GPL on October 13th 2002, thanks to a spectacular fundraising campaign – marking the start of Blender as the popular free and open source software 3D creation suite it is today
Blender today
Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. Blender is being actively developed by hundreds of people from all around the world. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation.
Blender is cross-platform and runs equally well on Linux, Windows, and Macintosh computers. Blender is an open source project licensed under the GNU GPL. All code is written in C, C++ and Python. Its interface uses OpenGL to provide a consistent experience. Blender is well suited to individuals and small studios who benefit from its unified pipeline and responsive development process.
Cycles Render Engine
Cycles is Blender’s built-in unbiased path-tracer engine that offers photo-realistic rendering.
- Real-time viewport preview
- CPU & GPU rendering
- PBR shaders & HDR lighting support
- VR rendering support
Animation & Rigging
Blender has high quality rigging and animation tools. Blender is being used for numerous short films, advertisements, TV series and feature films currently.
- Envelope, skeleton and automatic skinning
- B-spline interpolated bones
- Curve editor and dope sheets
- Custom bone shapes for fast input
- Sound synchronization
Story Art, (drawing 2D)
Drawing directly in a 3D viewport makes a lot of sense. It opens a workflow freedom for story-boarders and 2D artists.
- Combine 2D with 3D right in the viewport
- Full Animation Support with Onion Skinning
- Layers & Colors for Stroke and Fill
- Sculpt brush strokes & Parent to 3D objects
Tracker
Blender includes production ready camera and object tracking. Allowing artists to import raw footage, track the footage, mask areas and see the camera movements live in a 3d scene.
- Auto and Manual tracking
- Powerful camera reconstruction
- Real-time preview of your tracked footage and 3D scene
- Support for Planar tracking and Tripod solvers
Python
Blender has a flexible Python controlled interface. Layout, colors, size and even fonts can be adjusted. Use hundreds of add-ons by the community.
- Customize the interface layout and colors
- Hi-res/Retina screen support
- Create your own tools and add-ons
- Draw over the OpenGL viewport
- Connect with Blender’s Render API
The current release version is 2.7, which included the key render denoising tool. Blender includes a lot of tools aimed at a complete pipeline. For example it also has a powerful simulation base with industry standard libraries such as Bullet and MantaFlow. It even has basic video editing tools.
Blender 2.80 Beta
2.80 is now in beta. It should be out of beta, around the end of Feb or March. Below are 5 key new features in Blender 2.80. The new version has made the software more consistent and easily to use.
This new beta also includes the new 2D animation mode with drawing right into the 3D animation environment.