Blender Landon Glodowski

Agenda  The History of Blender  Blender 2.6  Python Scripts  The Blender Foundation  The Blender Foundation Projects  The Blender Institute  Blendernetwork.org  Blenders Bad Side

History  Created By Ton Roosendaal  Dutch Animation Studio, NeoGeo, is where the first version of Blender was made in 1995  Roosendaal took it to his new company, NotANumber in 1998 but soon shut down in 2002  Convinced old investors to turn blender into an open source project

Blender 2.6  Free to download  Has a very small installation package, an average of 115 mg  Includes features such as  3D modeling  UV unwrapping and Texturing  Rigging and skinning  Fluid/smoke/particle/Soft body simulation  Sculpting  Animating  Match moving  Camera tracking  Rendering video editing and compositing  A built-in game engine  Python scripts

Operating Systems Minimal specs for Hardware  Windows XP SP3, Vista, 7 or 8 32 bits, Dual Core CPU with at least 2 GHZ, and SSE2 support.  Mac OS X 10.6 and later 2 GB RAM  Linux 24 bits 1280x768 display  FreeBSD Mouse or trackpad OpenGL Graphics Card with 256 MB RAM Average specs for Hardware Production specs for Hardware 64 bits, Quad Core CPU64 bits, Dual 8 Core CPU 8 GB RAM16 GB RAM Full HD Display with 24 bit color Two times Full HD Display with 24 bit color Mouse or trackpad Mouse + tablet OpenGL Graphics Card with 1 GB RAM Dual OpenGL Graphics Cards, quality brand with 3 GB RAM Figure 1.1 System Requirements [2]

Python  Python is an open source language “that is often compared to Tcl, Perl, Ruby, Scheme or Java  Libraries of user made Scripts add to blenders features

The Blender Foundation  One of the few incomes supporting Blender  Employs Blenders very few employees  Produces projects to improve the software  Project Orange  Project Apricot  Project Peach  Project Durian  Project Mango

Orange  The project included  a full recode of the character animation system  upgrades to the rendering system  a node-based compositor The result was “Elephants Dream (2006)”

 This Project focused on the improvement of the game engine “Yo Frankie (2006)” Apricot

Peach  This project focused on trying to improve the fur and hair animation.  It also was used to work on outside environments, which included such elements as grass.  And also the animation of cartoon characters. The finished project was the short film “Big Buck Bunny (2008)”. 

Durian  The open projects actually showing positive results so they put more money and effort into their third open movie “Sintel (2010)”.  Targeting sculpting tools detail,  Illumination rendering  All around stability of Blender 

Mango  This Project put animations in the same frames as real actors.  Worked with Blenders’ motion tracker “Tears of Steel (2012)” 

The Blender Institute  Is there to help organize the open projects and the goals The Foundation was after.  It also provides a physical building for the projects to be created in that a small staff can work with the invited teams of artists for each project.  Everything created within the Blender institute uses open source utilities and every finished project is published under an open license to make it available to everyone.

Blendernetwork.org  Blendernetwork.org is a website that is partnered with the Blender Foundation.  The site provides  a place where the users of Blender can be found.  online directory and make it possible for users to socialize with other Blender users.  Events relating to 3D animation and Blender are posted  jobs people and companies can place on a “virtual job board”

Blenders’ Negative Aspects  The ability to render the animations  With Blender files being so small, sending the files to a “render farm” can easily solve the rendering problem.  an average of 66% of users use an external renderer instead of using the internal renderer included in Blender

Conclusion  Its creator Ton Roosendaal built a program that he was so involved with that he kept it going and kept the community involved also.  Without the Community’s support and money, open source software would not work as well as it does.  Without the “corporate greed” involved with so many software programs, Blender was able to remain free and is ever evolving. Blender is a great example of how the typical user can compete with the top names in 3d animation.