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Blender Goes Freeware
xype writes "I just got a mail from NaN (the company developing Blender) that the new 1.8 release is out now - and it's freeware, without any "optional features one needs to pay for"! B@rt of NaN also gets into detail about NaN's plans around opensourcing parts of Blender." For those in the dark, Blender is a 3D Modeling/Rendering application for Linux [Update by nik: And FreeBSD (freebsd.org hosts the US mirror), and SGI, and Sun, and others]. Its not 3D Studio, but it'll do a lot of the same stuff.
- Maya
- Houdini
- Realsoft4D
- (others?)
But I have to wonder...how well is this going to work-out for NaN? The 3D Animation market as it currently stands is a relatively small market. Home users in general aren't 3D-savvy, and probably aren't going to become more-so any time soon. Production and Game houses typically have already invested time and money in a particular setup, and don't like to change. Giving it away free, or almost free, may actually work against NaN, believe it or not. A lot of houses equate free to "not well supported" I'm dubious of NaN's strategy, although I like the app, and I wish them luck.Actually, once you get the hang of it it gets pretty easy to use. One hand on the mouse and one on the keyboard means it optimizes how quickly you can do things...read a few tutorials and you'll start to get the hang of it.
One Microsoft Way
My plan is to pimp before they realize I'm a jackass. Hit 'em hard and fast.
Blender 2.0, which they are releasing this month at SIGGRAPH is labeled "Game Blender"
:) , so this OpenAL library will be something not for this version 1.8, but the one coming out this summer.
It will be a free game development platform/animation studio. So anyone can create OpenGL games. I take it these games will use sound
Game Blender might just revolutionize the game platform industry....
Blender was first and foremost developed as an inhouse animation tool, being pretty isn't at the top of the list. Tools like Lightwave 3D and 3D Studio Max are serious tools that cram an absolutely amazing amount of functionality into a single 21" screen and woe to you if you screen is smaller. Blender is comparable. Here there can't be enough hands. Mouse and keyboard work together - the buttons you see are actually just a tiny part of the functionality of Blender - there's no way it could perform all the tasks it needed to perform with just mouse-clicks. The app has modeling, animation, post-production and everything inbetween and beyond. Frankly, I think they really did a good job cramming the buttons in there. Many of the buttons are actually miniature sliders - click and move your mouse left or right to change the value or type a value in. That's some really neat stuff. And it's rendering is very quick. No complaints on this side. It'd be nice if they went totally GPL - but, frankly, I couldn't care less. I've paid far more for tools that did far less...
BTW - There are command-line capabilities to explore as well as multi-node rendering. Nifty for a free animation suite.
If you want something easy for an absolute beginner, keep looking. I'm sure there's a lot of simple modeling and rendering tools out there. Many are actually front-ends to POV. But if you're used to a little complexity, Blender is a breeze to use and real neat to explore...
OpenAT (http://www.openat.org) is the sound toolkit developed by Loki. Nice, but this is not something they're working on; they're just using it in Blender
Actually, it's OpenAL (http://www.openal.org).
One Microsoft Way
My plan is to pimp before they realize I'm a jackass. Hit 'em hard and fast.
If you do a search for "linux" on newtek's website you get zero matches.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm sick of the bug that won't let me post this as myself.
I am "PD" for the record.
The solid collision detection library that they are using is really nice. I used it in my (now suspended) open source project "Free Trek". I found it to be a really nice library, with excellent performance.
Setup of the objects is *exactly* like the setup of objects for OpenGL. Basically you place objects, rotate them, translate them, just like you would with OpenGL. Once you have your scene all set up, you just call a function and it spits out a list of objects that are colliding. You just can't get any sweeter than that.
If you need collision detection, I recommend this library very strongly.
I've been using Blender (altho not so activly) for almost two years now, and i was pretty amased from the begining. You've mentioned it's not 3D Studio - I can say it might be better.
:)
Explanation:
It is only 1 Mb compresed. It loaded instanteniously on my machine - compared to 3D MAX that takes two minutes or so on the same machine.It has almost every feature that 3D MAX has, only not so perfect, maybe. I'm no pro, but I can do everything in Blender that I can do in 3D MAX.
Interface might look very complicated, and it is. For the firt week that is. Later, You get so used to it and things are very well organized. I just tried a new version, and am happy with new scripting support that fell into my eyes
It also has a feature similar to Adobe Premiere (3D MAX has it also) and it was very, very usefull at one point of my life (i needed to complete some video for school project) - saved my ass (censor me if you dare)
p.s. i'm in a hurry so do not mind my inglish, mean english
linux isn't even a true Unix
Being not a true UNIX® system lets the GNU system (the system that runs on the Linux® kernel) be both good and free; UNIX system vendors have to pay royalties.
BTW, www.opengroup.org runs Solaris, a UNIX system.Will I retire or break 10K?
Trademarks are adjectives anyway, so why not give it the subject "SOLID library" or something.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Off the top of my head, VRML, Wavefront, DXF are natively exported and 3ds, 3DSMax and some others can be done using Python. XRacer - a WipeOut clone - uses Blender for its modelling. Check out the source which includes all the export scripts here.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
I've been following Blender for a while. I'm no 3D designing people but I found it interresting and I tested about every release since 1.54.
What was said from the beginning is that the new features would need the C-Key to be used but also that these feature would go free after some time...
Indeed, Plugins and other features went free as new features appear, needing the C-Key.
At first, the MS Windows version of Blender needed a B-Key to be really used (in order to allow saving). Then, the MS Windows version came to the same status that the Unix one... You only needed to pay for the bleeding edge functionnalities.
The features made free in 1.8 have been worked on for a long time and IMHO, it's about the time they would have been freed anyway. So, let's see if in the future there will be new feature you'll have to pay for (whatever thay'll be)
But Blender being available for free is a smart move. When it started to be available, it was said to be the in-house 3D tool of NeoGeo. So, making it free allows people to learn how to use it, to make feedback,...
And this is great for NeoGeo... Now, if they need 3D graphist for their game development, thay may really ask them to be able to use Blender (when the program was not distributed, these people needed to be teached how to do it... and that is a costly process).
This is also good as it provides them a great feedback from users, allowing to find bugs easier, to have information about what would be useful (not wasting time to implement unneeded stuff),...
It's also some kind of advertizing for themself... How many people did come to their WWW site for blender then follow the link to NeoGeo ?
And it made a little profit by itself, thank to the buying of B and C-keys and of manuals.
So, if you think of Blender as a 3D tool, it may seems not rentable, if you think of blender as the in-house tool of NeoGeo, the point of view may change...
It is actually one of the more intuitive programs I've used once you get used to it.
intuition n. (knowledge obtained from) an ability to understand or know something immediately without needing to think about it, learn it or discover it by using reason.
I've seen and used Blender's interface, and as almost everybody commenting on the article mentions, it is a real bugger to learn. I've never fully managed to. A lot of people have mentioned how it is "intuitive once you learn it". That is a contradiction in terms. Intuitive interfaces are simple, almost child's play, to learn - without manuals or hours upon hours of practice and experimentation. That is what "intuitive" means.
The interface can, however, very well be good even though it isn't intuitive. Take vi, take emacs. Both have un-intuitive interfaces, but they are still good.
The difficult part of interface design is making an interface that is expert-friendly, but without being newbie-hostile. Intuitive and expert-friendly in one interface is the stuff that makes killer-apps.
Now, most 3D-apps do not need to be friendly to the newcomer. Their main revenue comes from serious 3D-artists who are used to complex interfaces and who do not mind an interface taking three weeks to learn. Also, since they all have difficult-to-learn interfaces, you get very loyal customers. If it takes three weeks to learn any other tool, you don't unless you really have to.
What would happen if e.g. Blender got a intuitive interface that was still expert-friendly (such interface can be done, they are just a lot more difficult to design), and also got a lot of really cool features? Perhaps professional artists would try it out, it wouldn't cost them very much time to do that. Perhaps we would also find that a lot of people who are not 3D-designers tried Blender and created marvels with it. If you don't think you're good, you'll never take the weeks to learn it.
That could be a killer-app for Linux if I ever saw one. :-)
From the email Ton sent out to c-key owners:
blender 2.0 will make money from this boxed set. Sounds like a linux distro model.
I cannot wait for my tutorial guide!
Lowmag.net
hmm, looks like most of the mirrors don't have the new version. ah, well.
blender is _really_ cool software. i just wish it would work with my voodoo3. they say that glide doesn't support enough of opengl for it to work well.
anyways... plug plug. blender rocks.
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They modified GLUT? Tricky, since it isn't Open Source. Wonder if they made a deal, or were just unaware of the problem. Check out freeglut for an Open alternative.
I am glad this is freeware, but there's some drawbacks.
Because this is "free enough" for people who don't care about freedom, there will not be enough real demand for a good, GPL or even BSD licensed 3D app. Look at the legions of POVRAY users.. although it's a good app, it's matured slowly *because* the authors are not prepared to "let go", or lead. Another example is VRML... we HAVE VRML viewers, but they're binary things and they suck. This plays right into the hands of companies like Microsoft, who every 9 months announce a new 3D format (which has yet to materialize, but vaporware still does freeze the market).
I respect people's right to choose their own licenses, but to me proprietary freeware is worst than shareware. Anyone ever look at the work plowed into mIRC for Windows? What a *waste* of time (and apparently, years of someone's life).
I'll still gladly download the new version. I hope I can actually import an ASCII camera path animation so I can attempt a real "match move" with it. It ain't Alias/Wavefront's Maya, but after Houdini this is the premiere 3D app for Linux.
Well, I've used Blender, and I find two things about it I dislike.
- The interface
- The rendering engine
Now, that doesn't mean that it's not worth getting - you can't really beat it for the price. But those who say it can compete with the likes of LightWave and 3D Studio are decieving themselves. Blender needs a lot of work, and going the open source route is probably a good decision for getting that done. Here's a few of the features that Blender would need to be competitive:
- Volumetrics (Something akin to LightWave's Hyper Voxels or Afterburn would be good to see.)
- Better shader support, and better shaders (Once again, there are some very good OSS shaders available, all someone would need to do port them over. This could be a good project for someone looking for one.)
- Better interface. (Personally, I like the LightWave/Softimage style of dialogs rather than the cluttered look of other programs. In the end, the ability to customize the interface would probably be the best course of action.)
- Better render engine (Things like better lighting and antialiasing need to be implemented before Blender can hit the big times. Even better would be support for things like radiosity.)
Blender represents a good first step towards 3D on Linux. With some of the things I mentioned above, and other enhancements, it could very well come to challenge other 3D packages. If I had the time and the ability I'd love to work on some of these things myself. Still, there are a lot of OSS programmers who will invariably see the opportunities here and jump on them. That should show people why open development is a superior method of software engineering!
It will be a free game development platform/animation studio. So anyone can create OpenGL games.
So if someone has OpenGL and a modeler he can create games? "OpenGL = game engine" is one of the persistant myths of recent times. Even if you used OpenGL to write a renderer, or even if you used Crystal Space or something else canned, you still have 90% of the work ahead of you.
SOLID is a collision detection toolkit. Useful to have, and I don't know of any other open-source alternatives out there already.
"Windows Toolkit" is Yet Another Windowing Toolkit. The good part about it is that it is crossplatform, working on both X and Windows. Not a duplicate because C doesn't have that many toolikits that are STABLE on both platforms.
OpenAT (http://www.openat.org) is the sound toolkit developed by Loki. Nice, but this is not something they're working on; they're just using it in Blender.
Blender Render Daemon - Insignificant. Lets you distribute your rendering jobs so you can have, say, 10 idle machines do your rendering late at night. Nice, but it's not a major part of Blender and it's not much of an innovation anyway.
So, all in all, they're releasing a few things and making a huge fuss about it. Some of these are really cool and helpful but don't go on about open-source Blender itself.
MostlyHarmless posting anonymously because of a weird quirk in the comment form
When I first heard about blender, I thought "that sounds cool, I'll try it". So I d/l'd and was shocked--at the poor (and poorly documented) UI.
But the coolness made me persevere. And man, am I ever glad. Blender is just about the coolest thing since sliced bread. And the UI is actually easy to use once you get used to it. It's very consistent--it just has a whole different paradigm (like buttons that act like sliders or that do different things depending on which edge you press on). Once you realize how much screen real estate is being saved just by relearning a few key mappings you will marvel at the mind that came up with it all.
I've been lusting after the manual and tutorial book, but I think I'll wait until 2.0 comes out.
To anyone thinking of trying it: Do it now! Even if you have no artistic skills (like me) you will have more fun than sex in a hottub (believe me, I know).
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Blender isn't quite there yet for game development and commercial character animation but the progress it has made so far is incredible. NaN say Game Blender (v 2.0) out in November this year will address the needs of game developers much more specifically a la character modelling, skins and the like.
But in the meantime, here are the benefits of the package (as I see them):
* kick-butt all-round cool 3d modeller, renderer and animator suite
* it's a whopping 1 Mb download
* Free as in Beer with Free as in Speech in the works
*runs on SGI Irix 5.3/6.x, Sun Solaris 2.6, FreeBSD , Linux x86, Linux Alpha, PPC Linux Macs, BeOS, Windows 95/98/NT
* has been used for commercial (i.e. studio quality) animations and TV ads so it's not Mickey Mouse
* very nice to use once you understand how it works
* exports a range of file formats
* built-in post processing and sequence editing
* built-in Python scripting (you can do anything with this feature)
* supports hardware acceleration
* plugins
* the developers listen on the mailing list and take people's feature requests seriously
* I could go on and on here...
See it for yourself and decide...