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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.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...
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!
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...