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Blender Releases Linux 3D Web Plugin
Qbertino writes: "Not a Number, producer of Blender, the Linux community's favorite professional 3D Package (get it for free) has released the beta of their 3D Web Plugin for Netscape 6.1 / Mozilla on Linux/Unix. It offers full integration of Blender's realtime 3D enviroment based applications into the browser's enviroment. Including OpenGL acceleration and all. Check out the Demos. Feedback on the beta-release is welcome and kindly requested on the Blender Community Discussion Board."
I know for most of us Internet Explorer support is rather unimportant... But it will make a difference in whether or not this plugin will gain wide support. The more Blender support you can get, the merrier.
When has 3d environments *ever* been something useful on the web?
What didn't get noted is that one can go to the same demos running Wintel and IE and get a working plugin automagically installed. This isn't just Linux/Mozilla but reasonably cross-platform. Next gotta check with MacOS & MacOS X.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
This sounds great, but are there any "real world" sites using or planning on using this plugin? Or is it just another VRML experiment?
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Sheesh. Take 3 seconds, click a link, you find their explorer install page
Or you can just post to Slashdot.
This could be just what I'm looking for. My University honours project includes doing some 3D models in a web browser and at the moment I'm looking at SVG and javascript to fake the 3D. I'm now requiring something a bit more advance and this may be just what I'm looking for to avoid ActiveX :-)
Follow me
It's not completely free. You can't get the source.
Read http://freshmeat.net/projects/blender/
--mycr0ft
Me physicist. Me make rockets.
Blender is a win32 package too, the gui is horrible, but ok, that seems common with 3D packages. What seems to be so odd is the Unix only releases of plugins for the web.
How many users do they think there are with Unix browsers? So how many people will produce 3D content for their format? If there isn't a market, there are not suppliers. It's a simple as that.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Haven't we tried this before?
It is a very powerful 3D editor, from what I have seen, but I'll be damned if I can get it to do anything! lol I just hope that the plugin isn't as impossible to use as the editor. I'm glad to hear that they have Linux in mind though.
Actually, yes there is, if you get a more recent distro from RedHat or Mandrake, at least in my experiences, it is included.Here is the download link for the player. I hope that this helps you.
no text
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Unless you're lucky enough to say "first post!" forget about hitting their site. Slashdotting is evil.
I've tried to get something useful out of Blender on a couple of occasions, but the interface is just too obtuse.
I've been able to figure out Sculpt 3D, Turbo Silver, Imagine, Lightwave, and VariCAD without too much drama, but Blender defeats me.
I really, really miss Lightwave. It had the perfect mix of power and ease-of-use.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
The way I understand freenet is that when an object is requested it is cached along the way so that it will be faster to get on future requests. Since there is only a finite amount of cache space each subsequent request pushes one off the bottom. If an item is popular it will stay on the cache of many of the peers wheras an unpopular might disappear from all but the original.
As for allocating bandwidth, I am not sure how this would ever be done in a practical setting. I would to drive traffic to my site so that I can get more bandwidth but I think my ISP would start balking at some point.
Oh, wait, it said "plugin"... damn. Gotta get these eyes fixed.
--
perl -e'$_=shift;die eval' '"$^X $0\047\$_=shift;die eval\047 \047$_\047"' at -e line 1.
Seeing how the site is slashdotted, I might as well reply.
I see the market for this not being "VRML" like things, like someone said, but remote viewing of blender files (and other supported formats?) without having to have blender installed. The same reason many companies use PDF for "print" documents. You don't have to have the DTP tool used to create the document, you just have to have a common web based viewer (Acrobat.)
I know companies charge thousands for web plug-ins that let people view ProE models and the like without having ProE installed. Is this much different?
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Hi, I have used Blender for a couple of years, and I have some comments on the user interface that would probably shed some light here.
The interface is not obvious at first, but it seems to follow a *nix like trend, in that it is:
1) Confusing, and difficult to pick up.
2) Way faster than the more widely known packages, once you get the hang of it.
3) High degree of customizability in workflow and layout of the screen.
It takes time to understand the interface (and the manual helps a lot), but it does boast a very direct feel in the workflow, there are few cumbersome elements in the interface.
-Adrian
- Community's (instead of communitys)
- Browser's (instead of browsers)
Simple enough, we're talking possessive, not plural. Just doing the job the Grammar Nazi's not awake to do right now....Tom.
Oh arse
>Uhh... "professional" in the same sentence "Linux" and "free".... isn't that "oxymoron"?
I know I'm probably just feeding a troll but anyway, here goes.
A bit OT but linux really is a professional OS, it's used by many companies to do their back office systems. It even outperforms MS's own implimentation of SMB and as for webservers...
>the Linux communitys favorite professional 3D package (get it for free)
Secondly blender is a spectacular program. I've been using it for quite a while and once you get used to the interface it relatively easy to draw whatever you need and use it how you need to. Those facts make it professional enough for me.
"moron" in the same sentance as "Linux" and "free"? That isn't very professional...
When you go to the actual plugin download page it is currently only available for Wintel platforms.
The linux one is a high priority they say and they hope to have it available for all platforms that Blender supports.
Telcos have alot of dark fibre in the States. Most people assume that's optical fibre...but it's actually moral fibre.
Now if only we could get Clive Barker to stop touching the corpse, then we'd have something.
I believe both Maya and Softimage XSI are available for Linux. Much more feature rich than Blender, and I prefer them, as would any serious 3D artist. Still. for the price, Blender is pretty nifty. Perhaps you should say favorite free/cheap Linux 3D app...
Site's seems to be slashdotted already. Does anyone know any mirrors?
Am I the only one who has trouble getting plugins to work under Linux/Mozilla? After months of trying things out I finally have the Java plugin working, but every other one I try (including this new Blender plugin I just downloaded) crashes Mozilla.
That's the main reason I don't use more plugins.
The tool is different from just about everything out there and once you get used to the method of interaction is seems very easy to get things done. I'm sure that there are plenty of people out there that bitch about the Linux interfaces and how hard they are to use, while many more people find them quick and efficient... give blender a try and see if it falls into this same scenario.
Stop griping about how it works/doesn't work or comparing it to other products like VRML until you've at least taken a look at what it can do. The user galleries and demos on the site are excellent examples of what can be done by an artist.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
However, what really kills it for me is the extremely limited ability to Undo actions. In this day and age, we've all been pampered by essentially unlimited undo in all useful applications; including most (admittedly, much more costly) 3D modelling packages...Even after learning the Blender UI, I couldn't deal with the lack of proper Undo and eventually abandoned it. I may take another look if they fix this issue.
Here we go again. Let's release some real cool app, run only on netscape and preferably on linux.
Willy Webmaster notices it, and wants to use it. He creates a real cool 3d web app and puts in front page on corporate web site. One week later, willy is sacked by management because 85% of the visitors were completely unable to view the site.
So, the question is, will there be a COM wrapper to put it in IE??????? Or is it, as I suspect, not worth downloading?
"Nice ap. yeah, reeeeeaaaaalll nice. Next!"
Don't click here. BT will enforce intellectual rights and sue for eac
when they tried it with vrml it was poorly thought out, poorly executed, and way ahead of the hardware technology currently available.
now with 3d accelerated graphics cards far more commonplace in the desktop world, there actually is a serious chance this type of thing could be the next face of the "web".
don't you think that in it's early stages the current iteration of the web must have seemed useless? imagine... the year is 1994...
"plain text served over modem connections? why would anyone want to bother when you could just
mail them a printed flyer"
.... and now the web is a mainstay of corporate advertising. virtual 3d environments for it are simply the next step in a logical progression.
The biggest problem with VRML is there was never a full-featured authoring application (which offered access to the whole feature set) combined with a full-featured viewer (which offered access to the whole feature set).
:)
Blender already has both, so it should prove interesting. Now if I could export some models to a ray-tracer...
Adobe Atmosphere
Macromedia Shockwave3D, in cooperation with Intel
Curious Labs Avatar Lab
Viewpoint VET
This goes way beyond VRML, and there are some big clients using those technologies. E.g. AOL is using Viewpoint.
Does anyone have any insight into why Blender is not open-source? I'm wary about investing time in learning a 3D-modeling environment that is free today, but could easily cost more money than I can afford tomorrow. Does anyone know if NaN plans to truly open-source Blender at some point in the future? Also can anyone compare Blender to open-source programs like Panorama and K3D?
And the player file format is proprietary.
There are other 3D players. Shockwave 3D, for example. VRML, despite lack of interest, actually works quite well now, if you have a 3D accelerator board and DSL or better. There's X3D, which is just VRML text expressed as XML, but nobody uses that.
X3D would be a useful format if it was used, because it's one of the very few non-proprietary, documented 3D scene formats out there. Consider it if you're doing open-source 3D tools.
I'd like to see X3D import and export for Blender. VRML 2 export has been done as a Python script, so it's possible. Blender itself only does VRML 1.
Just browse thier site (if it works now) and check the shop (Publisher product) or the forums (some unhappy members).
Ok, so where's the source so that this won't be just another proprietary standard that nobody uses?
This plugin might have had legs a year or so ago, when any new internet technology could garner support for no other reason than it was a new internet technology. Now that Macromedia's shockwave has a pretty impressive 3D engine, with hardware acceleration, the Blender plugin might not see that much attention. Flash has the 2D animation market pretty much sewn up, and I'm expecting SW to do the same for 3D...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
What didn't get noted is that one can go to the same demos running Wintel and IE and get a working plugin automagically installed. This isn't just Linux/Mozilla but reasonably cross-platform.
This auto-installing MSIE plug-in did work on my box with the slightly jacked-up AMD K6-2/366MHz CPU (overclocked to 400MHz), 256M SDRAM and generic Trident 4M AGP video card, but it was agonizingly slow. They're not kidding about needing at least a 450MHz CPU (something) and a modern TNT AGP video card. I'd suggest an Athlon 800MHz CPU for bearable performance.
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
Just tried it, but can't get it to go at all in Konqueror. In Mozilla I can't figure out how to load it, and netscape crashes my X server when I run the radiosity demo. Anyone else having problems? Thanks,
David
I am a Linux only user. I tried your link but could not view the pictures because I apparently have no VRML browser. Anything available for Linux?
Depends on what browser you use. The netscape website has this collection of pretty stable plugins that will work with Netscape Navigator and Mozilla. For any other browsers that don't support netscape plugins try looking round the plugin sections of their websites. Someone will probably have made one for them.
My understanding is that the blender plug-in is sandboxed by design. You could probably find out more from the site, but I'm relatively certain that it's sandboxed because some people had wanted to use it for active desktop interface but couldn't do much with it because of the sandboxing.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
Absolutely no way I'm installing any software on my computers that comes with the conditions below:
I saw this a couple of months ago here on slashdot. As far as I can tell he is not dead.
The only demo I got to work beyound the pink rabbit screen was "Clown", and it is terribly slow (less than one frame/update per second). Then it crashed on exit from the demo page.
I run Netscape 4.7 for WinNT 4.0 on 300MHz P3 PC with 1GB RAM.
Don't forget to turn the Smart Update back OFF...
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
The plugin isn't released to enable to view Blender 3D models. The plugin is released to enable games in web browsers. VRML has never been intended as a development platform for games.
It's the next step in the strategy of Not a Number to develop Blender as game development platform. I think it has never been discussed an Slashot before but since a while game creation is an integral part of Blender. The "realtime" part of Blender gives the opportunity to add sensors, controllers and actuators to every object in a Blender scene. This way user toobject as well as object to object interaction is possible without the need to do any programming. Even for Blender haters, the realtime part is very simple, and in my opinion very intuitive.
More on gameblender can be found in the onlione gameblender manual [blender.nl]. Gameblender demo files can be found at the blender community website. The skategirl demo for example is very impressive, at least if you have 3D accelerator card (GF2).
Now that game creation is possible the next step is the ability to publish the games. Games can always be published as a blender native file. This requires that the person who wants to play the game, has to install Blender and play the game within the Blender program. He can play the game and he can even modify the game.
The Blender player and Blender plugin are ment for game developers who want to publish their games to people who aren't interested in the Blender program but only in the game. The player makes it possible to publish on CD-ROM, the plugin to publish on the web.
behold for the future
soon there will be more and more 3d on the net,
educational, promotional, and just for fun
online gaming, online sales, online product
presentations, you name it!
at our company we use blender for all our 3d!
animations and a few games we are working on now!
blender is the fastest modeller available!
blender renders faster than any other highend 3d
application!
blender, once you get addicted...
you will never let go!
peter (dotblend)
http://www.alatis.com
Sorry to rain on this, but Shockwave 3D is really no match for the Blender solution. First of all its limited to Windows and MacOS. And then it's basically a cut-down version of the more than 2 year old NeMo/Virtools (www.virtools.com) App'n'Web 3D package (which in itself is actually quite remarkable - despite the 5000$ a basic package costs).
Intel and Macromedia 'joined' for Webbased 3D about a year ago to 'develop' a 'new technology' for this. What they actually did was just buy a propretary format - the only one that wasn't yet 'infected' by an 'open source'/'sdk for free' (as in genesis3d/wildtangent) or 'give away for free' (as in Blender) marketing policy.
This could have turned out to be a major competitor to Blender on the Windoze platform if it weren't for Macromedia integrating the developement enviroment into one of the crappiest pieces of software under the sun - Director.
Figure this: Shockwave 3D programming is done in Lingo! *gasp* Intercal aside, it's the most hilarious excuse of a PL. With a set of 300 new commands for 3D. This is actually true.
NaN did it the right way by including Python as PL into Blender. Which also makes it a somewhat more complete solution than VRML.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I dislike browser plugins for the following reasons:
1. They make the already-memory-hog browser even more bloated.
2. They account for 2/3 of crashes/lockups of the browser. Sometimes I'm visiting a really interesting and hard-to-find site (from result 73 of a google search) in another window, and cannot find the thing again after killing and restarting.
3. Many of them are CPU hogs --- I don't want to waste my Valuable cpu time when I'm not looking at the browser window.
4. Really interesting things that have to be viewed with a plug-in is generally Big, and not saving them would be a bad waste of bandwidth. If I save them, in most cases I can watch them in a stand-alone application, which is cleaner.
5. Compatibility is a Big issue.
Therefore, I think I won't like this plugin, although Blender itself is still quite good.
Actually a better video card is more important than a better processor. It uses OpenGL so your card better have at least 16MB and be OpenGL compatible.
This is not VRML. Few sites use it for anything professional at this stage, because the plugin is only a few months old. It's still being tested for Linux/Netscape. It will do much if you actually give it a try instead of bashing it the second it comes out.
So who really cares. Maya's solution uses Shockwave and is slower on my new system than Blender is on older systems.
The program I really cut my 3D teeth on was a program called Imagine. Imagine was Blender-like, in so far that it had an interface and a bunch of concepts that you really had to know before you could make good use of it; stuff that wasn't immediately obvious.
:)
I did up a fully-detailed, to-scale Klingon D7 battlecruiser using it that was indistinguisable from the "real thing". It took about 3 months of after-work work. (Why is it that newbie 3D modelers always do Star Trek models?
Then, on the advice of a friend of mine, I got ahold of Lightwave.
In some ways it was more primitive than Imagine. No procedural textures to speak of, and no free-form bitmap textures (so "decals" were a serious PITA) But Oh-My-Lord it was SO SIMPLE to both make models and stage scenes.
Lightwave uses film paradigms for a lot of its user interface. It stops being a "3D tool" and starts being something more like an interactive film studio. With Imagine, 3D work was like being a cross between a computer programmer and an engineer. With Lightwave, it was more like being a film director.
Both my throughput and my quality went way, WAY up when I switched to Lightwave.
Imagine was capable of generating prettier stills (the renderer was more powerful) but Lightwave made better MOVIES - because the interface was more conducive to the real task at hand.
I don't doubt that people can do good work with Blender, and that with time, one can become proficiant in its use. But with Lightwave, that proficiancy step wasn't needed. The interface was transparent.
I guess you really have to try it and see for yourself.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
What's the big fuss? This constant /. bitching about licensing. It isn't that NaN get's to own your family when you've installed that plugin. Or that NaN ownz 95% of y'alls PC people out there like Mickeysoft does.
:-)
Blender has been for free (beer) since the begining and most certainly allways will be. Because that's the only way they can compete with Maya, Softimage and Houdini. It's the only usable 3D Package that costs nada. Or doesn't cost above 10000$, for that matter. Aside of that NaN owns the software. Period. In any commercial or non-commercial sense.
And so you're not installing a commercial plugin just like Flash. Ok. But calling that license "Draconian" is a bit over the top, imho.
Unless you've contributed Software to the public like Ton Roosendahl (Blender) did, I'd chill out on that issue a little.
On the other hand, if you should only be using GPL'd Software for the sake of it being GPL'd, I wouldn't care to much anyway. You're probably not the 'audience' for this software in the first place.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca