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NaN Closes Shop, The End of Blender?
lowell writes "The shareholders and directors of NaN Holding BV, owners of Blender, have decided to terminate all activities of NaN Technologies BV and apply for its bankruptcy at the Amsterdam court. It means that effective today, all technology development and website activities around
Blender will be frozen. " Nice
app. Too bad really.
um, with all due respect, "a couple times" isn't enough to understand a 3D design app.
As any real blender user will tell you, once you learn the interface it's one of the fastest modelers out there.
>It's already GPLed, Einstien.
Wrong.
from Freshmeat:
Per the license: "You are hereby granted permission to copy and distribute the Software without written agreement from NaN, only for non-commercial purposes."
Other parts of the software, such as the blender render daemon, are fully Open Source and Free Software, released under the new BSD license.
RFC1925
Maya (possibly the preeminent 3D animation app) is available under Linux. It's just out of your freebie pricerange.
There's also a free "Personal Learning Edition" available, but it's only for WinNT/2k/XP or OSX. So contact Alias|Wavefront and tell them you want to see it for Linux.
Blender really isn't the end-all/be-all of 3d apps the Slashdot crowd makes it out to be.
As any real blender user will tell you, once you learn the interface it's one of the fastest modelers out there.
...
That is absolutely correct.
I've been working on a film project using blender for some time, and have tried other 3d animation products on other platforms and blender was, hands down, the best at nearly everything one needs to do to make good, high quality animations. There were, of course, failings, and some things for which one would choose to use another tool, but for the vast majority of tasks it was excellent and, as you say, once you learn the interface, the most intuitive without sacrificing power and features.
This is really tragic. I really, really hope they GPL the source so that the project may live on, but I have a feeling this is going to be an example where the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman's much maligned stance of "avoid proprietary software at all costs, you'll pay in the end if you don't" may very well be vindicated, in the form of hundreds of hours of animation work that will become less and less usable as the existing binaries age and become more and more difficult to get running (as glibc and other libraries change with time).
If anyone from NaN is reading, please, please, please GPL the blender code.
As an aside I am surprised they didn't go with the "you pay for the release today, or wait 12 months and get the features in the GPLed version." Many would have paid, and the delayed, GPLed version would have been insurance against this kind of thing happening. Oh well, twenty-twenty hindsight and all that
:-(
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Let's pull some resources to port it.
http://www.openfx.org
As a non-animator I first installed Blender and immediately became deeply confused and gave up.
A while later, I installed k3d. There was no
Within an hour I learned how to make animations with dancing deformed tea pots.
K3d is GPL. It's available under windows as well, but that's a massive pain in the butt to install.