Some months ago we reported on Ton’s effort to Free his powerful 3D rendering package under the GPL, Blender. After almost 4 months and 100,000 euros, Blender is now completely free for all.
Blender is Now Free
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Now I wish I would have kept my Blender Book. I’ll have to buy it again.
Although I am about as artistic as a flock of diuretic skunks, I have used Blender in the past, and I have found it quite useful. I’m glad to see it available once again.
I have seen Blender’s interface chastised on OSNews before, and while it does present the user with what appears to be an enormous learning curve, it really isn’t that hard to figure out once you are shown the ideology behind it. I think it is actually quite easy to use once you get used to it because everything is right there. You don’t have to waste time futzing around with menus and dialog boxes.
My personal belief has always been that the interface was designed in such a way that, although Blender has always been free cash-wise, you had to buy the manual to figure out what was going on.
If that’s true, it’s not a bad way to support development really.
It’s not an OS.
I know Blender is a 3D creation suite, allowing fully integrated modeling, animation, rendering, post production and interactive 3D creation and playback.
I know it’s FULLY FREE AND CROSS PLATFORM.. oh
.
Great piece of software, great news, and deserves an article.
Blender becoming open source is certainly a good thing; I’m curious how the development will continue. But still, I’m a LightWave user at heart. Unfortunately, you’re not always in the position to chose your tools … 🙂
Regarding the OS site of things, I was pleasently surprised that both LightWave 7 and Rhino 2.0 run well on Linux, using Wine. There are some strange problems with redrawing menus, but nothing that really keeps you from getting your work done.
> If that’s true, it’s not a bad way to support development really.
Actually, it probably is a bad way to support development, considering the company went out of business…
>Actually, it probably is a bad way to support development, >considering the company went out of business..
Interesting, “if one fails all will fail” ..
I dont think so.
Nobody’s complained about the UI yet.
People like to do that at Slashdot.
Great, but how to compile it ? I’m using RedHat 8.0, after crawling through the makefiles and fixing things, its just broken. Some compiles though.
A real guide on how to compile this beast is needed.
>Nobody’s complained about the UI yet.
I think its great..
I was one of the lucky ones to attend the conference in Amsterdam, and saw some pretty amazing things that used Blender.
The GPL’ng of Blender is good in so many ways, I can hardly express it. Not only does it allow diehard render people and 3D people to continue using it, but now it can grow at an accelerated rate, and for other platforms, without being hindered by a board of directors.
There are some real geniuses working with Blender, and from what I saw at the conference, we’re all going to be surprised with what they can do now that the barriers to their freedom have been pushed aside. I mean that.
I also want to personally thank Ton and crew for being such fantastic hosts at the event, patiently answering a multitude of questions by many people, and generally being good sports.
Peace.
I have to tell you you botched it..
remember that quelsolaar / loq airu thing i was talking about…
its based on Verse….
you know as in speech on the blendercon ;D
anyway GREAT report on blender at the beosjournal love it.
keep up the good work chris & eugenia + crew
actually, it’s ok.
The author emailed me this morning about it, and told me that it was alright to say Verse now…
Oh, I also showed him the muscle page. He seemed interested.
What he wants to do ala Verse is very much what muscle already does, except in a very generic way. I’m positive that muscle could be adopted to handle 3D objects, and more.
The demonstration that the author gave at the conference was Spot On. I mean, solid… A packed audience, with very timely and informative content, and questions answered that showed how Verse could be used in Blender. Some really neat stuff.
I’m looking forward to seeing more work by him.
I’ve just finished downloading the tar.gz; can’t wait to compile it.
This is really good news for me since I donated some money but was a bit affraid that the money wouldn’t be enough to GPL’ed the package.
_____________
I’m curious how the development will continue. But still, I’m a LightWave user at heart.
😉
Can you use Verse in combination with Blender? We had these two guys from Verse as guest lecturers in a computer graphics course, but as far as I can remember, they didn’t mention integrating it with Blender. Might be some new stuff going on. Gotta look into that.
Also is Blender better than Maya 7.0 on Linux?
I think Corel Bryce is really good 3d software.
Easy to use UI, however takes about 15 mintues to get used to and is only meant for landscaping
See more here:
http://www3.corel.com/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic+FTContentServer?pagen…
Blender and Maya are two very different products, you can’t really compare the tool. While I would use Maya over blender any day, Blender is free and still holds its own as a great piece of software. I’m not too certain why you’re having problems running it on Linux (it requires GL, so make sure X has GL configured properly).
The latest version of Maya is 4.5, by the way, not 7.0
the makefiles of the source I got is completely messed up
When will there be an RPM or something easy to install? Also what is maya for and waht is belnder for? Aren’t they both for 3d modeling?
Also there is no Linux version of Bryce
The latest version of Maya is 4.5, by the way, not 7.0
I was about to say that…
and that you have to install something similar to QT2 to run the Maya 4 UI (KDE3 will not run Maya for Linux, thought).
SuSE 8.1 has KDE3, right ?
> Also what is maya for and waht is belnder for? Aren’t they both for 3d modeling?
Not only for modelling, but also for simulating/animating and rendering. In the end, it’s about the feature set and, of course, third-party support. Blender can’t compete with Maya (or any of the bigger packages, for that matter) in these areas.
http://www.linux.ucla.edu/~phaethon/blender/blender-autoconfiscate-…
Usually compiles without much tweaks.
Thanks for the file, downloading now.