Blender Rocks

Can you name a program or several that allow you to do 3D modeling, compositing, and animation? Good. Now can you name a free program that allows you to do all three? Hard, isn't it. Finally, can you name a program that does all of this, costs nothing, and runs on almost every platform in the known universe.

If you can you've probably heard about Blender and you can stop reading the post now. If you haven't then prepare to be amazed. This is a program that duplicates the power of programs that are infinitely more expensive. Yet does so in an intelligent and relatively easy to use manner. It's also open-source so you can bend it to your will however you may please. Power indeed.

I've been playing with the application on and off for several months now. I'm only now starting to get to the point where my models are starting to look like the stuff that I envision. It's like owning every set of Lego's out there and then some. With this program you get to build your own Legos.

What have I done with it. I've build a teddy bear, a submarine, and a robot. The robot is by far the most intricate. It's taken me about a week to get the modeling and proportions to where I would like them. But it's been fun.

It's not perfect. I've had the program quit on me a few times (less so in the recent version) and the control scheme takes forever to learn. But once you do you understand why they designers did it this way. It's incredibly fast to draw something out.

Blender's build for speed, ease of learning is secondary. But once you figure things out it's all good.

There is also a thriving community of Blender fanatics. Artists with the talent but not the money to own one of the big ticket modeling programs. Check out www.blenderwars.com for Star Wars related works. It's pretty cool. Also, the main page has a gallery where you can see the work that people have done with it. Everything from cartoony, to photoreal, to just plain wired exists on that site. Even if you don't do 3d design you can at least check out the pics.

That's what I've done this week.

Rob