Blender is a professional, free, and open-source 3D computer graphics software toolkit used to create animated movies, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, interactive 3D apps and video games. Blender features include 3D modeling, UV opening, texturing, raster graphics editing, cheating and skinning, fluid and smoke simulations, particle simulations, soft body simulations, sculpting, animating, motion matching, camera tracking, rendering, motion graphics, video editing, and compositing. It also features an integrated game machine.
Video Blender (software)
History
The Dutch animation studio NeoGeo developed Blender as an in-house application in January 1995, with the lead author being co-owner of the company and software developer Ton Roosendaal. The name Blender was inspired by a song by Yello, from the album Baby . Several design options and experience for Blender were brought from the previous software called Traces, developed by Ton Roosendaal for NeoGeo on the Commodore Amiga platform during the period 1987-1991.
NeoGeo was later dissolved and his client's contract was taken over by another company. Following the dissolution of NeoGeo, Ton Roosendaal established Not a Number Technologies (NaN) in June 1998 to further develop Blender, initially distributing it as shareware until NaN broke out in 2002.
On July 18, 2002, Roosendaal started the "Free Blender" campaign, the crowdfunding predecessor. The campaign is aimed at open-sourcing Blender for a one-time payment of EUR100,000 (US $ 100,670 at the time) collected from the public. On September 7, 2002, it was announced that they had collected enough funds and would release the Blender source code. Currently, Blender is a free and open source software mostly developed by the community, along with two full-time and two part-time employees employed by Blender Institute.
The Blender Foundation originally reserves the right to use a dual license, so that, in addition to GPLv2, Blender will also be available under Blender License that does not require source code disclosure but the payment required for Basic Blender. However, they never used this option and suspended it indefinitely in 2005. Blender is only available under "GNU GPLv2 or later" and is not updated to GPLv3, since no "tangible benefits" are seen.
The following table lists important developments during the Blender release history:
Suzanne
In January-February 2002 it was clear that NaN could not survive and would close its doors in March. Nevertheless, they issued one more release, 2.25. As a kind of Easter egg, the last personal sign, the artists and developers decided to add a 3D model of a chimpanzee head. This was made by Willem-Paul van Overbruggen (SLiD3), who named it Suzanne after the orangutans in Kevin Smith's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back .
Suzanne is a Blender alternative to more general test models such as Teko Utah and Stanford Bunny. A low-polygon model with only 500 faces, Suzanne is often used as a quick and easy way to test materials, animations, rigs, textures, and lighting arrangements and is also often used in joke shots. Suzanne is still included in Blender. The biggest Blender contest gave an award called the Suzanne Award.
Clone
Due to the open source nature of Blender, other programs have tried to take advantage of its success by repackaging and selling cosmically modified versions. Examples include IllusionMage, 3DMofun, 3DMagix, and Fluid Designer, the latter being recognized as Blender-based.
Maps Blender (software)
Features
The official Blender release for Microsoft Windows, MacOS and Linux, as well as the port for FreeBSD, is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Although often distributed without a broad sample scene found in some other programs, this software contains features that are characteristic of high-end 3D software. Among its abilities are:
- Support for geometric primitives, including polygon mesh, fast surface subdivision modeling, Bezier curves, NURBS surfaces, metaballs, icospheres, multi-res digital sculpting (including dynamic topology, roasting maps, remeshing, resymetrize, depletion) , outline fonts, and a new n-gon modeling system called B-mesh.
- Internal rendering engine with scanline rendering, indirect lighting, and ambient occlusion that can export in multiple formats.
- The rendering engine pathtracer is called Cycles, which can utilize GPU for rendering. The cycle supports Open Shading Language since Blender 2.65.
- Integration with a number of external rendering engines via plugins.
- Keyframed animation tools include inverse kinematics, armature (skeletal), hook, curve and lattice-based deformation, shape animation, nonlinear animation, constraints, and vertex weighting.
- Simulation tools for soft body dynamics include detection of mesh collisions, LBM fluid dynamics, smoke simulations, Bullet rigid body dynamics, ocean generators with waves.
- Particle system that includes support for particle-based hair.
- Modifier to apply non-destructive effects.
- Python scripting for tool creation and prototyping, game logic, importing/exporting from other formats, task automation, and custom tools.
- Basic non-linear video/audio editing.
- The Blender Game Engine, a sub-project, offers interactivity features such as collision detection, dynamic engine, and programmable logic. It also allows the creation of stand-alone real-time applications ranging from architectural visualizations to video games.
- A fully integrated node-based converter in pipeline rendering accelerated with OpenCL.
- Procedural textures and knot-based, as well as texture painting, projective painting, point painting, heavy painting and dynamic painting.
- Real-time control during physics simulation and rendering.
- Camera and object tracking.
User interface
The Blender user interface incorporates the following concepts:
- Edit mode
- The two main modes of work are Object Mode and Edit Mode , which are toggled with the Tab button. The object mode is used to manipulate individual objects as a unit, while the Edit mode is used to manipulate actual object data. For example, Object Mode can be used to move, scale, and rotate an entire polygon mesh, and Edit Mode can be used to manipulate individual vertices of a single mesh. There are also several other modes, such as Vertex Paint, Weight Paint, and Sculpt Mode.
- Use hotkey
- Most commands can be accessed via hotkey. There is also a comprehensive GUI menu.
- Numeric input
- The number keys can be "dragged" to change their values ​​directly without the need to redirect to a specific widget, and set using the keyboard. Both the slider and the number keys can be limited to various step sizes with modifiers such as the Ctrl and Shift keys. Python expressions can also be typed directly into numerical entry fields, allowing mathematical expressions to specify values.
- Workspace management
- Blender GUI builds its own tile windowing system on top of one or more windows provided by the underlying platform. One platform window (often sized to fill the screen) is divided into sections and sub-sections that can be either Blender or window-type display types. Users can specify multiple layouts from such Blender windows, called screens , and quickly switch between them by selecting from the menu or with keyboard shortcuts. Each GUI element of a self-window can be controlled with the same tools that manipulate 3D views. For example, one can zoom in and out GUI-buttons using similar controls that zoom in and out in 3D view. The GUI view and screen layout are fully customizable by the user. It is possible to set the interface for specific tasks such as video editing or UV mapping or texturing by hiding features that are not used for the task.
Hardware requirements
Requirements Young: Count Level 2.0, NVIDIA Fermi, Kepler better or newer
OpenCL Requirements: OpenCL 1.2, OpenCL 2.0 is better, AMD GCN 2nd Gen. or later with OpenCL 2.0 recommended since 2.79 (GCN 1 on the Black List) or NVidia Kepler or Later (Cuda with more Performance).
Actually recommended for best performance: Intel Xeon or AMD Ryzen (8 to 32 Proz.), 64 GB RAM, NVIDIA GTX 1080 or better, AMD Radeon RX 580 or better, fast SSD, Display: Double 3840x2160 30-bit Color.
In Version 2.80 OpenGL 3.3 is the minimum and higher recommended for additional Features.
Supported platforms
Blender is available for Windows Vista and above, Mac OS X 10.6 and above, Linux and FreeBSD. Blender 2.76b is the last supported release for Windows XP.
File format
Blender has an internal file system that can package multiple scenes into a single file (called file ".blend ").
- All ".blend" blenders of advanced, backward, and cross-platform files are compatible with other Blender versions, with the following exceptions:
- Load animations stored in post-2.5 files in a pre-2.5 Blender. This is due to the working animation subsystem introduced in Blender 2.5 which is inherently incompatible with older versions.
- Loading mesh stored in heading 2.63. This is due to the introduction of BMesh, a more versatile mesh format.
- All scenes, objects, materials, textures, sounds, images, post-production effects for all animations can be saved in a ".blend" file. Data loaded from external sources, such as images and sounds, can also be stored externally and referenced via absolute or relative pathname. Likewise, the ".blend" file itself can also be used as a Blender asset library.
- The interface configuration is maintained in the ".blend" file.
A variety of import/export scripts that extend Blender's capabilities (accessing object data via the internal API) make it possible to work with other 3D tools.
Blender organizes data as various types of "data blocks", such as Objects, Snares, Lights, Scenes, Matter, Images, and so on. An object in Blender consists of several data blocks - for example, what the user would describe as a polygon mesh consisting of at least a block of Object and Mesh data, and usually also Materials and more, linked together. This allows multiple data blocks to refer to each other. There may be, for example, some Objects that refer to the same Mesh, and make subsequent edits of the mesh results together in the form of changes in all Objects using this Mesh. Objects, mesh, materials, textures etc. can also be linked from other.blend files, which allow the use of.blend files as reusable source libraries.
Import and Export
The software supports various 3D file formats for import and export, including 3D Studio (3DS), Filmbox (FBX), Autodesk (DXF), SVG, STL (for 3D printing), VRML and X3D.
Video editing
Blender features a fully functional Non-Linear production video editor called Video Sequence Editor or VSE for short. Blender's VSE has many features including effects like Gaussian Blur, Color gradation, Fade and Wipe transitions, and other video transformations. However, there is no multi-core support for video rendering with VSE.
Blend4Web, the open source webGL framework, can be used to convert Blender's entire scene with graphics, animations, sounds and physics to work in standard web browsers. Export can be done with a single click, even as a stand-alone web page.
Verge3D, a real time renderer and toolkit for creating interactive 3D web experiences, working on Blender and 3ds Max.
Rendering and ray tracing
Cycle is a tracing-racing machine designed to be interactive and easy to use, while still supporting many production features. It is installed as an add-on that is available by default and can be enabled in the top header.
GPU rendering
Cycles support GPU rendering that is used to help speed up rendering time. There are two GPU rendering modes: CUDA, which is the preferred method for NVIDIA graphics cards; and OpenCL, which supports rendering on AMD graphics cards. Some GPUs are also supported, which can be used to create a render farm - although having multiple GPUs does not increase the available memory because each GPU can only access its own memory.
Integrator
Integrator is the rendering algorithm used for lighting calculations. The current cycle supports track path integrators with direct light sampling. This works well for various lighting settings, but is not suitable for caustics and some other complex lighting situations. The rays are tracked from the camera into the scene, reflected to find a light source such as a light, a light-emitting object, or a world background. To find lights and surfaces emitting light, either indirect light sampling (letting rays follow the BSDF surface) and direct light sampling (selecting a light source and tracking rays toward it) are used.
There are two types of integrators:
- The default integrator tracking path is a pure path tracker. On each blow reflect light in one direction and take one lamp to receive the lighting. This makes each sample quicker to calculate, but it usually takes more samples to clear the sound.
- The alternative is a branched line tracking integrator that at the first corner divides the path for different surface components and takes into account all the lights for the shadow, not just one. This makes each sample slower, but reduces noise, especially in scenes dominated by direct or single-bounce lighting.
Go to Shading Language
Blender users can create their own nodes using Open Shading Language although it is important to note that there is no support for it on the GPU.
Materials
The material determines the look of snares, NURBS curves and other geometric objects. They consist of three shaders, defining mesh surface appearance, inner volume, and surface displacement.
Surface shader
Shader surface defines the interaction of light on the mesh surface. One or more BSDF can determine whether incoming light is reflected back, refracted into mesh, or absorbed.
Volume shader
When the surface of the shader does not reflect or absorb light, it enters the volume. If no volume shader is specified, it will pass directly to the other side of the mesh.
If one is defined, the volume shader describes the interaction of light as it passes through the mesh volume. Light can be spread, absorbed, or transmitted at any point in the volume.
Transfer Shaders
The surface shape can be changed by shader displacement. In this way, the texture can be used to make the mesh surface more detailed.
Depending on the setting, the displacement may be virtual, just modify the normal surface to give the impression of displacement (also known as bump mapping) or a combination of real and virtual displacement.
Demo reel
The Blender website contains several demo reels featuring various Blender features.
Physics
Blenders can be used to simulate the smoke, rain, dust, cloth, water, hair and body are stiff.
Fabric Simulation
The fabric is part of a net that has been designated as 'fabric' in the physics tab.
Fluid simulation
Physical Fluid Simulation
Liquid simulators can be used to simulate liquids, such as water on a cup. It uses the Lattice Boltzmann method to simulate fluid and allows for a large number of particle and resolution adjustments.
Simulated fluid particles
The particle physics fluid simulation creates particles that follow the hydrodynamic method of smoothed particles.
Development
Since the opening of the source, Blender has undergone significant refactoring of the initial code base and major additions to the feature set.
Improvements include animated system refreshes; a pile-based modifier system; an updated particle system (which can also be used to simulate hair and feathers); fluid dynamics; soft-body dynamics; GLSL shader support in gaming machine; advanced UV opening; fully rendered rendering pipes, allowing separate rendering and "rendering to texture"; editing and merging of node based materials; and projection painting.
Part of this development is fostered by the Google Summer of Code program, where the Blender Foundation has participated since 2005.
Blender 2.8 Project
Official planning for the next major revision Blender after the 2.7 series begins in the second half of 2015, with potential targets including a more configurable UI (dubbed "Blender 101"), support for physical based rendering (PBR) (dubbed EEVEE for "Extra Easy Virtual Environment Engine ") that will bring 3d realtime graphics upgrades to the viewport and thus also improve game engine rendering as well, enabling the use of C 11 and C99 in the codebase, moving to newer OpenGL versions and dropping support for earlier versions 3.2, repair of particle systems and constraints. Blender Internal renderer removed from 2.8.
Support
Blender is extensively documented on its website, with support provided through community tutorials and discussion forums on the Internet. The Blender network provides support and social services for Blender Professionals. Additionally, YouTube is known to have an abundance of video tutorials available for Blender or professional amateurs at no cost.
Use in media industry
Blender began as an in-house tool for NeoGeo, a Dutch commercial animation company. Blender has been used for television commercials in several parts of the world including Australia, Iceland, Brazil, Russia and Sweden.
Blender is used by NASA for 3D models available to the public. Many 3D models on the NASA 3D resources page are in the original.blend format.
NASA is also using Blender and Blend4Web to develop interactive web applications to celebrate the 3rd anniversary of Mars exploration of Curiosity on Mars. This app allows to operate the rover, control the camera and robot arm and reproduce some important events from the Mars Science Laboratory mission. This app is presented at the beginning of the WebGL section of SIGGRAPH 2015.
The first major professional project that uses Blender is Spider-Man 2 , where it is primarily used to create animatics and pre-visualizations for storyboard departments.
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- As an animated artist working on the storyboard department of Spider-Man 2, I use Blender ' s 3D modeling and character animation tools to enhance storyboards, re-create sets and props , and puts it into motion action and the camera moves in 3D space to help make Sam Raimi's vision ' clear to other departments. Ã, - Anthony Zierhut, Animatic Artist, Los Angeles.
The French movie Friday or Another Day is the first 35 mm feature film that uses Blender for all special effects, created on Linux workstations. It won a prize at the International Film Festival Locarno. The special effects are Digital Graphics of Belgium.
Blender has also been used for shows on the History Channel, along with many other professional 3D graphics programs.
Tomm Moore's The Secret of Kells, partly produced in Blender by Belgian Digital Graphics studio, has been nominated for an Oscar in the "Best Animated Feature Film" category.
PlumÃÆ'feros , a commercial animated film made entirely in Blender, aired in February 2010 in Argentina. The main character is an anthropomorphic speaking animal.
The special effects for episode 6 of Red Dwarf season X, played in 2012, are made using Blender as confirmed by Ben Simonds of Gecko Animation.
Blender is used for both CGI and compositing for the Henry Hardcore movie .
The special effects for the TV series The Man in the High Castle are done in Blender, with some particle simulations downgraded to Houdini.
Blender is used for pre-visual effects in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and many visual effects in the feature film Sabogal performed in Blender. Director David F. Sandberg uses Blender to some photoshoot at Lights Out (2016) , and Annabelle: Creation . Blender is used for part of the credit sequence at Wonder Woman (2017) and to do animations in the movie Cinderella the Cat (2017) .
Open project
Every 1-2 years, the Blender Foundation announces new creative projects to help drive innovation in Blender.
Dream Elephant (Open Film Project: Orange)
In September 2005, several leading Blender artists and developers began working on short films using free software primarily, in an initiative known as the Orange Film Project organized by the Dutch Institute of Media Art (NIMk). The resulting film, Elephants Dream , aired on March 24, 2006. In response to the success of the Elephants Dream, the Blender Foundation established the Blender Institute to undertake additional projects with two announced projects: Big Buck Bunny , also known as "Project Peach" and Yo Frankie , also known as Project Apricot (open game in collaboration with CrystalSpace which reuses some of the assets created during the Peach Project). This then makes Nintendo Video Nintendo 3DS between 2012 and 2013. Big Buck Bunny (Open Movie Project: Peach) )
On October 1, 2007, the new team began working on a second open project, "Peach", for the production of short film Big Buck Bunny. This time, the creative concept is very different. Instead of the deep and mystical style of Elephants Dream , things are more "funny and furry" according to the official website. The film premiered on April 10, 2008.
Yo Frankie! (Open Game Project: Apricot)
"Apricot" is a project to produce games based on the universe and movie characters Peach ( Big Buck Bunny ) using free software. This game is titled Yo Frankie . The project started on February 1, 2008, and construction is completed by the end of July 2008. The final product is expected at the end of August; However, the release was delayed. This game was released on December 9, 2008, under the GNU GPL or LGPL, with all content licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.
Sintel (Open Film Project: Durian)
Durian The Blender Foundation project (in accordance with the fruits tradition as the code name) was chosen this time to make a fantasy action epic about twelve minutes long, starring a teenage girl and a young dragon as the main character. The film premiered online on September 30, 2010. A game based on Sintel was officially announced at Blenderartists.org on May 12, 2010.
Many new features are integrated into Blender 2.5 and so on are the immediate results of Project Durian.
Tear Steel (Open Film Project: Mango )
On October 2, 2011, the fourth open film project, codenamed "Mango", was announced by Blender Foundation. A team of artists gathered using open-call community participation. This is the first Blender open movie that uses live action as well as CG.
The shoot for Mango begins on May 7, 2012, and the film was released on September 26, 2012. Like the previous movie, all recordings, scenes, and models were created under a Creative Commons license according to free content.
According to a press release the movie, "The premise of the movie is about a group of warriors and scientists, who gathered at the 'Oude Kerk' in Amsterdam to organize important events of the past, in a desperate attempt to save the world from a destructive robot.."
Cosmos Laundromat (Open Movie Project: Gooseberry)
On January 10, 2011, Ton Roosendaal announced that the fifth open film project will be codenamed "Gooseberry" and the goal is to produce a long animated film. He speculates that production will begin between 2012 and 2014. The film should be written and produced by a coalition of international animation studios. The studio lineup was announced on January 28, 2014, and production begins shortly thereafter. As of March 2014, a mood board has been built and development goals have been set. The first ten-minute pilot was released on YouTube on August 10, 2015. He won the Jury's SIGGRAPH 2016 Computer Animation Festival Award.
Layanan daring
Blender Cloud
The Blender Cloud Platform, launched in March 2014 and operated by Blender Institute, is a cloud-based cloud computing platform and add-on Blender client that provides hosting and syncing for reserved animated project files. Launched to promote and raise funds for Project: Gooseberry , and is intended to replace DVD sales by Blender Foundation with subscription-based models for file hosting, asset sharing, and collaboration. The Blender Cloud feature is Blender Sync , which provides sync between Blender clients for file changes, user preferences, and other features.
Blender ID
Blender ID is a unified login for Blender software and service users, providing login for Blender Cloud, Blender Store, Blender Conference, Blender Network, Blender Development Fund, and Blender Foundation Certified Trainer Program.
See also
- Caminandes, a series of animated short movies
- ManuelbastioniLAB, free and open source plug-in for Blender for 3D parametric modeling of photorealistic humanoid characters
References
Further reading
External links
- Official website
- Wiki Blender
- Blender on Stack Exchange (Questions & Answers)
- Community of Blender Artists
- Blender Nation, news
- Blender Art, a bimonthly magazine for Blender learners
- NPR Blender, dedicated to Non-Photorealistic Rendering
- Portal Blender Game Engine Portal
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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