Blender is a full-featured tool

   

Blender Welcome Screen ver 2.68 autumn 2013

Blender makes it possible to perform a wide range of 3d-content-creation-oriented tasks. Therefore it may seem daunting when first trying to grasp the basics. However, with a bit of motivation and the right learning material, it is possible to be productive with Blender after a few hours of practice. If you're reading this wiki, it is a good start, though it serves more as a reference. You also have online video tutorials (free and paid) from specialized websites, and several books in the Blender store.

Despite everything Blender can do, it remains a tool. Great artists create masterpieces, not only by pressing buttons or manipulating brushes, but also by learning and practicing human anatomy, color theory, composition, lighting, traditional animation, photography, psychology and many other areas. 3D content creation software have the added technical complexity and jargon associated with the underpinning technologies. CPUs, GPUs, memory, algorithms, vectors, materials, meshes are the mediums of the digital artist, and understanding them, even broadly, will help you using Blender to its best.

So keep reading this wiki, learn the great tool that Blender is, keep your mind open to other artistic and technological areas, and you too can become a great artist.

Blender’s History

In 1988 Ton Roosendaal co-founded the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo. NeoGeo quickly became the largest 3D animation studio in the Netherlands and one of the leading animation houses in Europe. NeoGeo created award-winning productions (European Corporate Video Awards 1993 and 1995) for large corporate clients such as multi-national electronics company Philips. Within NeoGeo Ton was responsible for both art direction and internal software development. After careful deliberation Ton decided that the current in-house 3D tool set for NeoGeo was too old and cumbersome to maintain and upgrade and needed to be rewritten from scratch. In 1995 this rewrite began and was destined to become the 3D software creation we all know as Blender. As NeoGeo continued to refine and improve Blender it became apparent to Ton that Blender could be used as a tool for other artists outside of NeoGeo.

In 1998, Ton decided to found a new company called Not a Number (NaN) as a spin-off of NeoGeo to further market and develop Blender. At the core of NaN was a desire to create and distribute a compact, cross platform 3D application for free. At the time this was a revolutionary concept as most commercial modelers cost several thousands of (US) dollars. NaN hoped to bring professional level 3D modeling and animation tools within the reach of the general computing public. NaN’s business model involved providing commercial products and services around Blender. In 1999 NaN attended its first Siggraph conference in an effort to more widely promote Blender. Blender’s first Siggraph convention was a huge success and gathered a tremendous amount of interest from both the press and attendees. Blender was a hit and its huge potential confirmed!

Following the success of the Siggraph conference in early 2000, NaN secured financing of €4.5m from venture capitalists. This large inflow of cash enabled NaN to rapidly expand its operations. Soon NaN boasted as many as fifty employees working around the world trying to improve and promote Blender. In the summer of 2000, Blender v2.0 was released. This version of Blender added the integration of a game engine to the 3D application. By the end of 2000, the number of users registered on the NaN website surpassed 250,000.

Unfortunately, NaN’s ambitions and opportunities didn’t match the company’s capabilities and the market realities of the time. This over-extension resulted in restarting NaN with new investor funding and a smaller company in April 2001. Six months later NaN’s first commercial software product, Blender Publisher was launched. This product was targeted at the emerging market of interactive webbased 3D media. Due to disappointing sales and the ongoing difficult economic climate, the new investors decided to shut down all

NaN operations. The shutdown also included discontinuing the development of Blender. Although there were clearly shortcomings in the then current version of Blender, such as a complex internal software architecture, unfinished features and a non-standard way of providing the GUI, the enthusiastic support from the user community and customers who had purchased Blender Publisher in the past meant that Ton couldn’t justify leaving Blender to fade into insignificance. Since restarting a company with a sufficiently large team of

developers wasn’t feasible, Ton Roosendaal founded the non-profit organization Blender Foundation in March 2002.

The Blender Foundation’s primary goal was to find a way to continue developing and promoting Blender as a community-based Open Source project. In July 2002, Ton managed to get the NaN investors to agree to a unique Blender Foundation plan to attempt to release Blender as open source. With an enthusiastic group of volunteers, among them several ex-NaN employees, a fund raising campaign was launched to “Free Blender”. To everyone’s surprise and delight the campaign reached the €100,000 goal in only seven short weeks. Thence the Foundation could buy the rights to the Blender source code and intellectual property rights from the NaN investors and subsequently release Blender to the open source community under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) on Sunday October 13, 2002. Blender development continues to this day driven by a team of far-flung, dedicated volunteers from around the world led by Blender’s original creator, Ton Roosendaal.

 

Video: From Blender 1.60 to 2.50 

 

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