Screenshot of Blender 2.3.0.
(Larger version)

Blender is an open-source computer program for modelling and rendering three-dimensional scenes and animations. It has a highly idiosyncratic user interface, which has been criticized as unintuitive but defended as very efficient.

Table of contents

1 Development 2 Features 3 External links

Development

Originally, the program was developed as an in-house application by the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo; the main author, Ton Roosendaal, founded Not a Number Technologies (NaN) in June 1998 to further develop and distribute the program. The program was initially distributed as proprietary software available at no cost (freeware) until NaN went bankrupt in 2002. The debtors agreed to release Blender as free software, under the terms of the GNU General Public License, for a one-time payment of €100,000. On July 18, 2002, a Blender Funding Company was founded by Roosendaal in order to collect donations; on September 7, it was announced that enough funds had been collected and that the Blender source code would be released in October. Blender is now an actively developed open-source program.

Features

Blender has a relatively small installation size (less than 10 megabytes), and is not distributed with documentation or extensive example scenes, but the software is rich with features that are characteristic of high-end modelling software. Among is capabilities are:

• Support for a variety of geometric primitives, including polygon meshes, NURBS, and vector fonts
• Animation tools including inverse kinematics, armature and lattice deformation, keyframes, constraints, and vertex weighting
• Audio editing and synchronization for movie playback
• Interactive game features such as collision detection, game dynamics and logic
• Versatile rendering capabilities and integration with the Yafray free ray tracing package
• Python scripting for automating or controlling various tasks

External links