Blender Software Seminar 2011

1. INTRODUCTION

Blender is a free, open-source 3D rendering program that puts the power of the medium back

into the hands of the artist. Blender is available for most platforms that are in use today. You can

run it on Windows 98, ME, 2000, or XP; Mac OS X; Linux; Solaris; Irix; FreeBSD.The

download is, at most, 5.9MB. This should take less than half-an-hour on a dial-up connection,

and less than one minute on a broadband connection, so there's no reason not to download it if

you're even remotely curious about giving it a try.

In the world of video editing tools, Blender is a popular 3D graphics tool that's often used for

modeling, texturing, UV unwrapping, rigging, smoke and water simulation, rendering,

animating, and skinning. It is also used for simulating, editing non-linear work, compositing and

for the making of 3D applications including visual effects, video games, and animated film.

Neo Geo, the Dutch animation company, created Blender for their own benefit and it took some

years for it to enter the public domain and become free software. The primary author of Blender

was Ton Roosendaal. It began being distributed as shareware by Not a Number Technologies

who went on to declare bankruptcy in 2002.

Features of Blender include simulation tools that are very advanced, such as realistic body

simulators, cloth, fluid, dynamics for soft body rendering, animation tools for creating powerful

bodies, node based materials, and script embedding technology. Blender has a feature set that is

robust, and is comparable to high-end software such as Maya Cinema 4D, LightWave, and 3ds

Max.

Blender features a file system that is internal and allows users to place many scenes into one file.

Blender can act as a library from which content that's already been made can be borrowed. Files

can also be automatically saved by the program, to avoid the risk of losing valuable work. All

added effects for post production, textures, materials, sounds, images, scenes and objects for a

complete animation can be saved in one single file - a real plus for any creator. Configurations

for the interface are stored in files so that what is saved is exactly what is returned when the

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Blender Software Seminar 2011

content is re-accessed. Import and export scripts running within Blender make inter operation

with other 3D tools possible. Blender doesn't take up a great deal of disk space and can be run on

most popular operating systems.   

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Blender Software Seminar 2011

2. HISTORY

Blender was developed as an in-house application by the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo and

Not a Number Technologies (NaN). It was primarily authored by Ton Roosendaal, who had

previously written a ray tracer called Traces for Amiga in 1989. The name "Blender" was

inspired by a song by Yello, from the album Baby.

Blender 2.4 screenshot

Roosendaal founded NaN in June 1998 to further develop and distribute the program. The

program was initially distributed as shareware until NaN went bankrupt in 2002.

The creditors agreed to release Blender under the terms of the GNU General Public License, for

a one-time payment of €100,000 (US$100,670 at the time). On July 18, 2002, a Blender funding

campaign was started by Roosendaal in order to collect donations and on September 7, 2002 it

was announced that enough funds had been collected and that the Blender source code would be

released. Today, Blender is free, open-source software and is, apart from the two half-time

employees and the two full-time employees of the Blender Institute, developed by the

community.

The Blender Foundation initially reserved the right to use dual licensing, so that, in addition to

GNU GPL, Blender would have been available also under the "Blender License", which did not

require disclosing source code but required payments to the Blender Foundation. However, this

option was never exercised and was suspended indefinitely in 2005. Currently, Blender is solely

available under GNU GPL.

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2.1SUZANNE

Suzanne

In January/February 2002 it was quite clear that NaN could

not survive and would close the doors in March. Nevertheless, they found the energy for doing at

least one more release: 2.25. As a sort-of easter egg, a last personal tag, the artists and developers

decided to add a 3D model of a chimpanzee. It was created by Willem-Paul van Overbruggen

(SLiD3), who also named it Suzanne, after the orangutan in the Kevin Smith film Jay and Silent

Bob Strike Back.

Suzanne is Blender's alternative to more common "test models" such as the Utah Teapot and the

Stanford Bunny. A low-polygon model with only 500 faces, Suzanne is often used as a quick and

easy way to test material, animation, rigs, texture, and lighting setups, and is also frequently used

in joke images. The largest Blender contest gives out an award called the Suzanne Awards.

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Blender Software Seminar 2011

3. FEATURES

Blender has a relatively small installation size and runs on several popular computing platforms.

Official versions of the software are released for Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, and

FreeBSD. Though it is often distributed without extensive example scenes found in some other

programs, the software contains features that are characteristic of high-end 3d software. Among

its capabilities are:

Support for a variety of geometric primitives, including polygon meshes, fast subdivision

surface modeling, Bezier curves, NURBS surfaces, metaballs, digital sculpting, outline

font, and a new n-gon modeling system called B-mesh.

Integration with YafaRay, a free software ray tracer.

Internal render engine with ray tracing, indirect lighting, and ambient oclusion that can

export in a wide variety of formats.

Keyframed animation tools including inverse kinematics, armature (skeletal), hook, curve

and lattice-based deformations, shape keys (morphing), non-linear animation, constraints,

vertex weighting, soft body dynamics including mesh collision detection, LBM fluid

dynamics, smoke simulation, Bullet rigid body dynamics, particle-based hair, and a

particle system with collision detection.

Modifiers to apply non-destructive effects.

Python scripting for tool creation and prototyping, game logic, importing and/or

exporting from other formats, task automation and custom tools.

Basic non-linear video/audio editing and compositing capabilities.

Game Blender, a sub-project, offers interactivity features such as collision detection,

dynamics engine, and programmable logic. It also allows the creation of stand-alone,

real-time applications ranging from architectural visualization to video game

construction.

A fully-integrated node-based compositor within the rendering pipeline.

Realtime control during physics simulation and rendering.

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Using the node editor to create anisotropic metallic materials

A 3D rendering with ray tracing and ambient occlusion using Blender and YafaRay

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Blender Software Seminar 2011

Blender can create very high resolution models and renderings

Rendered grass created with Blender 2.49.

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Blender Software Seminar 2011

Sintel and her dragon rendered with Blender. Blender offers the ability to create realistic-looking people.

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Blender Software Seminar 2011

3.1 USER INTERFACE

Blender's user interface has been upgraded for version 2.57

Blender has had a reputation as being difficult to learn for users accustomed to other 3D graphics

software. Nearly every function has a direct keyboard shortcut and there can be several different

shortcuts per key. Since Blender became free software, there has been effort to add

comprehensive contextual menus as well as make the tool usage more logical and streamlined.

There have also been efforts to visually enhance the user interface, with the introduction of color

themes, transparent floating widgets, a new and improved object tree overview, and other small

improvements (such as a color picker widget). Blender's user interface incorporates the following

concepts:

Editing modes

The two primary modes of work are Object Mode and Edit Mode, which are toggled with

the Tab key. Object mode is used to manipulate individual objects as a unit, while Edit

mode is used to manipulate the actual object data. For example, Object Mode can be used

to move, scale, and rotate entire polygon meshes, and Edit Mode can be used to

manipulate the individual vertices of a single mesh. There are also several other modes,

such as Vertex Paint, Weight Paint, and Sculpt Mode. The 2.45 release also had the UV

Mapping Mode, but it was merged with the Edit Mode in 2.46 Release Candidate 1.

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Hotkey utilization

Most of the commands are accessible via hotkeys. Until the 2.x and especially the 2.3x

versions, this was in fact the only way to give commands, and this was largely

responsible for creating Blender's reputation as a difficult-to-learn program. The new

versions have more comprehensive GUI menus.

Numeric input

Numeric buttons can be "dragged" to change their value directly without the need to aim

at a particular widget, thus saving screen real estate and time. Both sliders and number

buttons can be constrained to various step sizes with modifiers like the Ctrl and Shift

keys. Python expressions can also be typed directly into number entry fields, allowing

mathematical expressions to be used to specify values.

Workspace management

The Blender GUI is made up of one or more screens, each of which can be divided into

sections and subsections that can be of any type of Blender's views or window-types.

Each window-type's own GUI elements can be controlled with the same tools that

manipulate 3D view. For example, one can zoom in and out of GUI-buttons in the same

way one zooms in and out in the 3D viewport. The GUI viewport and screen layout is

fully user-customizable. It is possible to set up the interface for specific tasks such as

video editing or UV mapping or texturing by hiding features not utilized for the task. The

user interface supports multiple monitors.

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Blender Software Seminar 2011

3.2 HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS

Blender has very low hardware requirements compared to other 3D suites.However, for

advanced effects and high-poly editing, a more powerful system is needed.

Hardware Minimum Recommended Production Standard

System Type 32 bit 32 bit 64 bit

Processor 1 GHz, Single Core 2 GHz, Dual Core 2 GHz, Multi Core

Memory 512 MB RAM 2 GB 8 GB

Graphics

Card

OpenGL card with 64

MB RAM

OpenGL card with 256 or

512 MB RAM

OpenGL card with 768 MB RAM,

ATI or Nvidia card**

Display1024x768 px with 16

bit color

1920 x 1200 px with 32 bit

color1920 x 1200 px with 32 bit color

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Blender Software Seminar 2011

3.3 FI LE FORMAT

Blender features an internal file system that allows one to pack multiple scenes into a single file

(called a ".blend" file).

All of Blender's ".blend" files are forward, backward, and cross-platform compatible with

other versions of Blender.

Snapshot ".blend" files can be auto-saved periodically by the program, making it easier to

survive a program crash.

All scenes, objects, materials, textures, sounds, images, post-production effects for an

entire animation can be stored in a single ".blend" file. Data loaded from external sources,

such as images and sounds, can also be stored externally and referenced through either an

absolute or relative pathname. Likewise, ".blend" files themselves can also be used as

libraries of Blender assets.

Interface configurations are retained in the ".blend" files, such that what you save is what

you get upon load. This file can be stored as "user defaults" so this screen configuration,

as well as all the objects stored in it, is used every time you load Blender.

The actual ".blend" file is similar to the EA Interchange File Format, starting with its own header

(for example BLENDER_v248) that specifies the version, endianness and pointer size, followed

by a collection of binary chunks storing the data blocks, and all the type and struct definitions

also known as DNA. Although it is hard to read and convert a ".blend" file to another format

using external tools, the readblend utility can do this. Dozens of import/export scripts that run

inside Blender itself, accessing the object data via API, make it possible to inter-operate with

other 3D tools.

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Jeroen Bakker documented the Blender file format to allow inter-operation with other tooling.

The document can be found at the The mystery of the blend website.A DNA structure browser is

also available on this site.

Blender organizes data as various kinds of "data blocks", such as Objects, Meshes, Lamps,

Scenes, Materials, Images and so on. An object in Blender consists of multiple data blocks - for

example, a polygon mesh has at least an Object and Mesh data block, and usually also a

Material. This allows various data blocks to refer to each other; there may be, for example,

multiple Objects that refer to the same Mesh, allowing the mesh to be duplicated while only

keeping one copy of the mesh data in memory, and allowing subsequent editing of all duplicated

meshes at the same time. Data block relationships can also be changed manually. Data blocks

can also be referred to in other .blend files, allowing the use of .blend files as reusable object

libraries.

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Blender Software Seminar 2011

4. COMPARISON WITH OTHER 3D SOFTWARE

Blender is a dominant open source product with a range of features comparable to mid- to high-

range commercial, proprietary software. In 2010, CGenie classed Blender as a fledgling product

with the majority of its users being "hobbyists" rather than students or professionalsbut with its

high standards rising year on year. They also reported that users thought Blender needed more

development and required more compatibility with other programs.

A 2007 article claimed that Blender's interface was not up to industry standards, but was

nevertheless suited to fast workflow and was sometimes more intuitive. Poor documentation was

also criticizedalthough there is community support through an online wiki, and a range of books

published both by the Blender Foundation and independently.

In 2010, Blender 2.5 Beta was released for open-testing. Featuring a completely redesigned and

greatly simplified user interface, it aims to improve work flow and ease of use. Although not yet

fully featured, Blender 2.5 is in its final stages of development and its animation system is

considered by early users to be as good or better than some professional packages.

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Blender Software Seminar 2011

5. DEVELOPMENT

Since the opening of the source, Blender has experienced significant refactoring of the initial

codebase and major additions to its feature set.

Game engine GLSL materials

Recent improvements include an animation system refresh; a stack-based modifier system; an

updated particle system (which can also be used to simulate hair and fur); fluid dynamics; soft-

body dynamics; GLSL shaders support in the game engine; advanced UV unwrapping; a fully-

recoded render pipeline, allowing separate render passes and "render to texture"; node-based

material editing and compositing; Projection painting.

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Part of these developments were fostered by Google's Summer of Code program, in which the

Blender Foundation has participated since 2005.

The current release version is 2.58a.

Blender 2.5 is currently in the test version release cycle, beginning with the release of Alpha 0

version on 24 November 2009. The current stable version, 2.58 was released on June 22, 2011.

New features include:

New user interface

New animation system, which allows almost any value to be animated

Re-written, Python 3.x scripting API

Smoke simulation

Ocean simulationUpdated toolset, with improved implementation

Approximate indirect lighting

Volume rendering

Ray tracing optimizations, rendering some scenes "up to 10x faster"

Solidify modifier

Sculpt brush and stroke upgrade

Add-on system

Custom keyboard shortcuts

Spline IK

Color management

Fluid particles (smoothed-particle hydrodynamics)

Network render

Deep shadow maps

Dynamic paint system

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Blender Software Seminar 2011

6. SUPPORT

In the month following the release of Blender v2.44, it was downloaded 800,000 times; this

worldwide user base forms the core of the support mechanisms for the program. Most users learn

Blender through community tutorials and discussion forums on the internet such as Blender

Artists (previously known as elYsiun); however, another learning method is to download and

inspect ready-made Blender models.

Numerous other sites, for example BlenderArt Magazine]—a free, downloadable magazine with

each issue handling a particular area in 3D development—and BlenderNation, provide

information on everything surrounding Blender, showcase new techniques and features, and

provide tutorials and other guides

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7. ADVANTAGES

It's free www.blender.org to download

Supports programming in python .

It can develop games.

Very fast, lightweight, and no install needed .

Run's on many os's win32, linux, mac osx, etc.

keyboard shortcuts are available,so that you can model and animate extremely fast once

you get used to them. Also, since they're the same on all machines you don't have to

worry if you switch to another workstation, etc.

Blender has one of the fastest subdivision surface modeling tools in the industry.

Blender has a very powerful and robust UV mapping capabilities both in the core tools,

and via addon scripts.

Blender has a good looking and fast soft body dynamics system - it has softbody,

softbody collision capabilities.

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8. DISADVANTAGES

Learning curve for non standard GUI.

There is no "Create ToyStory" button.

Potential crashes when opening new window(user preferences,rendering,window

duplication).

COLLADA import and export is not complete.

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9. APPLICATIONS

Blender started out as an inhouse tool for a Dutch commercial animation company, NeoGeo.

Blender has been used for television commercials in several parts of the world including

Australia, Iceland, Brazil, Russia and Sweden.[

The first large professional project that used Blender was Spider-Man 2, where it was primarily

used to create animatics and pre-visualizations for the storyboard department.

"As an animatic artist working in the storyboard department of Spider-Man 2, I used

Blender's 3D modeling and character animation tools to enhance the storyboards, re-

creating sets and props, and putting into motion action and camera moves in 3D space to

help make Sam Raimi's vision as clear to other departments as possible." - Anthony

Zierhut, Animatic Artist, Los Angeles.

The French-language film Friday or Another Day (Vendredi ou un autre jour) was the first

35 mm feature film to use Blender for all the special effects, made on GNU/Linux workstations.

It won a prize at the Locarno International Film Festival. The special effects were by Digital

Graphics[ of Belgium.

Blender has also been used for shows on the History Channel, alongside many other professional

3D graphics programs.

Tomm Moore’s The Secret of Kells, which was partly produced in Blender by the Belgian studio

Digital Graphics, has been nominated for an Oscar in the category ‘Best Animated Feature Film’.

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Blender Software Seminar 2011

9.1 ELEPHANTS DREAM (OPEN MOVIE PROJECT: ORANGE)

Elephants Dream HD DVD cover.

In September 2005, some of the most notable Blender artists and developers began working on a

short film using primarily free software, in an initiative known as the Orange Movie Project

hosted by the Netherlands Media Art Institute (NIMk). The resulting film, Elephants Dream,

premiered on March 24, 2006. In response to the success of Elephants Dream, the Blender

Foundation founded the Blender Institute to do additional projects with two announced projects:

Big Buck Bunny, also known as "Project Peach" (a 'furry and funny' short open animated film

project) and Yo Frankie, also known as Project Apricot (an open game in collaboration with

CrystalSpace which reused some of the assets created during Project Peach).

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Blender Software Seminar 2011

9.2 BIG BUCK BUNNY (OPEN MOVIE PROJECT: PEACH)

Big Buck Bunny poster.

On October 1, 2007, a new team started working on a second open project, "Peach", for the

production of the short movie Big Buck Bunny. This time, however, the creative concept was

totally different. Instead of the deep and mystical style of Elephants Dream, things are more

"funny and furry" according to the official site. The movie had its premiere on April 10, 2008.

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Blender Software Seminar 2011

9.3 YO FRANKIE! (OPEN GAME PROJECT: APRICOT)

Apricot is a project for production of a game based on the universe and characters of the Peach

movie (Big Buck Bunny) using free software. The game is titled Yo Frankie. The project started

February 1, 2008, and development was completed at the end of July 2008. A finalized product

was expected at the end of August; however, the release was delayed. The

game was released on December 9, 2008, under either the GNU GPL or LGPL, with all content

being licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.

9.4 PLUMÍFEROS

Plumíferos, a commercial animated feature film created entirely in Blender, was premiered in

February 2010 in Argentina. Its main characters are anthropomorphic talking animals.

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Blender Software Seminar 2011

9.5 Sintel (Open Movie Project: Durian)

The Sintel promotional poster

The Blender Foundation announced its newest Open Movie, codenamed Project Durian(in

keeping with the tradition of fruits as code names). It was this time chosen to make a fantasy

action epic of about twelve minutes in length, starring a female teenager and a young dragon as

the main characters. The film premiered online on September 30, 2010.

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Blender Software Seminar 2011

10.FUTURE ENHANCEMENTS

Modelling :

Modeling through a 3D scanner (plug in).

Animation:

Suites that allow you to track animation so you will be able to animate

your character by realtime motion.

Game engine:

The ability of programming your game using languages like C++ and

C,C#.

A stand alone Game Engine separate from the blender 3D modelling and

animation so this gives you the ability to work faster .

Makes the engine able to export to iphones.

Sequal Editor:

Simple sequal editor.

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Blender Software Seminar 2011

11. CONCLUSION

Blender is extremely popular. Most devotees learn how to use Blended through tutorials in the

online community and forums for discussion, such as Blender Artists. Blender is a very useful

tool once you know how to use it well. The Blender interface is notoriously difficult to learn, but

after some time most users find that they are able to master it. Almost every function comes with

a shortcut on the keyboard. Color themes and a tree overview are some improvements that have

come along in recent years. It should be clear from the images that all of which created by

following the steps in the tutorials linked-to from the Blender site need no artistic talent . But for

someone who has got an eye for beauty, and a discipline for detail and patience, its certain they

could create spectacular things with Blender. It is incredible that Blender is free software. It is

so full of features that it really puts to shame a lot of commercial software that asks money for

barely anything. Anyone who's ever wondered about computer-generated imagery should really

devote some spare time to playing with Blender, and it is surely ideal for animation students who

cannot afford to spend hundreds of pounds on modelling and animation software that might not

be to their taste.

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Blender Software Seminar 2011

12. REFFERENCES

Blender For Dummies by Jason van Gumster

Introducing Character Animation with Blender by Tony Mullen

The Blender Gamekit: Interactive 3D for Artists by Carsten Wartmann

Beginning Blender: Open Source 3D Modeling, Anim... by Lance Flavell

Foundation Blender Compositing by Roger D. Wickes

www.blender.org

www.wikipidea.org

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