About Blender UV Image Editor
When it comes to open source 3D animation and UV software, by far the most popular solution is Blender UV Image Editor. It can be used for modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, water simulations, skinning, animating, rendering, particle simulations, non-linear editing, compositing, and creating interactive 3D applications. Blender is available for a number of operating systems including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, IRIX, Solaris, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, SkyOS, AmigaOS, MorphOS and Pocket PC. There have even been unofficial versions made for the BeOS.
Blender UV Image Editor was developed by the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo and Not a Number Technologies (NaN). It was primarily developed 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 the band Yello. Roosendaal founded NaN in June of 1998 to further develop and distribute the program. The program was distributed as shareware until NaN went bankrupt in 2002.
The creditors agreed to release Blender UV Image Editor under the terms of the GNU General Public License, for a onetime payment of �100,000 (roughly 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 UV Image Editor source code would be released. Blender is now completely free to use and available online, licensed under the GNU general Public License and is being actively developed under the supervision of the Blender Foundation.
Blender UV Image Editor has a robust feature set similar in scope and depth to other professional, commercial 3D software similar to products from companies such as Adobe and Maya. These features include advanced simulation tools such as rigid body, fluid, and soft body dynamics, modifier based modeling tools, powerful character animation tools, a node based material and compositing system and Python for embedded scripting. Blender has a relatively fast download and install due it is smaller size compared to the competition. Though it is often distributed without documentation or extensive example scenes, the software contains features that are characteristic of high end modelling software. Among its many capabilities is support for a variety of geometric primitives, including polygon meshes, fast subdivision surface modeling, Bezier curves, NURBS surfaces, meta balls, digital sculpting, and outline fonts. Blender UV Image Editor gives you all the power of a professional program with absolutely zero cost.
|
