Courne Supremacy

I used to be really big into 3D modeling way back in my teens because I thought I might want to do art for a living, and hell, making 3D models for video games, who wouldn’t want to do that? Of course, back then, I was inspired by games like Command and Conquer — they used 3D artwork, but only to make pre-rendered sprites. Now, well, you know what 3D is like nowadays in video games. There’s a lot to learn when it comes to making 3D meshes: texturing, rigging for characters, low polygon modeling, etc. The list goes on, but I’ve been surfing the web looking at freeware software for the past couple of days and came across Blender. Blender is a freeware 3D modeling, animation, and rendering package. Yes, there’s also Povray, but Povray never hit me as user friendly or intuitive to use. There are modelers for it but they never seemed all that great or cohesive — hence why I begged my mom (when I was younger) for a copy of Caligari Truespace to do 3D in, then later I picked up Martin Hash Animation Master. Back to Blender. Now you’d think that it being freeware means that the UI is obtuse, the features are buggy, and it’s generally just a pile of horse manure. Well, I’d say, and only from my limited experience with Blender so far, that you’d be wrong (and I was wrong to think that too). Its come a long way. I was quite surprised to see it have a huge set of features — it’s on par with what I found in Maya. There’s already some incredible artwork done in it including animated films –it can do everything from game artwork to full on broadcast quality 3D animation and even video compositing with CG elements.

Blender’s also lightweight clocking in around 11 mbs for the download. It runs fast. The UI will take some getting used too, but since I don’t know other 3D packages that well, it’s a blank slate for me and Blender can imprint its UI grammar and methodologies on my brain. There’s a huge user base it seems and a lot of blogs, tutorial sites, how-to videos, and documentation online. It might be the perfect way to get back into 3D for me. Best of all, I won’t have to fork over the ungodly sums of money Caligari or Alias want me too for their buggy, bloated software.

If you’re interested in checking out Blender you can visit their site: www.blender.org.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 2:30 am and is filed under 3D Modeling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.