Monday, June 9, 2008

Blender 2.46 – The Power-packed 3D Animator

Blender is an immensely popular cross platform 3D animation creator. The latest version of this software Blender 2.46 has been released on May 17th this year and till date the software has been downloaded almost 158,000 times from Download.com. This information is enough to mark the popularity of Blender. Basically Blender is a 3D animation program released as free open-source software. This is no doubt a powerful weapon for the 3D animation professionals. Some of the features it offers are advanced simulation tools including rigid body, fluid, and soft body dynamics, modifier based modeling tools, powerful character animation tools, node based material and compositing system and Python for embedded scripting. To some extent Blender is as powerful as other advanced 3D software like Softimage|XSI, Cinema 4D, 3D Studio Max, Lightwave and Maya.

Learning the application of blender is easy thanks to various community tutorials and discussion forums available on internet. You can also learn by downloading the software and studying the ready-made Blender models. Such models are easily available on the resource sites like Official Blender Model Repository. There are other useful tools as well like free downloadable BlenderArt Magazine. Each issue of the magazine covers a particular area in 3D development. You can also refer to BlenderNation, the central news site with all the required information, new techniques and features on Blender.

You can use Blender for modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, water simulations, skinning, animating, rendering, particle and other simulations, non-linear editing, compositing, and creating interactive 3D applications. This can be operated with different OS including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris and many more.

For some specific type of websites like sites related to kids, a small 3D animation can increase its visual impact several times. So if you own such a website and want to edit your website by adding some animations, Blender can be a good option. It will save your money not only because it is free, but also you can create some animations on your own with the help of online resources along with some basic technical knowledge.

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