Monday, July 17, 2006

Showcase for Open-Source Movement - Blender3D

I have written a few blog postings over the prior months about the state of the Open Source Software (OSS) movement, and have tried to demonstrate just how far along projects like Linux, OpenOffice, and others have come.

One really amazing OSS package is Blender3D, a 3D modeling, rendering, and animation tool. To showcase just how powerful this OSS package is, an entire short movie has been created using Blender3D and other Open Source Software. The movie, Elephants Dream, is even available in full 1920x1200 High-Definition. I downloaded the 800MB HD version using BitTorrent the other day in only half an hour over my Cable connection. And, once I watched the movie, I was completely and totally impressed by the capabilities of the Blender3D software (not to mention the talent of the various volunteer artists and such that made the movie!) To me, it was something I would expect to see coming out of a large studio like Pixar or such, though the movie is only 10 or so minutes long.

Check it out! If you ever had aspirations of creating your own animated 3D movie, but did not want to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on commercial software just to see if you could accomplish anything, Blender3D is for you -- it is FREE. I find the user-interface generally intuitive, and as least as intuitive as some of the commercial modeling software I have tried over the years. It is quite powerful (as the movie demonstrates), and should give you all you need to get started in 3D modeling and animation if you choose.

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