SIGNIFICANT BITS—July 2009

by Sean N. Henderson

I've been working with UNIX/Linux now since 1998, and have a good grasp of the applications available for that platform. When surveying audio/sequencing software for Linux, sometimes I'd see Blender in the application list. Mousing over it indicated it was a 3D modeling program. OK - I'm not really into making animations (I have enough projects), so I moved on to searching for a good MIDI sequencer. I have few "modeling" experiences. One was some failed attempts at learning TurboCAD 4x. During this past year or two I stumbled across Google's SketchUp. I made of couple of 3D models for some small projects, and thought SketchUp was nifty and sort of left it at that. My last SketchUp use, incidentally, was a quick model of the DACS.org booth for the Connecticut Film Festival where I was trying to visualize our table setup with our projector, screens, easels, banner, and so on.

Now it's 2009 and I was fortunate to attend the Connecticut Film Festival (CTFF) and take in a couple of events. One event was a Blender demonstration by Jason Van Gumster. Jason recently authored "Blender for Dummies". His presentation was exciting, upbeat and very enthusiastic - it is obvious he loves working in animation and he is a bit of an animated character himself. Read more about this event and Jason himself. His company is Hand Turkey Studios.

To briefly summarize Blender is to say that it is a model open-source project (pun intended). My interest in Blender isn't so much about needing to do animations myself, but more about how the Blender Foundation and the Blender user base came together to improve Blender, and to support it. The Blender community seems self contained and not necessarily concerned about how "Hollywood" perceives it. The Blender Foundation website is www.blender.org, and its history is worth reading. For example, when promoting Blender one take was not to focus on Blender, but to do a major project with Blender. The result was the first open source move, Elephant Dream. Not only is the movie freely available, but so are the tools and source used to make it. From an organizational point of view, the fundraising for this project was a spectacular show of support from the Blender community.

So what's the buzz about Blender? Well, first it is multi-platform and uses OpenGL - a standard graphics code library that is cross-language and cross-platform. The interface is structured in OpenGL such that all the fonts, buttons and such can be "zoomed" in a way that it'll work on any display, not just any platform. The other nice feature is that menus are depreciated somewhat in favor of hot keys or key commands. These hot keys are strategically placed to distribute the work between the hands and fingers to reduce fatigue. I was fascinated by this during Jason's explanation of this. To my mind, it seems that all new software was about menu-diving and ribbon rummaging. In fact, the controls and keyboard based focus kind of reminded me a bit of Ableton Live, a digital audio workstation. Jason also mentioned SIGGRAPH, which was a graphics SIG that eclipsed its host organization and another organization. All of this was of interest to me, more so than the actual animations produced or the idea of using Blender myself.

So what would be the other titles to compare with Blender? Wikipedia lists Cinema4D, Lightwave, Sketchup Pro and Maya, to name a few. I had heard of Lightwave from when I was using an Amiga 2000 and doing music production using a MIDI sequencer by the name of "Music-X". Lightwave is a NewTek product, and first appeared around 1990 for the Commodore Amiga. It is worth noting that some of these titles go for thousands of dollars. Then there are the high-high end systems used by the likes of Pixar and similar.

The DACS.org President, Rob Limbaugh, attended Jason's panel as well, and we both left that event very excited about the idea of DACS putting together a Blender/animation related event or meeting. Look for more animation-related offerings from DACS later this year.




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