years ago someone said that blender was a great program to learn 3d. i was about 9 years or something and i couldnt come over the too many buttons syndrome. so i abandonned it.
6 months ago i found a 3d page at startpagina.nl (a page with all kinds of handy links) there i found blender and i tried it for the second time (now reading tutorials) and i registered at elysiun. and here i am.
I remember i used blender in 1998, But i cant Remember the First version i was using 
wow my buddy is a blender guru. literally :D. go jonas!!!
I found blender through a summer camp, strangely enough. it was a CTY three week introductory computer science course. most of it was learning the basics of programming and data structures. The language we used was python.
The last week though we started doing a little visual stuff. First visual python, then the instructor showed us this neat program called POV-Ray. I was pretty psyched beacuse this was the first time I’d been able to do anything 3d.
As the course was nearing its end, he showed us a couple animations that he had gotten at one of the Siggraphs and told us that they were done in another program called blender. This piqued my interest and after I asked he gave the website. I tried it when I got home spent the first hour wondering why objects started rotating and scaling when I tried to select them %| . I eventually got the hang of it and am still hooked today.
After messing around with a copy of POV-Ray my brother downloaded (and deleted weeks later when he lost interest in 3D) I developed a passing interest in 3D, and when I saw the cutscenes from FFVII it solidified it.
My brother started me out on a copy of Bryce 3D and Poser 3 (both illegal copies he got from his workplace’s advertising department) and I used them for about half a year. Poser got frustrating because I couldn’t make custom clothes for the character, and I got sick of Bryce when it took so much work to animate the Poser characters (export a series of DXF or OBJ files, import them all into Bryce, set the alpha values to 0 (other than frame 1), move to frame 2, set object 1’s alpha to 0 and object 2’s alpha to 100 (or whatever the limit was), translate, repeat until computer goes crashing through the window), and when I was inspired to make a video to Peter Gabriel’s “San Jacinto” I couldn’t make a buffalo using booleans.
I did some checking on the internet, at the time being naive enough to think that all 3D models were made using booleans, and that’s when I learned about vertices and the difference between modellers and renderers. I did a search for free 3D modellers, and the only one that wasn’t shareware (which I don’t know why the shareware modellers turned up in a search for free modellers when I used the quotes in the search box) was Blender 1.8. I checked some screenshots, and the most impressive one at the time was the castle from the “modelling/texturing a castle” tutorial and some “trees” that were nothing more than brown cylinders with green spheres on the top.
I passed it up, deciding to save up for one of the shareware ones, and went on to my search for a freeware 3D game engine. Once again Blender turned up. Actually, it was in preparation for the upcoming game engine, so I downloaded it to practice up on the graphics a bit. I don’t remember the year, but I do remember that it was 1.8, the first release (if I recall correctly) with the UV editor.
The game engine came out, and by that time I had learned that you can do more with Blender than spheres, boxes, and cylinders. I don’t use the game engine, because I found out that my on-board graphics chip (intel 810, haven’t upgraded yet) doesn’t support opengl. I still can’t make that buffalo (or any organic creature, for that matter), though.
techtv
version 2.23
Alltaken
I was researching new 3D technologies while I was at Disney Interactive, and accidentally ran across Blender (around the 1.5 days).
Eventually, I ordered the 1.5 manual, as well as getting a C-Key license.
Blender books that I have:
1.5 manual, 1.8 manual, 2.0 manual
3 x 2.3 manual (signed 1st edition to stay on the shelf, one for a nephew, and a 2nd edition copy for everyday use)
a purchased soft-copy of the game-engine docs
The Blender Book
I also purchased Blender Publisher when that came out.
And of course, I’m proud to have paid my share to the Blender Foundation to help free the sources.
I’ve been with Blender for a while, and with the terrific work that has been, and is being done in the software’s development, it seems that my loyalty to the cause is really paying off!
I also found it (and linux) through Tech TV…back when it was worth watching - before “Vulture enterprises” bought it. They haven’t been worth a D*** since they got rid of tux as their mascot. ( gee guess why)
it was probably 2.23 but think I remember having 1.8 on a floppy too for some reason
i remember looking around at all the suites, so i wanted to get a hacked copy of bryce or some other crap like that. it woulda taken too long to download so i got pissed and tried searching for freeware 3d suites. lo, and behold i came upon a program called blender version 1.8. when i first ran it, i had no idea what to do. after minutes of not being able to do anything other than move the cursor around i became angry and vowed never to use blender again. several days later i happened upon the program on my system and decided to give it another go. still no luck, so i searched for tutorials. i read the tutorials off the blender site, and i was blown away at how i had almost missed the best freeware program i’ve ever seen.
A thread was started by a poster named Jen, who happens to be into free stuff and cell shading. She freely shares what she finds in those two subjects.
I had looked into the program a few years back, but for some reason that I can’t remember now, rejected it in favor of purchasing Animation Master Hash.
Boy was THAT a waste of cash. Blender is far superior, IMO.
I blame irGeroge he got me into blender after me seeing him using it at the beggining of 2004 and ever since i havnt stoped blending and i have been getting paler and paler and paler til i became white 