I recently discovered Blender, and I have to say
this all feels WAY too good to be true!
I almost cannot believe all of this is FREE.
And then I read about the NEXT version.
Makes me almost tremble and stutter,
like I didn’t read the fine print
and there’s a hidden cost, or a trick.
I hope Blender doesn’t time out and ask me to pay… lol
To think I almost blew my life’s savings on Maya!
I wish more people knew about Blender.
I’m mad at myself for not knowing about it sooner.
Something this good shouldn’t be so hard to find.
I’m going to tell all my friends about it.
I just felt like I had to speak my mind
and say a big THANK YOU and HUGS and KISSES
to whoever makes this dream come true.
You have a permanent fan here, and I LOVE you!
Welcome, glad to hear you found the diamond in the rough!
but ummm… I don’t think blender is actually so hard to find these days:rolleyes:, Type 3d in google and most of the time blender is one of the first things you will find. Oh and 3d world has been adding alot of tutorials and articles based on blender because of the incredible power it has as an open source software.:eek:
That being said, no it will not time out ask for money or tie you down to a single machine. Dude, if your a programer as well, go for it and change some of the code at your own whim.
And yeah:eek:, the next release is going to be absolutely kick ass! Thanks to the self sacrifices of our beloved developers and programers.
Once again we welcome you! P.S. Invite your friends!!
Type 3d in google and most of the time blender is one of the first things you will find.
Actually, when I was looking for something like Blender I found it by complete fluke, there was a link to it on a site I just happened to end up on by accident. “3D” on Google popped up with things like 3DS Max and Maya, whereas “Free 3D” came up with 3D Canvas (absolutely terrible) and Anim8or (or something).
Nowadays, however, Blender is slightly easier to find, if you use the right search terms (“Blender 3D” :D).
i would declare Blender as the Maya killer because well there is a difference in the complexity of tools between Maya and Blender. However Blender is byfar not what it was few years ago. And today it can even have tools not found in Maya at the moment like the UV unwrapper. This means that the gap between the power of the tools is getting smaller while in some areas of course the commercial solutions will be dominating anyway.
However years ago making some 3D stuff was very difficult because hardware and software was rare or very expansive.
Today we still do the same 3D stuff while the software is more evolved and easier to access.
I seriously that Blender can satisfy many project needs today already. i am not sure if a finale fantasy killer would be possible with it.
ah cekuhnen, you speak my language: a year ago, i went back to maya so often (how was it called ? - Maya Power User) … but nowadays less-and-less… and like you told: the gap is getting smaller.
btw: the film I made about the castle in Germany is finished and was a huge success (i told you). If you have already a german adress, i can send you or your brother…
I know the feeling. The good news is that Blender is moving up both in quality and visiblity. The release of Elephants Dream, the increasing attention from 3DWorld and CGSociety, etc. Sybex will be putting out a book soon (full disclosure, it’s my book, see my sig) and it seems that a lot of CG researchers are using it as a development tool (see the recent magic fluid demo on blendernation.com, etc) which will help it become an ever more leading edge application. Also, when Plumiferos comes out, whenever that happens, it will be another big push forward. So just keep spreading the word!
I’m just an amateur who used to own a license of Lightwave 8 until last year when I sold it.
But now I wanted to do some modeling again so I downloaded the demo versions of Modo 202 and Lightwave 9, and of course Blender 242a.
Modo is way too unstable (regular crashes, tools not working, …) and you ca’nt animate so I stopped checking it out very fast.
Lightwave 9 is good but not that different from Lightwave 8, and not free; and as an amateur I did not want to spend a lot of money again.
(Just my experience and feelings. It’s not my aim to downgrade that software, so please do’nt shoot me .)
So I turned my attention to Blender and the more I use it the more I am in AWE.
So much that I wonder why I as an amateur ever purchased Lightwave in the first place.
But back then I did’nt know about Blender and my idea of free software was that it just does not compare to commercial software.
LITTLE did I know…
I’m currently doing the “BSoD: Introduction to Character Animation Tutorial” created by marenzelleria (THANK YOU Ryan!) and apart from the fact that this is a great tutorial, I discover new things about Blender all the time.
Yep blender can be hard to find. I found OpenFx (used it for about a year) later anim8tor before finding Blender being Sold on ebay, I actaully was going to buy it on ebay for ~$50. I decided to do a google search for this “Animation Studio” and found a forum thread that talked about the fraud of selling Blender.
moral of story: Google saved me $50, and I’ve been using google ever since, the end
Welcome lovingblender, don’t be afraid to ask questions. We are here to help!
(Little warning concerning asking questions here, some of us get a little grumpy when a new user asks a question to an answer that can be easily found on google or by using the above search function.)
Maya has uv-unwrap in it as of v7, and was in the 6.5 bonus tools. Just pedantic fact-checking.
But as you say, everything you need to do paying commercial work is in blender right now. Whether exisitng maya/max/xsi/etc based studios would switch is a more difficult question. The elephants dream production model (stress test blender through doing a film) seems like the perfect way to do things, I’d be curious if that be extended; production houses pay for ‘1st tier access’ to the dev team, so showstopper bugs get fixed as fast as possible. Might annoy the die-hard ‘it should all be free’ fanatics, but like elephants dream, the benefits would trickle down to the end-user base anyway. Softimage have this with their ‘special projects’ team, seems to work well.
The bigger questions tho are:
-would there be enough willing paying customers (there’s possibly the plumiferos team, and…?)
-would the dev guys be happy taking money to work on boring bug-hunts, or do they prefer working on whatever features they want, whenever they want?
Might annoy the die-hard ‘it should all be free’ fanatics,
I’m not sure whether I count as a die-hard “it should all be free” fanatic, but Blender should definitely all be free. That is, GPL code is GPL code and any released modifications to the code would have to be free according to the license, simple as that. As for whether devs should be paid (if economic circumstances permit), that would be great to see. Anybody who feels strongly that open source devs shouldn’t be paid in principle is not a fanatic, just confused about the meaning of free software. As for hiring coders to do strictly in-house, not-to-be released modifications, that seems a bit anti-social and probably more trouble than it’s worth. But many open source projects (Linux, MySQL, Apache, etc) benefit from paid development. It would be terrific to see something like this happen with Blender. Plumiferos is a great step in this direction I think.
Maya has uv-unwrap in it as of v7, and was in the 6.5 bonus tools. Just pedantic fact-checking.
It didn’t have LSCM unwrapping or Angle-Based Flattening though… until somebody wrote this Plugin:
On the topic of Blender being “hard to find”, perhaps the foundation should have a special donation bracket that folks can contribute a couple of bucks at a time to. The donation slot would go to buying clickthroughs on google adwords “3D warez”, “maya crackz”, “3ds crackz”, etc. That way, we can give people the chance to see the FOSS alternative right at the point where they’re about to go the other way.
Hell, Ton might be able to talk Google into putting those adwords up for free, otherwise they’d be letting folks use their search engine to find explicitly illegal content.
Welcome to the blender community !
i’m using blender for a few years now and i must admit that i got heavily addicted in the meantime…
I think blender 1.8 or something like that was the first version i tried andsince then there
has been A LOT of improvement. When i read about the 'brandnew" features of
expensive 3d-software in expensive CGI-magazines i think to myself “hm, boring, blender
can do this since version 2.x”…
So, i’m really looking foreward to 2.43 and i’m curious, which new possibilities it will
give to the blender community
And it is continually being paid by a dedicated community of users, developers and free/open source advocates with their time and effort in the ongoing process of Blender development. What you are experiencing is freedom and generosity in an open forum for software development. Great stuff isn’t it? Welcome to FOSS, Linux and the GPL.
May I recommend www.ubuntu.com for much more of the same?
The sad part is that there’s nothing illegal about selling Blender. Some people are shelling out money for a program that they could download for free… Hopefully more will be as smart as you and do a little research before spending their money on ebay.
Maya has quite a powerfull uv tool but the problem is that the UV un-wrapper in
Blender is less powerful in tools set but gets the job done better and faster.
in blender it is build in. maya provides an external plug in and the pelting tool.
all came later after blender was the first.
