I’m a complete newbie to Blender, but worked with numerous 3D animation apps (3DS, Lightwave, Hash) up until 5 years ago (took a nice looong vacation!)
I’m back to the industry and bumped into Blender 5 days ago, and WOW! This free app blows away the tools I paid thousands of $$ for not that long ago. I’m absolutely blown away by the quality of this program and the wealth of plugins and info that support it and I’m fully charged to get up to speed on this program. I searched the knowledgebase to answer some questions, but still have a few left, so here are my questions:
I installed Blender 2.34 (using Windows XP), what directory structure should I use for projects, python scripts, plugins, and such? The program includes a zip file of more Python scripts, where do these go?
I found conflicting advice in the knowledge base about which Python version to install, so: a. do I need to install Python? and b. what version do I need?
I’m pretty sure that I’m gonna order the printed manual, good idea or is it too old?
How many of you are using this for actual production work? And is this your only (or primary) 3D tool?
I just have a folder named Blend containing a folder for each project alongside the Bl2.34 folder. But Blender has a nice browse feature that lets you find and handle files easily. And when opening a file it remembers what was last saved.
I use Python 23 installed on the root of c: So far so good, although I had to use an older version of that treemaker (well, neoIstseed228.) but other stuff like makehuman is fine with PY23. ( I only have a P3 with intel graphics card)
The current manual is for 2.3+ . Nice to have.
I use Blender for amature production stuff. I’m hooked and getting better.
Blender is advancing FAST and programmers even accept ideas for the next version.( but they’ve probably heard them all…) The community is big, and knowledgable, but spread out. The people here are helpfull but sometimes you need to search around a bit for info. Worthwhile though.
i started seriously with blender 2.25. i bought the official 2.0 guide and didn’t regret it - i learned so much! so, though the 2.3 manual may be a bit outdated, don’t hesitate and buy it.
most plugins are distributed as python scripts. a part of them will run without python installed (the blender distributons comes with a tiny python library which is used instead), but the other part will require a full python installation, version 2.3.
over the last year i used blender a lot, often as my primary tool. video editing, a DVD-cover, technical visualization, print design and image-presentations…
What isn’t enough said is that Blender it’s a communist project!! Yes, communist!
Bought to a capitalist entreprise by an anonymous community around the world, and make freely available for all, so, a software well suited for poor people .
It’s definetely a GOOD IDEA to buy the manual. Asolutely not out of date for the basic knowledge ( and even advanced), and it’s a nice book in itself.
As you’ve noticed, Blender is “amazing”, so your money will help to keep the development.
You will find that Blender is reall y surprising…among others things, many people use 2, 3 or 4 Blender versions ( try to do the same with 3dMax )
One official, the 2.25 for tthe game engine, another version because some function works,
a “cutting edge” Tohupu one, and maybe a 1.63 for the nostalgics like me
Blender is lightweight and lightfast
Now, you start to feel the power of Open Source ( quite dramatic this one… )
Bye
