Mine the Harvest

I never cease to be surprised at the ever increasing number of excellent quality Open Source applications. Here is just another to add to my list of favorite Open Source apps (you can find my whole list of favorites here.)

The new discovery is Blender – described on the page as:

“Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.”

While I can describe blender, to do it justice you just have to see some of the work done by artists using it – check these out:

(Click for larger images.)

(These are all from the gallery at Blender.org site, more are available there to view)

Blender is available for Linux, Solaris, FreeBSB, OS X (PPC and Intel versions) and Windows. Installation was a one line rpm install of the package and it worked flawlessly for me.

Blender is one of the applications used to create the popular animation, “The Elephants Dream” – a pretty stunning production, and they are working on a sequel to this, a new animation called “Peach” – which is to be released quite soon. Here is a shot of a (minor) character from the new project:

(Click on me)

In addition, the project has a game development module with integrated physics engine. They are developing an Open Source 3D game using this called Apricot and it looks to be pretty damn cool too.

Though not a 3D artist myself, I do enjoy playing with 3D object modeling. As a kid I played with some 3D studio apps on my Amiga 500, these were precursors to the infamous Lightwave, which itself is still around and very widely used.

However, I could never afford Lightwave back then, nor the hardware to run it on.

What a pleasure to find Blender – completely Open Source, and it packs an impressive punch indeed.

If you are interested in graphics, 3D design or animation at all – definitely check this project out and spread the word.

The application is very well designed, has numerous tutorials and videos and extensive documentation.

I hope I can carve out some time and design some things myself.