An Introduction to Blender

What is Blender?

I know what you people might be thinking right now…Is he going to talk about a blending machine… a mixer grinder? or How can a blending machine relate to technology? It is obviously a technology in relation to what technology means. But that’s not what I’m going to write about.

I’m going to introduce you all to another technology, Blender, a free and open-source complete 3 Dimensional creation suite, which was created  21 years back by Ton Roosendal which supports the entirety of  3D pipeline like modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline. From my experience, I would say Blender is like a Swiss Army Knife…

What’s so special about Blender? It does not specialize in any one thing. It’s not even an industry-standard tool like Maya or 3D Max. Blender is special because firstly it’s free and Open-source. It’s cross-platform and runs on Linux, Windows, and Macintosh computers. Aah… it’s open-source, so it can’t produce quality professional stuff, this will be the general speculation because of the history of open-source software. For that, I’ll provide a link to the latest Blender demo reel, and also a link to the InApp’s Multimedia team demo reel of what we have created using Blender so that you can decide for yourself…

Personally from experience with blender for the past 9 years, I think that the quality of work done in blender equals or even surpasses the standards set by any proprietary software out there.

Where can we get Blender?

We can download blender from https://www.blender.org

How can we learn to use Blender?

For a beginner who would like to start learning and using Blender, the main thing to know about is modeling, rigging, animation, and rendering. Let me give you a general briefing about this stuff. For learning the basics of Blender, you can click here.

Modeling

Modeling is simply the art of creating a shape or a geometry from a basic geometry like a plane, cube, cylinder, sphere etc, that either mimics the shape of a real-world object or expresses your imagination of abstract objects.

Texturing or Texture mapping.

Texturing is the process of projecting or mapping the geometry or shape on to an image. On simple terms. It’ll be like wrapping a box with a gift wrapper.

Rigging

It is basically creating a bone structure or a  skeleton for the created 3d model so that the model can be moved and animated.

Animation

It is the process of making an object to move by tweaking the skeleton or changing shape over time by keyframing the position, rotation or location of the object or the bone.

Rendering

Process of turning a 3D scene into a 2D image, image sequence or into video output. There are three render engines in Blender system, Eevee, Cycles, Workbench.

So Why Blender?

As I said earlier blender is a free open source creative suite under the GNU General Public License (GPL). So the usual marketing strategy of acquiring and killing software that will be a threat to the proprietary software won’t work against Blender. Blender software will be free forever with this licensing. Blender is a community-driven software where there is support 24x 7. Proprietary software like Autodesk Maya, 3D Max or Cinema 4D are really expensive and works in a closed environment where an individual cannot request new features compared to Blender. If you learn Blender you can learn any other 3D software as there will be only slight adjustments for working. So for a beginner who would like to start learning 3D, as a Blender user myself, I would surely recommend it.

Future of Blender

With the release of the latest version 2.80 which is packed with features and a beginner-friendly interface, Blender is gaining its audience pretty quickly. Understanding the power of Blender, more and more animation/VFX/game studios like Ubisoft are using blender in their pipeline and as blender is becoming the talk of the 3D world, more and more corporate and game industry giants like Nvidia, EPIC Mega grants, Ubisoft, Google, Intel Software are funding the development of Blender. We can also be a part of the blender development program by donating. Blender is slowly and steadily climbing the ladder of being the 3D industry-standard tool.

Can Blender be the David who defeated the Goliath? We’ll wait and see…