Blender
Blender is one of the most famous open-source projects ever. It is a free software (since 2002 available under GNU Public License) 3D animation program that can be used for modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, skinning, animating, rendering, particle and other simulating, non-linear editing, compositing, and creating interactive 3D applications.
Blender is well-known for the fact of running on a really wide range of operating systems: Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, IRIX, Solaris, FreeBSD, SkyOS, MorphOS and Pocket PC.
Because of its rich set of capabilities it is often compared to high-end commercial 3D software products like Softimage|XSI, Cinema 4D, 3ds Max and Maya. Among some of its features are:
- Support for a variety of geometric primitives, including polygon meshes, fast subdivision surface modeling, Bezier curves, NURBS surfaces, metaballs, digital sculpting, and vector fonts.
- Versatile internal rendering capabilities and integration with YafRay, an open source ray tracer.
- Keyframed animation tools including inverse kinematics, armature (skeletal), hook, curve and lattice-based deformations, shape keys (morphing), non-linear animation, constraints, vertex weighting, soft body dynamics including mesh collision detection, fluid dynamics, Bullet rigid body dynamics, particle based hair, and a particle system with collision detection.
- Python scripting for tool creation and prototyping, game logic, importing and exporting from other formats such as COLLADA and task automation.
- Basic non-linear video editing and compositing capabilities.
- Game Blender, a sub-project, offers interactivity features such as collision detection, dynamics engine, and programmable logic. It also allows the creation of stand-alone, real-time applications ranging from architectural visualization to video game construction.
The most noticeable examples of Blender employment were probably Spider-Man 2 movie and Elephant Dreams – world’s first ‘open movie’.
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