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miriam_eI got into 3D a long time ago on my old Amiga computer, with DKBTrace, which became POVRay, a brilliant raytracer. Raytracers are wonderful things, but mostly they are slow and dedicated to making 'offline pictures', which means single images. The pictures can be strung together to make an animated video, but generally raytracers don't produce realtime content.
At around the same time I played with some 3D modeler programs that showed me that realtime 3D was possible and I became inspired to work more on this. When I found out about Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) it was like a light was switched on. This was back about 1997 and the original VRML 1.0 version. Soon VRML had a major upgrade to VRML 2.0 and it looked like nothing could stop it. But it died away for various reasons. VRML still exists, but the community has shrunk and it goes by another name (X3D) after another overhaul about a decade later.
I became aware of Blender fairly early on, but didn't do much about it because I'd bought a copy of Lightwave3D and found it easy and intuitive to use. I became interested when I finally moved almost completely from my Amiga computers to what was then called an IBM-clone, but nowadays is often referred to as an x86 computer. I could no longer use Lightwave on the new machine and couldn't afford to buy a new copy for it. I found out that the company making Blender had gone broke and was was going to close down. The programmers who developed Blender and the worldwide community of users banded together to buy Blender from the company and then they did something amazing -- they released it for free as opensource software! This was in a time when buying comparable 3D modelers would generally set you back thousands of dollars!
All 3D modelling programs are difficult to use because of the contortions involved in doing stuff in 3D using 2D screens and 2D mice. I'd thought Lightwave3D was easy and intuitive, but that was really only because I'd gotten into it early in its development and grown along with it. I was simply used to it. I'd found it hard to get into Blender, thinking that its interface was weird, but actually Blender is no more bizarre than any 3D modelling program. It was merely its unfamiliarity that put me off. In recent years, in my renewed efforts to use Blender I found a wonderful resource: Blender 3D: Noob to Pro. It is a wikibook created and refined by Blender users over years. It will probably never be finished as people find better ways to say things and better examples to use. If you read it from the beginning and do the examples as you go along you find yourself slipping fairly effortlessly into the mindset required to use Blender.
Blender is truly an amazing piece of work. Have a look at the extraordinary short, open movie Sintel to see the kind of things that can be done with it. (The images above are a couple I snapped from the video.) However, Blender is not only a 3D modeler incorporating a physics engine, bones for animating characters, lighting effects, cloth draping, hair and fur, procedural as well as image textures, and scripting (using python)... as if all that wasn't enough! You needn't just be restricted to using it for making images and movies. The Blender package also includes its own game engine as a standalone program so that you can create 3D content that will work in real-time and distribute it to people for free.
Download Blender from http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/
It is cross-platform, working on a variety of computers -- one of the great benefits of being open source.
When you install it in your computer you will find you also have a small program called blenderplayer. This will play content that is made specifically for it. Want to see a couple of examples? On the Blender site there are some bundles of sample files called "regression files" that show off or test many of the capabilities of the program and the machine it is being run on. In one of them (test249) is a demo file called "webskategirl_bullet.blend" (all blender files have the .blend extension). It can be loaded directly into blenderplayer. If you know how on your operating system, you can set up blenderplayer on the context menu for blend files, or you can drop the webskategirl file onto blenderplayer's icon, or use the commandline:
I've uploaded the webskategirl file to my site so you can download it before grabbing all the other wonderful stuff that's on the Blender site and scattered around the net. (I don't own the program. I'm just doing this as a way to entice people into Blender.)
Hmmm... I think I'll upload a few of my other favorites I've collected in my wanderings. The "walk_anim.blend" and "cuteBEAR.blend" files are to be viewed in the main Blender program, not blenderplayer. I'll give more info shortly. My net connection has failed in the computer that has Blender so I'll fix that and add more here.
At around the same time I played with some 3D modeler programs that showed me that realtime 3D was possible and I became inspired to work more on this. When I found out about Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) it was like a light was switched on. This was back about 1997 and the original VRML 1.0 version. Soon VRML had a major upgrade to VRML 2.0 and it looked like nothing could stop it. But it died away for various reasons. VRML still exists, but the community has shrunk and it goes by another name (X3D) after another overhaul about a decade later.
I became aware of Blender fairly early on, but didn't do much about it because I'd bought a copy of Lightwave3D and found it easy and intuitive to use. I became interested when I finally moved almost completely from my Amiga computers to what was then called an IBM-clone, but nowadays is often referred to as an x86 computer. I could no longer use Lightwave on the new machine and couldn't afford to buy a new copy for it. I found out that the company making Blender had gone broke and was was going to close down. The programmers who developed Blender and the worldwide community of users banded together to buy Blender from the company and then they did something amazing -- they released it for free as opensource software! This was in a time when buying comparable 3D modelers would generally set you back thousands of dollars!
All 3D modelling programs are difficult to use because of the contortions involved in doing stuff in 3D using 2D screens and 2D mice. I'd thought Lightwave3D was easy and intuitive, but that was really only because I'd gotten into it early in its development and grown along with it. I was simply used to it. I'd found it hard to get into Blender, thinking that its interface was weird, but actually Blender is no more bizarre than any 3D modelling program. It was merely its unfamiliarity that put me off. In recent years, in my renewed efforts to use Blender I found a wonderful resource: Blender 3D: Noob to Pro. It is a wikibook created and refined by Blender users over years. It will probably never be finished as people find better ways to say things and better examples to use. If you read it from the beginning and do the examples as you go along you find yourself slipping fairly effortlessly into the mindset required to use Blender.
Blender is truly an amazing piece of work. Have a look at the extraordinary short, open movie Sintel to see the kind of things that can be done with it. (The images above are a couple I snapped from the video.) However, Blender is not only a 3D modeler incorporating a physics engine, bones for animating characters, lighting effects, cloth draping, hair and fur, procedural as well as image textures, and scripting (using python)... as if all that wasn't enough! You needn't just be restricted to using it for making images and movies. The Blender package also includes its own game engine as a standalone program so that you can create 3D content that will work in real-time and distribute it to people for free.
Download Blender from http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/
It is cross-platform, working on a variety of computers -- one of the great benefits of being open source.
When you install it in your computer you will find you also have a small program called blenderplayer. This will play content that is made specifically for it. Want to see a couple of examples? On the Blender site there are some bundles of sample files called "regression files" that show off or test many of the capabilities of the program and the machine it is being run on. In one of them (test249) is a demo file called "webskategirl_bullet.blend" (all blender files have the .blend extension). It can be loaded directly into blenderplayer. If you know how on your operating system, you can set up blenderplayer on the context menu for blend files, or you can drop the webskategirl file onto blenderplayer's icon, or use the commandline:
blenderplayer webskategirl_bullet.blendI've uploaded the webskategirl file to my site so you can download it before grabbing all the other wonderful stuff that's on the Blender site and scattered around the net. (I don't own the program. I'm just doing this as a way to entice people into Blender.)
Hmmm... I think I'll upload a few of my other favorites I've collected in my wanderings. The "walk_anim.blend" and "cuteBEAR.blend" files are to be viewed in the main Blender program, not blenderplayer. I'll give more info shortly. My net connection has failed in the computer that has Blender so I'll fix that and add more here.