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[edit] Introduction

Welcome to Blender! The documentation of Blender consists of many parts: this user manual, a reference guide, tutorials, forums, and many other web resources. This first part of this manual will guide you through downloading Blender, installation, and if you elect to download the sources, building an executable file to run on your machine.

Blender has a very unusual interface, highly optimized for 3D graphics production. This might look odd to a new user, but will prove its strength in the long run. You are also highly recommended to read our section on The Interface carefully, both to get familiar with the interface and with the conventions used in the documentation.

[edit] What is Blender?

Blender is an integrated suite of tools enabling the creation of a broad range of 3D content with the singular benefits of cross-platform interoperability and an incredibly small download file size. It is the most popular Open Source 3D graphics application in the world, and is one of the most downloaded.

Aimed world-wide at media professionals and artists, Blender can be used to create 3D visualizations, stills as well as broadcast and cinema quality video, while the incorporation of a real-time 3D engine allows for the creation of 3D interactive content for stand-alone playback.

Originally developed by the company 'Not a Number' (NaN), Blender now is continued as 'Free Software', with the source code available under the GNU GPL license. It now continues development by the Blender Foundation in the Netherlands.

Key Features:

  • Fully integrated creation suite, offering a broad range of essential tools for the creation of 3D content, including modeling, uv-mapping, texturing, rigging, weighting, animation, particle and other simulation, scripting, rendering, compositing, post-production, and game creation;
  • Cross platform, with OpenGL uniform GUI on all platforms, ready to use for all versions of Windows (98, NT, 2000, XP), Linux, OS X, FreeBSD, Irix, Sun and numerous other operating systems;
  • High quality 3D architecture enabling fast and efficient creation work-flow;
  • Free support channels via http://www.blender3d.org;
  • More than 200,000 downloads of each release (users) worldwide;
  • User community support by forums for questions, answers, and critique at http://BlenderArtists.org and news services at http://BlenderNation.com;
  • Small executable size, for easy distribution;

You can download the latest version of Blender here.

[edit] Blender's History

In 1988 Ton Roosendaal co-founded the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo. NeoGeo quickly became the largest 3D animation studio in the Netherlands and one of the leading animation houses in Europe. NeoGeo created award-winning productions (European Corporate Video Awards 1993 and 1995) for large corporate clients such as multi-national electronics company Philips. Within NeoGeo Ton was responsible for both art direction and internal software development. After careful deliberation Ton decided that the current in-house 3D tool set for NeoGeo was too old and cumbersome to maintain and upgrade and needed to be rewritten from scratch. In 1995 this rewrite began and was destined to become the 3D software creation suite we all now know as Blender. As NeoGeo continued to refine and improve Blender it became apparent to Ton that Blender could be used as a tool for other artists outside of NeoGeo.

In 1998, Ton decided to found a new company called Not a Number (NaN) as a spin-off of NeoGeo to further market and develop Blender. At the core of NaN was a desire to create and distribute a compact, cross platform 3D creation suite for free. At the time this was a revolutionary concept as most commercial modellers cost several thousands of (US) dollars. NaN hoped to bring professional level 3D modelling and animation tools within the reach of the general computing public. NaN's business model involved providing commercial products and services around Blender. In 1999 NaN attended its first Siggraph conference in an effort to more widely promote Blender. Blender's first 1999 Siggraph convention was a huge success and gathered a tremendous amount of interest from both the press and attendees. Blender was a hit and its huge potential confirmed!

On the wings of a successful Siggraph in early 2000, NaN secured financing of €4.5m from venture capitalists. This large inflow of cash enabled NaN to rapidly expand its operations. Soon NaN boasted as many as fifty employees working around the world trying to improve and promote Blender. In the summer of 2000, Blender v2.0 was released. This version of Blender added the integration of a game engine to the 3D suite. By the end of 2000, the number of users registered on the NaN website surpassed 250,000.

Unfortunately, NaN's ambitions and opportunities didn't match the company's capabilities and the market realities of the time. This overextension resulted in restarting NaN with new investor funding and a smaller company in April 2001. Six months later NaN's first commercial software product, Blender Publisher was launched. This product was targeted at the emerging market of interactive web-based 3D media. Due to disappointing sales and the ongoing difficult economic climate, the new investors decided to shut down all NaN operations. The shutdown also included discontinuing the development of Blender. Although there were clearly shortcomings in the then current version of Blender, with a complex internal software architecture, unfinished features and a non-standard way of providing the GUI, enthusiastic support from the user community and customers who had purchased Blender Publisher in the past, Ton couldn't justify leaving Blender to disappear into oblivion. Since restarting a company with a sufficiently large team of developers wasn't feasible, in March 2002 Ton Roosendaal founded the non-profit organization Blender Foundation.

The Blender Foundation's primary goal was to find a way to continue developing and promoting Blender as a community-based Open Source project. In July 2002, Ton managed to get the NaN investors to agree to a unique Blender Foundation plan to attempt to release Blender as open source. The "Free Blender" campaign sought to raise €100,000 so that the Foundation could buy the rights to the Blender source code and intellectual property rights from the NaN investors and subsequently release Blender to the open source community. With an enthusiastic group of volunteers, among them several ex-NaN employees, a fund raising campaign was launched to "Free Blender." To everyone's surprise and delight the campaign reached the €100,000 goal in only seven short weeks. On Sunday October 13, 2002, Blender was released to the world under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Blender development continues to this day driven by a team of far-flung, dedicated volunteers from around the world led by Blender's original creator, Ton Roosendaal.

[edit] Version/Revision Milestones

Blender's history and road-map

  • 1.00 Jan 1995 Blender in development at animation studio NeoGeo
  • 1.23 Jan 1998 SGI version published on the web, IrisGL
  • 1.30 April 1998 Linux and FreeBSD version, port to OpenGL and X
  • 1.3x June 1998 NaN founded
  • 1.4x Sept 1998 Sun and Linux Alpha version released
  • 1.50 Nov 1998 First Manual published
  • 1.60 April 1999 C-key (new features behind a lock, $95), Windows version released
  • 1.6x June 1999 BeOS and PPC version released
  • 1.80 June 2000 End of C-key, Blender full freeware again
  • 2.00 Aug 2000 Interactive 3D and real-time engine
  • 2.10 Dec 2000 New engine, physics, and Python
  • 2.20 Aug 2001 Character animation system
  • 2.21 Oct 2001 Blender Publisher launch
  • 2.2x Dec 2001 Mac OSX version
  • 13 October 2002 Blender goes Open Source, 1st Blender Conference
  • 2.25 Oct 2002 Blender Publisher becomes freely available
  • Tuhopuu1 Oct 2002 The experimental tree of Blender is created, a coder's playground.
  • 2.26 Feb 2003 The first true Open Source Blender
  • 2.27 May 2003 The second Open Source Blender
  • 2.28x July 2003 First of the 2.28x series.
  • 2.30 October 2003 At the 2nd Blender Conference the 2.3x UI makeover is presented.
  • 2.31 December 2003 Upgrade to stable 2.3x UI project.
  • 2.32 January 2004 Major overhaul of internal rendering capabilities.
  • 2.33 April 2004 Ambient Occlusion, New Procedural Textures, game engine is back!
  • 2.34 August 2004 Big improvements: Particle Interactions, LSCM UV mapping, functional YafRay integration, Weighted creases in Subsurfaces, Ramp shaders, full OSA, and many many more.
  • 2.35 November 2004 Another version full of improvements: Object hooks, curve deforms and curve tapers, particle duplicators and much more.
  • 2.36 February 2005 More of a stabilization version, much work behind the scene, few new features, Normal and Displacement mapping, mainly.
  • 2.37 June 2005 A big leap: Transformation tools and widgets, Softbodies, Force fields, deflections, incremental Subdivision Surfaces, Transparent shadows, and Multithreaded rendering.
  • 2.40 Dec 2005 An even bigger leap: full rework of armature system, shape keys, fur with particles, fluids and rigid bodies.
  • 2.41 Jan 2006 Mainly Game engine adds and lots of fixes.
  • 2.42 Jul 2006 The Node release. Over 50 developers contributed Nodes, Array modifier, vector blur, new physics engine, rendering, lipsync and many other features.
  • 2.43 Feb 2007 The Multi release: Multi functions: multi-resolution Meshes, multi-level UV Textures, multi-layer images and multi-pass rendering and baking, Sculpting, Retopology, multiple additional Matte, Distort and Filter Nodes, modeling and animation improvements, better painting with multiple brushes, fluid particles, proxy objects, Sequencer rewrite, and post-production UV texturing. whew! Oh, and a website rewrite And yes, it still has multi-threaded rendering for multi-core CPUs. With Verse it is still multi-user, allowing multiple artists to work on the same scene collaboratively. Lastly, render farms still provide multi-workstation distributed rendering.
  • 2.44 May 2007 The SSS release: The big news, in addition to two new modifiers and re-awakening the 64-bit OS support, was the addition of subsurface scattering, which simulates light scattering beneath the surface of organic and soft objects.

[edit] About Free Software and the GPL

When one hears about "free software", the first thing that comes to mind might be "no cost". While this is true in most cases, the term "free software" as used by the Free Software Foundation (originators of the GNU Project and creators of the GNU General Public License) is intended to mean "free as in freedom" rather than the "no cost" sense (which is usually referred to as "free as in free beer"). Free software in this sense is software which you are free to use, copy, modify, redistribute, with no limit. Contrast this with the licensing of most commercial software packages, where you are allowed to load the software on a single computer, are allowed to make no copies, and never see the source code. Free software allows incredible freedom to the end user; in addition, since the source code is available universally, there are many more chances for bugs to be caught and fixed.

When a program is licensed under the GNU General Public License (the GPL):

  • you have the right to use the program for any purpose;
  • you have the right to modify the program, and have access to the source codes;
  • you have the right to copy and distribute the program;
  • you have the right to improve the program, and release your own versions.

In return for these rights, you have some responsibilities if you distribute a GPL'd program, responsibilities that are designed to protect your freedoms and the freedoms of others:

  • You must provide a copy of the GPL with the program, so that the recipient is aware of his rights under the license.
  • You must include the source code or make the source code freely available.
  • If you modify the code and distribute the modified version, you must license your modifications under the GPL and make the source code of your changes available. (You may not use GPL'd code as part of a proprietary program.)
  • You may not restrict the licensing of the program beyond the terms of the GPL. (You may not turn a GPL'd program into a proprietary product.)

For more on the GPL, check the GNU Project Web site. For reference, a copy of the GNU General Public License is included in Volume II.

[edit] Getting support - the Blender community

Being freely available from the start, even while closed source, helped a lot in Blender's adoption. A large, stable and active community of users has gathered around Blender since 1998.

The community showed its best in the crucial moment of freeing Blender itself, going Open Source under GNU GPL in late summer 2002.

The community itself is now subdivided into two, widely overlapping sites:

  1. The Development Community, centered around the Blender Foundation site. Here you will find the home of the development projects, the Functionality and Documentation Boards, the CVS repository with Blender sources, all documentation sources, and related public discussion forums. Developers coding on Blender itself, Python scripters, documentation writers, and anyone working for Blender development in general can be found here.
  2. The User Community, centered around the independent site BlenderArtists. Here Blender artists, Blender gamemakers and Blender fans gather to show their creations, get feedback on them, and ask for help to get a better insight into Blender's functionality. Blender Tutorials and the Knowledge Base can be found here as well.

These two websites are not the only Blender resources. The Worldwide community has created a lot of independent sites, in local languages or devoted to specialized topics. A constantly updated listing of Blender resources can be found at the above mentioned sites.

For immediate online feedback there are three IRC chat channels permanently open on irc.freenode.net. You can join these with your favorite IRC client.

The IRC channels are #blenderchat for general discussion of blender; #blenderqa for asking questions on Blender usage; and #gameblender for discussion on issues related to game creation with Blenders included game engine. For developers there is also #blendercoders for developers to ask questions and discuss development issues, as well as a meeting each Sunday at ?; #blenderpython for discussion of the python API and script development; #blenderwiki for questions related to editing the wiki

[edit] Who uses Blender?

This manual was written for the wide array of talented people that use Blender:

  • Hobbyist/Student that just wants to explore the world of computer graphics (CG) and 3D animation
  • 2-D artist that produces single image art/posters or enhances single images as an image post-processing lab
  • 2-D artist or team that produces cartoon/caricature animations for television commercials or shorts (such as “The Magic of Amelia”)
  • 3-D artist that works alone or with another person to produce short CG animations, possibly featuring some live action (such as "Suburban Plight").
  • 3-D team that produces an animated (100% CG) movie (such as "Elephant's Dream", "Plumiferos").
  • 3-D team that works together to produce live action movies that include some CG.

A wide range of age groups, from teenagers to oldsters use Blender, and the user community is fairly evenly divided between novice and professional graphic artists; those occasional users as well as commercial houses. We can divide the 2-D and 3-D teams that produce movies and animations further into individual job categories. Those that use Blender include:

  • Director - Defines what each Scene should contain, and the action (animation) that needs to occur within that scene. Defines shots (camera takes) within that scene.
  • Modeler - Makes a virtual reality. Specialties include Character, Prop and Landscapes/Stage modelers
  • Cameraman, Director of Photography (DP): sets up the camera and its motion, shoots the live action, renders the output frames.
  • Material Painter - paints the set, the actors, and anything that moves. If it doesn't move, they paint it anyway.
  • Animation and Rigging - makes things hop about using armatures
  • Lighting and Color Specialist - Lights the stage and sets, adjusts colors to look good in the light, adds dust and dirt to materials, scenes, and textures.
  • Special Purpose talent - Fluids, Motion Capture, Cloth
  • Editor - takes all the raw footage from the DP and sequences it into an enjoyable movie. Cuts out unnecessary stuff.

As such, this manual is written for these people to answer the question "I want to do something; how do I do it using Blender?".

This manual is a worldwide collaborative effort using time donated to the cause celeb. While there may be some lag between key features being implemented and their documentation, we do strive to keep it as up-to-date as possible.

While Blender does offer painting abilities, those abilities are geared toward animation or coloring meshes. At a fine level of detail, such as skin UV textures or matte paintings, it does not compete and does not hope to compete with ease of use and functionality in specialized paint programs such as Gimp or Photoshop. Instead, it seamlessly uses their output graphic files for mesh and scene colorization.

[edit] About this Manual

This manual is a mediawiki implementation that is written by a world-wide collaboration of volunteer authors. It is updated daily, and this is the English version. Other language versions are translated, generally, from this English source for the convenience of our world-wide audience. It is constantly out of date, thanks to the tireless work of some 50 or more volunteer developers, working from around the world on this code base. However, it is the constructive goal to provide you with the best possible professional documentation on this incredible package.

To assist you in the best and most efficient way possible, this manual is organized according to the creative process generally followed by 3D artists, with appropriate stops along the way to let you know how to navigate your way in this strange territory with a new and deceptively complex software package. If you read the manual linearly, you will follow the path most artists use in both learning Blender and developing fully animated productions:

  1. Getting to know Blender = Intro, Navigating in 3d, scene mgt
  2. Models = Modelling, Modifiers
  3. Lighting
  4. Shading = Materials, Textures, Painting, Worlds & Backgrounds
  5. Animation = Basics, Characters, Advanced, Effects & Physical Sim
  6. Rendering = Rendering, Compositing, Video Seq Edit
  7. Beyond Blender = Extending Blender
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