I know that a lot of people here are interested in 3-D modeling and such. So, has anyone tried Blender? It is free, and because of the free license agreement, anything that you make on it is completely yours. It’s good for starting out.
- C-3PO
I downloaded it a few days ago, but I have yet to try it out. I need to be able to devote a good amount of time figuring out how it works, and right now I don’t have that time. But it looks awesome. I am reall excited about it. I didn’t know there was any free animation software before I found it.
Well, I just downloaded it, (Wednesday night, I believe), and I have been slowly but surely figuring it out… I too was really glad that there was free software like this. Normally other software is thirty days free, and then you have to pay - and animation software can be really expensive.
There are some good tutorials on the Blender website, and the user manuel is there as well. I kind of keep going back to it, but it does need a good chunk of time, since you can get on it to try one thing, and lose track of time.
Here are the links that I was using in particular. Once I figure this all out, I should be able to do some pretty cool things.
biorust.com/index.php?page=tutor … 81&lang=en
wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual
wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manua … tes_Part_I
wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manua … es_Part_II
wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manua … _Parenting
- C-3PO
Blender is a long time acquaintance of mine. It’s pretty much a full blown computer graphics suite, free and open source!
I discovered it around the end of 2003 (courtesy of Finding Nemo 
) and I’ve been teaching myself CG since. I’ve been extremely lazy though - I’ve only done simple 3D modelling all this while, barely touched Blender’s animation features.
For the ultimate demonstration of what Blender can do, check out Big Buck Bunny - a short computer animated film by the Blender Institute itself.
I tried it out a few months ago. It’s a pretty good program even though I don’t use it much.
I’m going to download it once I get an external hard drive. A friend of mine explained to me, that if you don’t have enough space on your computer, it can wipe it clean. So I don’t want to take the risk right now.
It has the minimum system requirements on the Blender’s website - can’t remember where though…
- C-3PO
Fairly Odd New Yorker - Are you saying the computer can wipe itself clean when it runs out of space? That’s absurd…I’d very much like to hear your friend’s explanation. AFAIK, the worst that could happen is a “disk full” error message. Either way, Blender only uses ~50MB of space. 
C-3PO - Here you go: blender.org/features-gallery/requirements/
Other than a decent graphics card to handle Blender’s interface, it’s pretty simple: the faster your processor, the better because rendering is going to stress it to the max.
wayne - Thanks for linking to that page. I couldn’t find it again. Anyway, it runs fine on the computer I’m using, since it’s a fairly new Intel based iMac. I remember looking at the requirements, and this computer surpasses them by, well, a lot! I’m really lucky to have access to a computer like this.
- C-3PO
wayne: Well, the kid I spoke to knew too much about computers, so much that he made me feel like an idiot, but he could be wrong … and by the way, it takes up 128 MB plus 20 MB. And for optimum it’s 2 GB.
Not that that’s so much wrong … but I don’t want to take the risk, particularly since if I do download it, I won’t have time for it in the next four months …
Nah…128MB Ram, 20MB hard disk space, 16MB graphics ram…they’re all different things; don’t jumble them up. I was referring to hard disk space in my previous post, sorry if I wasn’t clear about that. No big deal if you don’t wanna try it.
wayne: No, I do want to try it; I just don’t have time to use it these next few months, so I’m waiting to download it. 
I don’t think it would be wise for me to put it on my laptop for Disney when I’ll have homework to do. ^^;