Blender
Not much happening at the moment. I've been sinking a bit of time into having a crack at Blender a really powerfull, open source 3D graphics program. It's got a rather unique interface, that really takes some learning, but it shows a lot of potential, and has a very good rendering engine that can do ray tracing as well.
There is a massively steep learning curve involved, as the GUI, while it's come a long way since Blender's early days, is still difficult, and really optimised for the power user. There are a lot of keyboard shortcuts, so once you learn them, you leave one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse, and you can get pretty quick at navigating around in 3D space and manipulating objects. The modelling tools are also quite powerful, leading to the ability to relatively easily create organic curves and surfaces.
Once I've become a little more proficient in the program, I'll post some of my creations =)
3 Comments:
Good to see you have taste in 3d apps :-)
I've been blendering for years now and get more impressed with each rev. Check out the blender Movie (Project Orange) to see some of the 3d goodness.
The Yafray raytracer isn't too shabby either, but it takes a while to master some of the nuances (radiosity and all that).
Now, if only I had some talent :-)
(Hell I still use povray too, some habits are hard to break)
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Craig
craigrat.cachegurus.com
Developer/Site Breaker
Geocaching Australia
I'm sure it's very powerful, but in the few minutes I had with it, I couldn't even draw a primitive! I don't think we should have to learn new interfaces this day and age.
Software should become more obvious as time goes by, not less.
I agree with you re: the interface - however I can understand why Blender has an interface like it does. It was originally an inhouse tool, written by the people who used it, so they could be as cryptic as they liked, and as long as it made sense, and was fast to use, it was all good.
Blender is heading towards having a nicer to use interface, however if you want to use something that's really straightforward, try Cheetah3D
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