Jason Gumster - Blender For Dummies

Unfortunately, even though Blender was gaining in popularity, NaN was not making enough money to satisfy its investors, especially in the so-called “dot bomb” era that happened around that time. In 2002, NaN shut its doors and stopped working on Blender. Ironically, this point is where the story starts to get exciting.

Even though NaN went under, Blender had developed quite a strong community by this time, and this community was eager to find a way to keep their beloved little program from becoming lost and abandoned. In July of 2002, Ton provided a way. Having established a non-profit organization called the Blender Foundation, he arranged a deal with the original NaN investors to run the “Free Blender” campaign. The terms of the deal were that, for a price of €100,000 (at the time, about $100,000), the investors would agree to release Blender’s source code to the Blender Foundation for the purpose of making Blender open source. Initial estimations were that it would take as long as six months to one year to raise the necessary funds. Amazingly, the community was able to raise that money in a mere seven weeks .

Because of the Blender community’s passion and willingness to put its money where its metaphorical mouth was, Blender was released under the GNU General Public License on October 13, 2002. With the source in the community’s hands, Blender had an avalanche of development and new features added to it in a very short time, including somewhat common features like Undo (a functionality that was conspicuously missing and highly desired since the initial releases of Blender by NeoGeo).

Nearly two decades later, the Blender community is larger and stronger than ever. Blender itself is a powerful modern piece of software, competitive in terms of quality with similar software costing thousands of dollars. Not too shabby. Figure 1-1 shows screenshots of Blender from its early days to the Blender of today.

FIGURE 1-1:Blender through the years: Blender 1.8 (top left), Blender 2.46 (top middle), Blender 2.72 (top right), and the major changes apparent in the Blender of today (bottom).

One of the cool things about the programmers who write Blender is that many of them also use the program regularly. They’re writing code not just because they’re told to do it, but because they want to improve Blender for their own purposes. Many of Blender’s developers started as artists who wanted to make Blender do something it hadn’t been able to do before. Part of the programmers’ motivation has to do with Blender’s open source nature, but quite a bit also has to do with the fact Blender was originally an in-house production tool, built for artists, based on their direct input, and often written by the artists themselves.

Seeking to get even more of this direct artist feedback to developers, the Blender Foundation launched “Project Orange” in 2005. The project’s purpose was to create an animated short movie using open source tools, primarily Blender. A team of six members of the community were assembled in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, to produce the movie. Roughly seven months later, Elephants Dream premiered and was released to the public as the first open movie . This means that not only was it created using open source tools, but all the production files — 3D models, scenes, character rigs, and so on — were also released under a permissive and open Creative Commons Attribution license. These files are valuable tools for discovering how an animated film is put together, and anyone can reuse them in their own personal or commercial work. Furthermore, if you don’t like Elephants Dream , you’re free to change it to your liking! How many movies give you that luxury? You can see the film and all the production files for yourself at the project’s website, www.elephantsdream.org .

Due to the success of the Orange project, Ton established the Blender Institute in 2007 for the expressed purpose of having a permanent space to create open movie and game projects, as well as provide the service of training people in Blender. Since then, the Blender Institute has churned out open projects (most codenamed with a type of fruit) every couple of years. Like with Elephants Dream, both the final product and the production files for each project are released under a permissive Creative Commons license. More recently, the Blender Institute has spun off a separate entity, the Blender Animation Studio, a Blender-based animation studio with the goal of producing and releasing a feature-length animated film. Table 1-1summarizes each of the Blender Institute’s open projects.

TABLE 1-1Open Projects from the Blender Institute

Congratulations! As a Blender user, you’re a part of our community. You’re joining a diverse group that spans all age ranges, ethnicities, professional backgrounds, and parts of the globe. We are a passionate bunch: proud of this little 3D program and more than willing to help others enjoy using it as much as we do. Have a look at Chapter 21for a list of community resources that are invaluable, not only for discovering the intricacies of using Blender, but also for improving yourself as an artist.