Last time this column appeared, I went over several new free Open Source products for use in exploring the Digital Arts. This time around, I'm going to focus on Blender, which isn't Maya, but makes a very good try, considering the price.
What exactly is Blender? It's an integrated toolset for 3D modeling, animating, rendering, and even compositing. It's capable of producing professional-quality work and indeed has already done so, and continues to do so.
The executable file isn't huge, and performance is quite good—it runs like a champ on my Intel Mac laptop. It utilizes Open GL and has been ported to OS X, Linux, Windows and several Unix flavors, making it extremely multi-platform.
Rest assured, this isn't going to be a tutorial on how to use Blender. In the first place, there isn't space in the entire Newsletter for such in-depth documentation, and in the second place, there's already very good documentation available at the Blender Website, www.blender.org. What I am going to do is take a brief tour of Blender, just enough to give a look and feel for its operation. And at the same time, we'll consider a few of Blender's pros and cons.
One of my personal gripes about Blender is that, most high-end professional animators and modelers are using Maya as their primary tool, with 3DsMax a probable second. That being the case, you'd think that the Blender people would want to make it possible for users of those established commercial packages to wean themselves off with as shallow a learning curve as possible, wouldn't you? Alas, Blender does not take that route. As Bart Veldhuizen laments in his excellent Blender User Interface tutorial: "I had found this extremely interesting looking 3D application (which other users were raving about), but the user interface completely baffled me...it is non-standard..."
Truer words were never spoken! Here's what Blender looks like right out of the box, just after installation (Figure 1):
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Figure 1: The first screen |
The big gray area at the top is the 3D window, where all the modeling is done. The one below it is the Buttons Window, the contents of which change in the context of what you're doing at the moment.
Maya has a simple button to change the view from four-paned orthogonal to single-paned with just a mouse click, but Blender wants you to set up the screen view by yourself by middle-mouse-button (MMB) clicking and selecting "Split Area" from the pop-up menu. The subdivided windows aren't orthogonal by default, you have to define them as Top, Side, Front and Camera View manually (Figure 2) by clicking the View icon.
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Figure 2: Divided into four panes |
Once you've got all this set up, you can return to single-screen view with CTRL/UPARROW, then return to orthogonal view with CTRL/DOWNARROW. Yeah, that's right, Blender makes heavy use of keystroke combinations to get things done. Not my favorite way of working, but then no one consulted me about it.
Incidentally, the first thing you're likely to want to do with your Blender-created object is to move the camera around to see what it looks like from all sides. Maya uses Alt/Left Mouse Button, Alt/Middle Mouse Button (MMB) and Alt/Right Mouse Button to maneuver the camera, but Blender does things differently. SHIFT/MMB moves the camera view up, down and side-to-side, CTRL/MMB zooms the camera and ALT/MMB tumbles it through all three axes.
Oh, and once you've gotten the Blender interface looking the way you want it, save these preferences to your home directory by pressing CTRL/U.
Okay, we've created an object. Well, we haven't really, but the default object in a Blender space is a cube, so for purposes of illustration, we'll assume that we've created it. And once an object has been created, one of the first things we want to do is assign it a texture.
With the cube selected, press F5 to bring up the Materials panel in the buttons window. It looks like this (Figure 3):
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Figure 3: Adding materials |
You'll see when you open these panes in the Buttons window (though it's hard to read in this small picture) that the Materials section has three rather inconspicuous sliders for R, G and B, so you can adjust the object's color. Less obvious is that if you click the "HSV" button, you get sliders for adjusting Hue, Saturation and Brightness (aka Value). Setting the RGB values to .999, .616 and.273 respectively, for example, gives a sort of medium copper-gold color.
The pane on the far right of the Buttons window is for texture mapping. When choosing an image map, press F6 to get the full set of texturing options. Just for the sake of illustration, I mapped an image to the facets of the cube, choosing Cubical projection. Then I added a couple of lights (Blender calls them "lamps") to the scene and started a render. F12 is supposed to render the current frame in Blender, but F12 is mapped by default to the Dashboard on a Mac, so I chose the Render Current Frame option from the Render pulldown at the top of the window. This was the result (Figure 4):
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Figure 4: A rendered object |
Modeling is done in Edit mode (press TAB to switch between Edit and Object modes). When in Edit mode, you can select vertices and move them about. Here's our cube with a marbled texture applied, and several of its vertices moved, to produce a deformed effect (Figure 5):
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Figure 5: Altered cube |
Of course, we can't do much modeling with only the eight corner vertices the default cube gives us, so we'll use the W key to bring up Blender's Specials menu (not exactly an intuitive association). Among its many options is "Subdivide," so we'll do that a couple of times to add more vertices to our cube (Figure 6):
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Figure 6: A subdivided cube and the Specials menu |
Once vertices have been created, they can be extruded (extended). Having subdivided my cube, I used SHIFT/Right mouse button to select multiple vertices (thus forming faces). Then I pressed the E key to bring up the Extrude menu, then chose Region. Doing this repeatedly, I managed to extrude the cube into a primitive shape (Figure 7):
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Figure 7: The cube, with extrusions |
Is this beginning to look like something? Yeah, we're on the way to a simple robot figure.
That is how Blender works—many operations that are attached to buttons and menus in commercial software are assigned to keystrokes, and even when you're dealing directly with a function window, the design is often less than user-friendly. Right, I know—any software seems simple once you've made yourself an expert in its use. And until you've used Blender long enough to be thoroughly familiar with its way of doing things, it's going to feel pretty confusing, especially if you've already learned some commercial animation/rendering package.
My personal opinion? Blender is a very powerful tool, and once learned, can be used to create professional-level animations. In fact, it has been used to create professional-level animations, and will probably continue to do so. But it suffers badly from having an eccentric interface that isn't like any of the commercial tools now in the marketplace. Even the most accomplished Maya expert, for example, is going to take one look at Blender's riot of control sequences, function keys and key combinations and start screaming after ten minutes at the keyboard.
And that, I think, is Blender's greatest obstacle to acceptance in the wider commercial world. Most professional animators/modelers and the shops in which they work have invested far too much time in adapting to "industry standard" tools like Maya and 3Ds Max (just to name two) to sit down and force-fit themselves into Blender's slick but oddball way of doing things. And, after all, other than price, what incentive have they to do so? The big commercial players in the animation and rendering field are constantly making tremendous progress in refining their products, and for all the dedication of the Blender programmers, Blender is always going to be stuck chasing a fast-moving brass ring. If Blender had more of a standard interface, or if it offered some significant technical advantage over the commercial products, it would be a different story, but we donÕt live in that parallel world, yet. That's my opinion, and you can praise my brilliant analysis or laugh at my foolish short-sightedness.
But even though I don't see Blender becoming visible on Autodesk's or ILM's radar soon, that doesn't mean it has no real niche, especially to the non-commercial user. Maya's retail price of (roughly) $7,000 is going to keep it out of the hands of most of us private users for the foreseeable future, and Blender's ability to do modeling, animation, compositing and rendering in an all-in-one package for the attractive price of $0.00 makes it ideal for small shops on a shoestring budget, home users or those who want to learn about the field of 3D modeling, rendering and animation firsthand.
If you fall into any of those categories, I recommend downloading Blender and giving it a serious try. It runs on Windows, OS X (Intel or PPC), Linux and several other Unices. It won't hurt your wallet, but be prepared to budget plenty of time for learning.
The Blender Website. downloads, news and tutorials: http://www.blender.org/cms/Home.2.0.html
Plumiferos: a Spanish animated film created with Blender and other Open-Source tools: http://www.plumiferos.com/index-en.php
A very basic tutorial for those just getting started: http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/BSoD/Introduction_to_Character_Animation
Download the demo reel produced by the Blender team for SIGGRAPH 2006. (Impressive stuff): http://www.blendernation.com/2006/07/28/siggraph-demoreel-released/
