How Do I Choose the Best Open Source Animation Software?

Blender is an open source cross-platform all-round 3D animation production software, providing a series of animation short film production solutions from modeling, animation, materials, rendering, to audio processing, video editing and so on.

Blender

(3D animation production software)

Blender has a variety of user interfaces that are easy to use in different tasks, with built-in advanced video solutions such as green screen keying, camera back tracking, mask processing, and post node synthesis. There are also built-in cartoon styles (FreeStyle) and GPU-based Cycles renderer. To

Fully integrated authoring suite with comprehensive 3D authoring tools including

In 1988, Ton Roosendaal co-founded NeoGeo, a Dutch animation studio. NeoGeo soon became the largest 3D animation studio in the Netherlands and among the top European animators. NeoGeo's work for large corporate clients, such as the multinational electronics company Philips, has won the European Corporate Video Awards in 1993 and 1995. Ton was in charge of art direction and software development while working inside NeoGeo. After careful inspection, Ton thought that the 3D suite used at that time in their company was too old and complicated to maintain and upgrade, and should be rewritten from scratch. The work began in 1995 with the goal of the well-known 3D software authoring suite Blender. As NeoGeo continues to optimize and improve Blender, Ton thinks that Blender can also be a creative tool for artists outside NeoGeo.

In 1998, Ton decided to set up a NeoGeo spin-off company called Not a Number (NaN) with the purpose of further operating and developing Blender. NaN's core goal is to create and distribute a compact and cross-platform free 3D authoring kit. This idea was revolutionary when most business modeling software sold for thousands of dollars. NaN hopes to bring professional 3D modeling and animation tools to the general public. Its business model includes the provision of commercial products and services around Blender. In 1999, NaN participated in the Siggraph conference for the first time for promotion. Blender's first Siggraph tour was a huge success, attracted a lot of attention from the media and attendees, caused a sensation, and its great potential has been proven!

Taking advantage of this shareholder style, NaN received an investment of 4.5 million euros from venture investors in early 2000. This huge investment allowed the company to expand rapidly. Soon 50 employees worked around the world to improve and promote Blender. Blender v2.0 was released in the summer of 2000. This release adds an integrated game engine to the 3D suite. By the end of 2000, there were more than 250,000 registered users on the NaN website.

Unfortunately, NaN's ambitions and opportunities did not fit the company's capabilities and market environment at the time. The excessive expansion resulted in the reorganization of a smaller company through new investors in August 2001. Six months later, NaN released Blender Publisher, the first commercial software. The product was targeted at the then emerging web interactive 3D media market. Due to the poor sales performance and the difficult economic environment at that time, the new investor decided to shut down all NaN businesses, including stopping the development of Blender. Although Blender at the time had obvious shortcomings such as complex internal structure, incomplete function implementation, and irregular interface, the enthusiastic support of the user community and consumers who have purchased Blender Publisher kept Ton from leaving Blender to retire. Because it was no longer possible to reorganize a company, Ton founded the Blender Foundation, a non-profit organization, in March 2002.

The main goal of the Blender Foundation is to find a way for Blender to continue to be developed and promoted as a community-based open source project. In July 2002, Ton succeeded in getting NaN's investors to agree to the Blender Foundation's unique plan to try to make Blender an open source release. This "liberating Blender" campaign seeks to raise 100,000 Euros to allow the foundation to buy Blender's source code and intellectual property from NaN investors, and then hand Blender to the open source community. A group of volunteers, including several former NaN employees, enthusiastically started a fundraising campaign to "liberate Blender". Surprisingly, the goal of 100,000 euros was achieved in just 7 weeks. On Sunday, October 13, 2002, Blender was released to the world under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The development of Blender continues to this day, and the hardworking volunteer team around the world under the leadership of founder Ton has continued to promote this work ever since.

Mesh: An object composed of "faces, edges, and vertices", which can be edited and modified by mesh commands. Although Blender supports Mesh instead of Polygon, it has powerful editing functions and common common modification commands. Since version 2.63, it can also support N-sided, which is better than Polygon. Software is weak. And Blender's mesh is very fault-tolerant and can support non-manifold meshes.

Curve: A curve is a mathematically defined object that can be manipulated using weight control handles or control anchor points, which is a pen curve commonly found in general vector software. But because there are few responsible people and lack of programmers, this piece is basically in a semi-finished state. Only the initial level of modification commands, like some common commands, such as the break of curve anchor points, are not supported by default.

NURBS surfaces: It is possible to use the control handles or control points to manipulate the four sides of the surface. These are organic and smooth but have a very simple shape. This piece is just like the curve. Due to the lack of developers, it only has the initial level of modification commands, such as common cutting of surfaces, chamfering, double line lofting, inserting isoparameters and other common Nurbs commands.

Meta-object: The new version is translated as melting ball, and some software also calls it Metaballs. Consists of objects that define the three-dimensional volume of the object. When there are 2 or more melting balls, a Blobby form with liquid mass can be created. However, it only supports adding default objects, and does not support the use of custom meshes for shape generation.

Text object: Creates a two-dimensional string that is used to generate a three-dimensional font. However, due to a congenital defect of Blender, under the Windows platform, direct input of Chinese is not supported, and it must be entered in Notepad and then pasted into the edit box (this problem did not gradually resolve until the end of 2014). In addition, when the font switching is selected, the built-in Chinese name of the font file cannot be seen, only the original file name can be seen. Therefore, it is more troublesome to make Chinese 3D characters in Blender.

Bones: Bones are used to bind vertices in the 3D model so that they can pose and act. Built-in spline bone A special bone that can make a soft curved transition without relying on the spline IK. The binding method of the envelope is also defined as a bone style.

Empty object: It is also a common auxiliary object in general software. It is a simple visual mark with transformation attributes but cannot be rendered. They are often used to drive and control the position and constraints of other objects. It can also read in an image as a reference for modeling.

Lattice: Use an additional grid object to surround the selected grid. By adjusting the control points of this grid object, the vertices of the enclosed grid will be softly deformed. However, when the lattice is created, the bounding box of the selected object will not be matched, and the user needs to match manually.

Camera: The camera is the object used to determine the rendering area. It provides a variety of composition reference lines such as diagonal, nine palaces, golden section and so on. You can set a focus object to provide a reference when simulating the depth of field.

Lights: They are often used as the light source of the scene. The types of light sources that come with BI are: point light (flood light), sunlight (parallel light), spotlight, hemisphere light, area light (area light). Other engines can use self-illumination to make grid light sources.

Force field: used for physical simulation. They are used to apply external force effects, which can affect rigid bodies, soft bodies, and particles to cause them to move. They often act on empty objects (helper objects).

Mouse operation: Blender operation is weird. By default, right-click to edit and modify 3D objects, and left-click to position the 3D cursor. This is very different from mainstream software and does not conform to common software operation methods. But in the option setting, you can swap the left and right keys.

Editing workflow: Blender does not support node operations that can return to modification. After any object is created or the editing command is executed, the modification options will disappear, and you cannot return to modify the parameters. If you want to modify the operating parameters of a certain step in the history record, you can only undo this step first. After the modification is completed, manually perform all subsequent modifications again.

Sculpting and texture drawing: The brushes in these two modes are based on the "screen projection" operation, not the "face normal direction" of the mesh where the brush is located. Since Blender does not have a normal brush (the brush selection is also a screen projection), the operation method and feel will be different from the general sculpting software or texture drawing software based on normal brushes.

Hair system: Blender's hair system is particle based, so a particle system must be created before hair can be generated. Although the particles themselves support collisions, the fur system does not support collisions. Therefore, when the hair needs to produce collision animation, it can be simulated with the help of a force field object, so as to produce a false collision effect.

Post: Video Editing is a simple non-linear editing module for image sequences and video file processing. You can set transitions, add title text, audio, and simple color grading. The difference from some common non-linear software on the market is that the special effects part that comes with it is very simple. Many times it depends on the function of Blender itself, you need to render the special effects first, or after the processing of the synthesis node (for example: sun spot , Keying), and output as an image sequence in order to continue synthesis production to achieve the desired effect.

Switch Chinese interface: execute the menu File User Preferences (shortcut Ctrl + Alt + U), in the pop-up Blender User Preferences interface, switch to the System tab, and check International Fonts in this tab. Then click the Language drop-down list, select Simplified Chinese, and select Interface, Tooltips, and New Data at the same time to fully open Blender's Chinese culture. Note: This function requires version 2.60 and above. ^[1]

Since Blender 2.49, since the original framework can no longer meet the requirements, the official version 2.50 has been completely refactored and rewritten, and a new interface has been adopted.

Blender version 2.50 has made significant progress in all aspects: software, interfaces, modeling, animation processes, tools, and python APIs. Such advances are the result of careful study of use cases, continuous improvements over the years, and community collaboration.

So things made with version 2.50 and later may not be fully compatible with version 2.49. Therefore, the 2.4x and 2.5x updates are introduced separately. ^[3]

The official versions of the software provided in binary (compiled) are as follows:

A release (official) cycle takes 8-12 weeks (2-3 months), and the duration of the cycle is determined at Bcon1. ^[17]

Currently, Blender supports the following renderers. As for the comparison between them, you can see the specific evaluation. ^[18]

Foundation Open Source Movies

The following are open source movies with development codes and led by the Blender Foundation.

These movie works created by Blender are based on

There are only four Chinese textbooks officially published in mainland China:

The Blender Definitive Guide

Author: Luo Cong wing ^[51]

Blender Master

Author: Ben simonds (English)

Translator: Zhang Yu