This is one great free program. It has never been my modeling, rendering or animation tool of choice but it has some nice features that I use in my workflow and the new versions have got me really excited about this program. The new sculpting tools in the 2.53 beta version work very well and I can see how they will be very useful. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, it is definitely worth playing around with, and the new interface makes it much easier to get started with.
Blender has for some time been a “must have” tool for me; I use it mostly for file conversions (version 2.48 works well for this but 2.53 does not yet support everything I use). Flash rendering engines like Papervision and Away3D read Blenders collada file format very well, but not necessarily other commercial applications output. After installing Python, scripts can be installed to allow conversion of many common file formats. This alone can be worth the price of installation.
When modeling from photos with automated tools sometimes internal features of a model that are not silhouetted by the photos do not come out correctly. Corrections to the geometry and texture are often needed. Blenders new sculpting tools are much easier to use than my previous workflow for making minor corrections to the modeling geometry.
Other features of Blender worth looking into are projection painting and 3d texture painting. I usually use Photoshop cs4 for this type of work so I’m not sure how well these features of Blender work.
Many times when working on projects there are multiple ways of doing things and having Blender in your toolkit can be quite useful.
Getting Started
Blender can be a bit tough to get up and running in. I’ve added a few links to other tutorials and references that are helpful. It took me awhile to even figure out how to navigate around the view – use the middle mouse button to orbit with the shift key down to pan or control key down to zoom. In the 2.53 version the ‘n’ key brings up a hidden panel that has all kinds of goodies on it like a OpenGL view port mode ‘GLSL’ that’s nice to use when sculpting, and a quad window mode button.
Links:
New sculpting video tutorial
Introduction tutorial
Official Blender Site
