Blender is a free and open source 3D computer graphics software toolset developed by Blender Foundation. It is used for animation, visual effects, 3D modeling, motion graphics, virtual reality, and formerly video games.
History[]
The Dutch animation studio NeoGeo (not related to Neo Geo video game hardware) started to develop Blender as an in-house application, and based on the timestamps for the first source files, January 2, 1994 is considered to be Blender's birthday. Version 1.00 was released in January 1995, with the primary author being company co-owner and software developer Ton Roosendaal. The name Blender was inspired by a song by the Swiss electronic band Yello, from the album Baby, which NeoGeo used in its showreel. Some design choices and experiences for Blender were carried over from an earlier software application, called Traces, that Roosendaal developed for NeoGeo on the Commodore Amiga platform during the 1987–1991 period.
On January 1, 1998, Blender was released publicly online as SGI freeware. NeoGeo was later dissolved, and its client contracts were taken over by another company. After NeoGeo's dissolution, Ton Roosendaal founded Not a Number Technologies (NaN) in June 1998 to further develop Blender, initially distributing it as shareware until NaN went bankrupt in 2002. This also resulted in the discontinuation of Blender's development.
In May 2002, Roosendaal started the non-profit Blender Foundation, with the first goal to find a way to continue developing and promoting Blender as a community-based open-source project. On July 18, 2002, Roosendaal started the "Free Blender" campaign, a crowdfunding precursor. The campaign aimed at open-sourcing Blender for a one-time payment of €100,000 (US$100,670 at the time), with the money being collected from the community. On September 7, 2002, it was announced that they had collected enough funds and would release the Blender source code. Today, Blender is free and open-source software, largely developed by its community as well as 24 employees employed by the Blender Institute.
The Blender Foundation initially reserved the right to use dual licensing so that, in addition to GPL 2.0-or-later, Blender would have been available also under the "Blender License", which did not require disclosing source code but required payments to the Blender Foundation. However, this option was never exercised and was suspended indefinitely in 2005. Blender is solely available under "GNU GPLv2 or any later" and was not updated to the GPLv3, as "no evident benefits" were seen.
In 2019, with the release of version 2.80, the integrated game engine for making and prototyping video games was removed; Blender's developers recommended that users migrate to more powerful open source game engines such as Godot instead.
Suzanne[]
Preset Low poly 3D mesh
In February 2002, it was clear that the company behind Blender, NaN, could not survive and would close its doors in March. Nevertheless, they put out one more release, Blender 2.25. As a sort of Easter egg and last personal tag, the artists and developers decided to add a 3D model of a chimpanzee head (called a "monkey" in the software). It was created by Willem-Paul van Overbruggen (SLiD3), who named it Suzanne after the orangutan in the Kevin Smith film Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
Suzanne is Blender's alternative to more common test models such as the Utah Teapot and the Stanford Bunny. A low-polygon model with only 500 faces, Suzanne is included in Blender and often used as a quick and easy way to test materials, animations, rigs, textures, and lighting setups. It is as easily added to a scene as primitives such as a cube or plane.
The largest Blender contest gives out an award called the Suzanne Award.
Blender Game Engine[]
Blender Game Engine was a game engine suite that used to be embedded in Blender. It was initially developed in 2000, and was improved since Blender 2.41.
In 2019, with the release of Blender 2.8, the Blender Game Engine was entirely removed from Blender. However, there is an unofficial fork of the game engine still exists and is active, named UPBGE (Uchronia Project Blender Game Engine), created by a former Blender Game Engine developer.