On 11/08/07, Tom Musgrove <letterrip(a)gmail.com> wrote: What exactly does Blender do? Is it the program you could use to make a Pixar animation film? (potentially) Does Commons accept Blender working/output files? If not, should we? cheers Brianna -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/

Stephen Bain wrote: It is a 3D content creation suite (Similar to Maya, 3DS Max, Cinema 4D, Lightwave, Houdini, etc.) - that means modeling, texturing (can paint in 2D, 3D, use images, or node/procedural textures), animation (rigging, skinning, a host of sophisiticated character and keframe animation tools), rendering, particle tools, simulation tools (hair, fluids, physics, cloth and softbodies), rendering - it can also be used for 2D animation; and of course creation of 2D stills. It also has an integrated sequencer and compositor (movie editing and compositing); and an integrated game engine. It has a fairly comprehensive import and export suite - supporting most major formats to some degree (standard 3D and 3D interchange formats such as Collada, FBX, OBJ, 3DS, DXF; assorted game formats; and other formats of interest such as VRML) also there are tools to export to flash and shockwave 3D format. Certainly among other capabilities - movies, game content, web animations, architectural renderings/previz, and content used in illustrations, also fairly decent CAD capabilities. It is being used as the almost exclusive 3D tool for 'Plumiferos' a commercial feature animated film that should be out by the end of this year or so. http://www.plumiferos.com/ Blenders own format isn't really appropriate for interchange - it is almost a direct memory dump to disk. However Blender, as noted above, exports to a large host of open formats. LetterRip

Thanks for all the answers. OK I guess my real question is, for the type of diagrams and pictures we use, when would you typically use Blender instead of say Inkscape? maybe for things like this? (I'm not sure what LadyofHats uses) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Alamosaurus_sanjuanensis_dinosaur.p… cheers Brianna -- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/

Uber Halogen wrote: is what patented? None of the formats we support are patent encumbered to my knowledge - and none use any clever algorithms for encoding. Tom M. LetterRip

Uber Halogen wrote: Nope. Tom M. LetterRip