Open-source app of the week

[XMEN Gambit]

This week's killer app is called Blender, a 3d modeling and animation package available for Windows and Linux systems. It even has a built-in simple game engine. Disclaimer: While I've been meaning to try this out for some time, as of now I've not yet run it. Here's a link to a review of the latest version:

http://software.newsforge.com/article.p ... 0&from=rss

[XMEN Ashaman DTM]

I have been working with it for a while. It's interesting.

This is coming from my perspective as an engineer. I never liked autocad. And I've personally liked Unigraphics the most. I think it's because the interface in Unigraphics was much more intuitive for me as an engineer, than autocad was (which was made for drafters and technicians). Blender is similar to autocad in that the interface is hard for me to get used to.


I will say one thing though: their manual and help pages do work better than a lot of open source programs' documentation.

As for its capabilities, it's got a pretty decent renderer, which from what I've seen is quick and looks good (run the mech demo). It does have some problems with certain drivers and running the renderer in openGL (I got weird color effects and strange lighting effects).

I would also say that how Blender ties its rendering engine in with its scripting setup makes for an interesting approach to games.

I think most people would have to work with it for a few weeks to really start to get into it. I've not spent that much time on it.

[Spinning Hat]

It sounds cool, but I don't do any high end graphic stuff or rendering, so I'll pass, but I have to say, getting used to the Gimp is an interesting process from Photoshop...