Comment by jfaucett | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jfaucett | Hacker News Reader

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> Blender is a nice project

Sorry, but Blender is an amazing project. Its single-handedly the best graphics software the FOSS community has produced by a long shot, and can compete with the likes of 3DS Max and Maya which are owned by the 3D powerhouse monopoly Autodesk. For me, its up there with the likes of linux and maybe libreoffice in terms of quality alternatives for otherwise software monopolies.

Anyway, I've used Blender quite a bit for games and animation and it never ceases to impress. So their devs deserve a huge applause IMO. Also, for those of you who think I'm exaggerating about Blender's quality just check out these links:

1. http://www.blenderguru.com/articles/24-photorealistic-blende...

2. http://archive.blender.org/features-gallery/gallery/index.ht...

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=R6Ml...

4. http://archive.blender.org/features-gallery/blender-open-pro...

To clarify Blender was originally a closed source private software created at Dutch studio Not a Number (NaN). Which Ton Roosendaal was software engineer at and helped create blender.

The source code was then releases by NaN under some licencing scheme. Only after a fund raising drive to buy the code for something like a few hundred thousand dollars from NaN and re-release it under an OSS licence did Blender become open source.

Its important to understand that Animation Studios hire the majority of Computer Graphics researchers, Programmers and Artists. Without the commercial Animation industry there would be a small fraction of the research and innovation that we have today. And also a fraction of the innovative open source Computer Graphics projects that we have.

Open source projects like Open SubDiv (Pixar), Ptex (Disney), Open VDM (Dreamworks), and many others are all projects that are created by Animation Studios and would not be possible without the funding and expertise that these studios have.

And the fund raiser was the Blender Foundation - I was number #884, yay! https://fossies.org/linux/blender/doc/license/bf-members.txt

Weirdly its also the best video editor that I've used on linux. Only issues I've ever had with it on that front is that rendering is awfully slow.

Haha, KDENLive has caught up with it in my opinion but yeah for years Blender was definitely the best video editor (after some configuration).

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