Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook
Colin Litster
Packt Publishing
The Blender 3D suite is probably one of the most used 3D creation and animation tools currently in existence. The reason for that popularity is both its tool set and the extraordinary fact that it can be downloaded free of charge. Blender has been around since 1998 but it was not until it entered the GNU General Public License, open source market in 2002 that it grew in popularity to its current position. Over the last year Blender has been going though a major update to its user interface, which has been named Blender 2.5. This radical restructure of the 3D suit has introduced not only a more up-to-date interface but also some advanced features that make Blender a capable 3D tool for professional productions. Indeed the Blender Foundation has been keen to develop these capabilities by applying Blender to create open source productions. 2010 saw the premiere of Sintel, a 15-minute cinema quality fantasy, which had over one million views on YouTube in less than four days.