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 Why use Blender?
Some pro-Blender arguments to set you on the right path - if you're wondering whether it's worth the effort to learn a new application.
SPOILER: the answer is "yeah, it's worth the effort"
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- It's free! Free, I tells you!
- It's available for a multitude of platforms (even, so far, for BeOs). For my own part I use it mainly on Windows and Mac OS X, with a total absence of compatibility problems.
- The application filesize is by the competitors' standards miniscule; especially good since you'll want to download the frequent updates as they come out. Every new release brings added joy and possibilites, in my experience.
- A built-in game engine. You can create quite advanced games within the application and distribute them as stand-alone files. (Not that I do, i just use the application for animations and stills. So far...)
- Extreme control of the user interface. Customize it to your hearts content.
- Script support: Python programmers (a group I do not belong to, as yet) can have a blast with Blender, and some really useful tools have been made available this way.
- Particle systems, which, for example, can be used to duplicate any object.
- Raytracing: built-in, as well as a neat connection to the free renderer Yafray. Now you can make tons of reflecting spheres suspended above chessboards :-)
- Global undo: believe it or not, but we managed to make do very well without it for years, but now that everything is undoable one cannot help but think it was about time. BTW, I love that word: "undoable"... it means whatever you want it to mean.
- A new character animation system that positively rewls.
- Deformation curves: use a curve to easily bend and twist a mesh or other object at your will.
- Menu options for just about everything. While bragging about the speed-inducing approach of doing most things with keyboard shortcuts, I often secretly felt that the option to choose actions from menus sometimes would be nice. Well, now you can.
- Catmull-Clarke subdivision surfaces: "Say what?" you yelp. In short, these make organic mesh modelling sooo much easier, and more fun as well.
- In short; having started out as a great in-house tool, Blender has taken all the needed steps to be a program that even the 3D novice can learn without going slightly mad. The dreaded "learning curve" of the app has flattened out dramatically, but all the speed and flexibility is still there.
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