"Victor Yap of the Blender User Group of Singapore will be demonstrating Blender at the #mce_temp_url# this Saturday..." — Blender is the *free software* 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License. —

A new release of Blender, the immensely popular open-source 3D modeling software, is now available. This is not the much-anticipated Blender 2.5 release, but instead version 2.49.

Blender is not only the best free and open source choice but also rivals all commercial 3d applications out there. Blender is the only free 3d application compared against the heavyweight industry favorites like 3d max (which costs around $5000+) and the only second application to support all three major operating system.

The Blender developers have released the first alpha for what will become version 2.6 of their open source 3D content creation suite, adding a number of new features and fixing more than 100 bugs from the previous development release

Blender is an open source, cross platform suite of tools for 3D creation, capable of modeling, rendering, and animating 3D environments. Since Blender is completely free, everyone can download and use it immediately in commercial projects.

TDT 3D has put together a comparison of six 3D modeling tools. I am not going to get too deeply into the finer points of the products and what the TDT 3D reviewer thought of them, but many readers got quite worked up about one of the tools, Blender 3D 2.45.

Following Elephants Dream and Peach (to be released in April), both open-source movies sponsored by Blender, Blender, an open-source 3D modeling application, and CrystalSpace, another open-source project relating to 3D graphics, are starting out a new project - a 3D open-source professional game.

This DR-21 3D Design course is an introduction to the world of computer generated 3-D modeling and animation using Blender. The course covers version 2.4 of Blender and it is composed of a few dozen lectures. The lectures are really easy to understand and this course is a great place to start if you are new to Blender.

One of my projects this fall is to take advantage of online "Open Courseware" classes, for personal and professional development. In setting up my own curriculum, I came across a very nice find: a class on 3D modelling based on the (free software) Blender 3D modelling application.