"...Big Buck Bunny is a free short movie created by the Peach open movie project.The animated movie is freely licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which means, according to their 'about' page: 'you can freely reuse and distribute this content, also commercially, for as long you provide a proper attribution.' Big Buck Bunny was made primarily with the awesome free Blender 3D

Remember ThinkFree? There are many situations where Microsoft approaches or acquires projects to ensure it can successfully exclude competitors and make third-party software developers (including their end users) more Microsoft-dependent. Watch what Microsoft is up to with Bldender at the moment. Blender is a FOSS poster child.

3D computer graphics software refers to programs used to create 3D computer-generated imagery. There are typically many stages in the "pipeline" that studios use to create 3D objects for film and games, and this article only covers some of the software used. Note that most of the 3D packages have a very plugin-oriented architecture, and high-end plugins costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars are often used by studios. Larger studios usually create enormous amounts of proprietary software to run alongside these programs. But thankfully, there are always free/open-source software alternatives that can help produce highly commendable 3D animations like it did in the short film entitled “Elephants Dream”.

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.

Apparently I’ve been living under a rock, because I only recently found out about the Blender project’s free and open source short movie, Elephants Dream, when I happened across Terry Hancock’s review of it last year on this web site.