3D - 2

free 3D animation program--blender?

to be able to do this kind of 3D work ( http://clan-foren.de/vdl/stuff/protoss.jpg ) what kind of program should i get? needs to be free :P is it blender? is it easy to learn? how easy is it to go from 3D model to 3D character like this ( http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3099/2549481543_210c898af2.jpg?v=0 ) adding texture and color, etc?

Public Comments

1. Blender is great, it's a bit hard to learn for a 1st modeling program, but when it's free who's complaining? Modeling itself just takes a lot of time to get used to, and learn. Texturing on the other hand will often boil down to how good of a 2d and Photoshop artist are you? It's pretty hard stuff to master, for any artist... so I wish you luck
2. Blender would be one choice. It is NOT easy to learn, though. Blender was the in-house animation package of a professional Amsterdam animation firm before it was open-sourced and like most Open Source programs combines power with an interface optimized for engineers. What you have to understand is that Blender is part of the Open Source movement which is NOT about software for nothing but rather about an end to vendor lock-in. One of its founders, Richard Stallman, described it as "Free as in Freedom, not as in Beer". The tradeoff for paying less or nothing for this sort of thing is that you take responsibility for supporting it yourself. ONLY Ubuntu will send you a free cd and it is frankly as targeted at the Developing World as it is at America. Generally you get a Linux or Unix distribution by downloading either the iso file (CD/DVD) or the individual packages which you use a host system (generally a similar form of Unix or linux) to install. Blender was almost certainly originally written on Unix for a silicon graphics network. It was, as I said, professional software which was ported to Windows Linux and the Mac OS X later. Those machines not only got more powerful but they became easier to network which helps blender because it is such a bear for memory period. Any animation is difficult. Blender provides you options for running on older equipment than the other two, but it is NOT easy. I would read all the documentation you can on it, and if you have a problem with it on Windows, download this Linux CD burn it to disk, try running it, and you will find Blender there, which might work (plus this distro runs from the CD which means you do NOT have to install it to disk and it won't write ANYTHING to your hard drive you don't explicitly tell it to): http://www.dynebolic.org