Has anyone here used and or have heard of '; Blender'; site for animation and painting software?

Any information and or comments are welcomeHas anyone here used and or have heard of '; Blender'; site for animation and painting software?
It's animation software, not painting software. It began as the in-house software of an Amsterdam animation house back when most professional stuff was done in UNIX on Silicon Graphics machines. Its strengths are that it is cross platform and powerful, also that, since it is cross platform you can put together a rendering farm, as it's called of two or three ubuntu boxes on a network, such as the internet.





http://www.blender.org





There are two proof of concept films, I'll get to in a minute. First, the program they used for rendering was the gimp:





http://www.gimp.org





The two proof-of-concept films are Elephants Dream and Big Buck Bunny.





http://www.elephantsdream.org


http://www.bigbuckbunny.org





I would start with Big Buck Bunny, frankly. Elephants Dream is a bit ambiguous.





Actually, you might consider Linux in this case, if you can afford to burn a cd. Go to http://www.dynebolic.org and download their 700MB iso image, burn it to disk with nero or something and reboot. It will take a few minutes to get used to because it's the XFCE desktop and a unix-like interface but anywhere on the desktop right click and you will get the menu. You will find BOTH Gimp AND Blender installed on it so you can try them before you buy them, which is why I am suggesting them in this case.





Of course both are open source so you generally get them for free (though as Richard Stallman says, Free Software is Free as in Freedom, not Free as in Beer) but they have STEEP learning curves and you may just decide they aren't worth it.Has anyone here used and or have heard of '; Blender'; site for animation and painting software?
http://www.blender.org/