The History of Blender

Lots of people think that Blender is relatively new, but that’s not accurate. Blender was born in the early 1990s, making it more than 20 years old. Recently, an “ancient” file—Blender’s first bit of code—was found by the Blender Foundation’s chairman Ton Roosendaal and it dated back to December 1992. However, it is true that the software became much more relevant to the public within the last few years with the release of version 2.50, which included a completely revamped, written-from-scratch interface and core that make it more user friendly and powerful than its previous versions.

In 1988, a new Dutch animation studio, NeoGeo, was cofounded by Ton Roosendaal. Not long after, the new studio decided it had to write new software to create its animations; as a result, in 1995 it started to build what is now known as Blender. In 1998, Ton founded a new company called Not a Number (NaN) to further develop and market Blender. Due to difficult economic conditions at the time, NaN wasn’t a success and investors stopped funding the company, shutting down Blender’s development in 2002.

Later in 2002, Ton managed to build the nonprofit organization, Blender Foundation. The users community donated 100,000 euros (an amazing sum, and it only took them 7 weeks) to get the previous development investors to allow the open sourcing of the software and make it available for free. Finally, Blender was released under the terms of the GNU General Public License on October 13th, 2002. Since that day, Ton has led a team of enthusiastic developers who want to contribute to the project.

The first Open Movie project (Elephants Dream) was born in 2005, with the goal of gathering a team of artists who could use Blender in a real production and also provide developers with feedback that would ultimately improve the software significantly. The goal was not only to create the movie with open-source tools, but also to release the end result and production files to the public under a Creative Commons open license.

The project ended up being a great success and Ton created the Blender Institute in the summer of 2007, located in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The institute is now the core of Blender’s development and more Open Movies have been made there since: Big Buck Bunny (2008), the video game Yo, Frankie! (2008), Sintel (2010), and Tears of Steel (2012).

The development of Blender version 2.50 began in 2008. It offered a major improvement in the software’s core, which was already becoming outdated. The final release of this version came in 2011. Sintel was made to put this new version to the test. It also helped improve the tools and bring back previous functionalities that were lost in the recent update. Since then, Blender has experimented with some other significant new features such as Cycles, a new render engine that supports GPU real-time, raytracing-based rendering.

The Blender Institute’s latest Open Movie, Tears of Steel, was made to implement and improve visual-effects tools, such as camera tracking, compositing nodes improvements, and masks to name a few, making Blender one of the more flexible tools in the 3D software panorama (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Tears of Steel (2012) was an Open Movie project that had a goal of improving Blender VFX tools.

Blender’s development process has been refined over time, and there are now new versions being released every 2 or 3 months. As this book is being developed (July, 2014), the current Blender version is 2.71 and, in the last couple of updates, some improvements to the UI were added (such as tabs in menus to prevent excessive scrolling), along with bug fixes and some new features (volumetric rendering, smoke, fire, and deformable meshes, motion blur support for Cycles, and new modeling tools). But the Blender 2.7X series is not aimed at adding amazing new features; the goal in these versions is to improve current features, improve Blender internally, and set it up for version 2.80. When version 2.80 comes around, it will be easier to implement new features and maintain the forward and backward compatibility of tools, add-ons, and numerous other features. Also, internal improvement will enhance performance, which is critically important for professional users.