Elastic Reality 1995 for Windows serial key or number

Original author(s)	Ton Roosendaal
Developer(s)	Blender Foundation, community
Initial release	January 2, 1994; 26 years ago (1994-01-02)[1]
Stable release	2.90.1 (September 23, 2020; 1 day ago (2020-09-23)) [±]
Preview release
Repository
Written in	C, C++, and Python
Operating system	Windows, macOS, Linux, Android,[3]FreeBSD,[4]OpenBSD,[5]NetBSD,[6]DragonFly BSD,[7]Haiku[8]
Size	129–190 MiB (varies by operating system)[9]
Available in	34 languages
Type	3D computer graphics software
License	GPLv2+[10]
Alexa rank	3,605 (Global, Sept. 2020[update])[11]
Website	https://www.blender.org

Blender is a free and open-source3D computer graphics software toolset used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, motion graphics, interactive 3D applications, virtual reality and computer games. Blender's features include 3D modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, raster graphics editing, rigging and skinning, fluid and smoke simulation, particle simulation, soft body simulation, sculpting, animating, match moving, rendering, motion graphics, video editing, and compositing.

History[edit]

Models and sample render in version 2.77

The Dutch animation studio NeoGeo (not associated with the Neo Geo video game hardware brand) started to develop Blender as an in-house application, and based on the timestamps for the first source files, January 2, 1994 is considered to be Blender's birthday.^[12] The version 1.00 was released in January 1995,^[13] with the primary author being company co-owner and software developer Ton Roosendaal. The name Blender was inspired by a song by the Swiss electronic band Yello, from the album Baby which NeoGeo used in its showreel.^[14][15] Some of the design choices and experiences for Blender were carried over from an earlier software application, called Traces, that Roosendaal developed for NeoGeo on the Commodore Amiga platform during the 1987–1991 period.^[16]

On January 1, 1998, Blender was released publicly online as SGI freeware.^[1] NeoGeo was later dissolved and its client contracts were taken over by another company. After NeoGeo's dissolution, Ton Roosendaal founded Not a Number Technologies (NaN) in June 1998 to further develop Blender, initially distributing it as shareware until NaN went bankrupt in 2002. This also meant, at the time, discontinuing the development of Blender.^[17]

In May 2002, Roosendaal started the non-profit Blender Foundation, with the first goal to find a way to continue developing and promoting Blender as a community-based open-source project. On July 18, 2002, Roosendaal started the "Free Blender" campaign, a crowdfunding precursor.^[18][19] The campaign aimed at open-sourcing Blender for a one-time payment of €100,000 (US$100,670 at the time), with the money being collected from the community.^[20] On September 7, 2002, it was announced that they had collected enough funds and would release the Blender source code. Today, Blender is free and open-source software, largely developed by its community as well as 15 employees employed by the Blender Institute.^[21]

The Blender Foundation initially reserved the right to use dual licensing, so that, in addition to GPLv2, Blender would have been available also under the Blender License that did not require disclosing source code but required payments to the Blender Foundation. However, they never exercised this option and suspended it indefinitely in 2005.^[22] Blender is solely available under "GNU GPLv2 or any later" and was not updated to the GPLv3, as "no evident benefits" were seen.^[23]

In 2019, with the release of version 2.80, the integrated game engine for making and prototyping video games was removed; Blender's developers recommended users migrate to more powerful open source game engines such as Godot instead.^[24][25]

Suzanne, the "monkey" mascot[edit]

In January–February 2002 it was clear that NaN could not survive and would close its doors in March. Nevertheless, they put out one more release, 2.25. As a sort-of easter egg, and last personal tag, the artists and developers decided to add a 3D model of a chimpanzee head, although it is called a "monkey" in the software. It was created by Willem-Paul van Overbruggen (SLiD3), who named it Suzanne after the orangutan in the Kevin Smith film Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

Suzanne is Blender's alternative to more common test models such as the Utah Teapot and the Stanford Bunny. A low-polygon model with only 500 faces, Suzanne is included in Blender and often used as a quick and easy way to test materials, animations, rigs, textures, and lighting setups. The largest Blender contest gives out an award called the Suzanne Award.

Releases[edit]

Official releases of Blender for Microsoft Windows, MacOS and Linux,^[26] as well as a port for FreeBSD,^[27] are available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Blender is available for Windows 7 and above, Mac OS X 10.6 and above, and Linux. Blender 2.76b is the last supported release for Windows XP and version 2.63 was the last supported release for PowerPC.^[28] In 2013, Blender was released on Android as a demo but hasn't been updated it since.^[29]

Hardware requirements[edit]

Release history[edit]

The following table lists notable developments during Blender's release history: green indicates the current version (2.90), yellow indicates currently supported versions, and red indicates versions that are no longer supported (though many later versions can still be used on modern systems).^{[citation needed]}

Features[edit]

Modeling[edit]

Primitives[edit]

Blender has support for a variety of geometric primitives, including polygon meshes, fast subdivision surface modeling, Bezier curves, NURBS surfaces, metaballs, icospheres, text, and an n-gon modeling system called B-mesh.

Modifiers[edit]

Modifiers apply non-destructive effects.

Sculpting[edit]

Blender has multi-res digital sculpting, which includes dynamic topology, maps baking, remeshing, re-symmetrize, and decimation.

Simulation[edit]

Blender can be used to simulate smoke, rain, dust, cloth, fluids, hair and rigid bodies.^[53]

Fluid simulation[edit]

The fluid simulator can be used for simulating liquids, like water hitting a cup.^[54] It uses the Lattice Boltzmann methods to simulate the fluids and allows for lots of adjusting of the amount of particles and the resolution.

The particle physics fluid simulation creates particles that follow the Smoothed-particle hydrodynamics method.^[55] Simulation tools for soft body dynamics including mesh collision detection, LBMfluid dynamics, smoke simulation, Bulletrigid body dynamics, and an ocean generator with waves. A particle system that includes support for particle-based hair. Real-time control during physics simulation and rendering.

In Blender 2.82 a new fluid sim system called mantaflow was added, replacing the old system.^[56]

Animation[edit]

Keyframed animation tools including inverse kinematics, armature (skeletal), hook, curve and lattice-based deformations, shape animations, non-linear animation, constraints, and vertex weighting.

Grease Pencil[edit]

Blender's Grease Pencil tools allow for 2D animation within a full 3D pipeline.

Rendering[edit]

Internal render engine with scanline rendering, indirect lighting, and ambient occlusion that can export in a wide variety of formats; A path tracer render engine called Cycles, which can take advantage of the GPU for rendering. Cycles supports the Open Shading Language since Blender 2.65.^[57]

Eevee is a new physically based real-time renderer. It works both as a renderer for final frames, and as the engine driving Blender's realtime viewport for creating assets. Blender Internal was removed in 2.8.

Texture and shading[edit]

Blender allows procedural and node-based textures, as well as texture painting, projective painting, vertex painting, weight painting and dynamic painting.

Post-production[edit]

Blender has a node-based compositor within the rendering pipeline accelerated with OpenCL.

The Video Sequence Editor (VSE)

Blender also includes a non-linear video editor called the Video Sequence Editor (VSE), with support for effects like Gaussian blur, color grading, fade and wipe transitions, and other video transformations. However, there is no multi-core support for rendering video with the VSE.

Plugins/addons and scripts[edit]

Blender supports Python scripting for creation of custom tools, prototyping, game logic, importing/exporting from other formats and task automation. This allows for integration with a number of external render engines through plugins/addons.

Deprecated features[edit]

The Blender Game Engine was a built-in real-time graphics and logic engine with features such including collision detection, a dynamics engine, and programmable logic. It also allowed the creation of stand-alone, real-time applications ranging from architectural visualization to video games. In April 2018 it was removed from the upcoming Blender 2.8 release series, having long lagged behind other game engines such as the open-source Godot, and Unity.^[24] In the 2.8 announcement, the Blender team specifically mentioned the Godot engine as a suitable replacement for migrating Blender Game Engine users.^[25]

Blender Internal, a biased rasterization engine / scanline renderer used in the previous versions of Blender was also removed for the 2.80 release, in favor of the new Eevee renderer, a realtime PBR renderer.^[58]

File format[edit]

Blender features an internal file system that can pack multiple scenes into a single file (called a ".blend" file).

• Most of Blender's ".blend" files are forward, backward, and cross-platform compatible with other versions of Blender, with the following exceptions:
  • Loading animations stored in post-2.5 files in Blender pre-2.5. This is due to the reworked animation subsystem introduced in Blender 2.5 being inherently incompatible with older versions.
  • Loading meshes stored in post 2.63. This is due to the introduction of BMesh, a more versatile mesh format.
  • Blender 2.8 ".blend" files are no longer fully backwards compatible, causing errors when opened in previous versions.
• All scenes, objects, materials, textures, sounds, images, post-production effects for an entire animation can be stored in a single ".blend" file. Data loaded from external sources, such as images and sounds, can also be stored externally and referenced through either an absolute or relative pathname. Likewise, ".blend" files themselves can also be used as libraries of Blender assets.
• Interface configurations are retained in the ".blend" files.

A wide variety of import/export scripts that extend Blender capabilities (accessing the object data via an internal API) make it possible to interoperate with other 3D tools.

Blender organizes data as various kinds of "data blocks", such as Objects, Meshes, Lamps, Scenes, Materials, Images and so on. An object in Blender consists of multiple data blocks – for example, what the user would describe as a polygon mesh consists of at least an Object and a Mesh data block, and usually also a Material and many more, linked together. This allows various data blocks to refer to each other. There may be, for example, multiple Objects that refer to the same Mesh and making subsequent editing of the shared mesh result in shape changes in all Objects using this Mesh. Objects, meshes, materials, textures etc. can also be linked to from other .blend files, which is what allows the use of .blend files as reusable resource libraries.

Import and export[edit]

The software supports a variety of 3D file formats for import and export, among them Alembic, 3D Studio (3DS), Filmbox (FBX), Autodesk (DXF), SVG, STL (for 3D printing), UDIM, USD, VRML, WebM, X3D and Obj.

User interface[edit]

Blender's user interface underwent a significant update during the 2.5x series, and again with the release of Blender 2.80

Commands[edit]

Most of the commands are accessible via hotkeys. There are also comprehensive graphical menus. Numeric buttons can be "dragged" to change their value directly without the need to aim at a particular widget, as well as being set using the keyboard. Both sliders and number buttons can be constrained to various step sizes with modifiers like the Ctrl and Shift keys. Python expressions can also be typed directly into number entry fields, allowing mathematical expressions to specify values.

Modes[edit]

Blender includes many modes for interacting with objects, the two primary ones being Object Mode and Edit Mode, which are toggled with the Tab key. Object mode is used to manipulate individual objects as a unit, while Edit mode is used to manipulate the actual object data. For example, Object Mode can be used to move, scale, and rotate entire polygon meshes, and Edit Mode can be used to manipulate the individual vertices of a single mesh. There are also several other modes, such as Vertex Paint, Weight Paint, and Sculpt Mode.

Workspaces[edit]

The Blender GUI builds its own tiled windowing system on top of one or multiple windows provided by the underlying platform. One platform window (often sized to fill the screen) is divided into sections and subsections that can be of any type of Blender's views or window-types. The user can define multiple layouts of such Blender windows, called screens, and switch quickly between them by selecting from a menu or with keyboard shortcuts. Each window-type's own GUI elements can be controlled with the same tools that manipulate 3D view. For example, one can zoom in and out of GUI-buttons using similar controls, one zooms in and out in the 3D viewport. The GUI viewport and screen layout are fully user-customizable. It is possible to set up the interface for specific tasks such as video editing or UV mapping or texturing by hiding features not used for the task.

Rendering engines[edit]

An architectural render showing different rendering styles in Blender, including a photorealistic style using Cycles

Cycles[edit]

Cycles is a path-tracingrender engine that is designed to be interactive and easy to use, while still supporting many features.^[59] It has been included with Blender since 2011, with the release of Blender 2.61.

GPU rendering[edit]

Cycles supports GPU rendering, which is used to speed up rendering times. There are three GPU rendering modes: CUDA, which is the preferred method for older Nvidia graphics cards; OptiX, which utilizes the hardware ray-tracing capabilities of Nvidia's Turing architecture & Ampere architecture; and OpenCL, which supports rendering on AMDgraphics cards.

Multiple GPUs are also supported, which can be used to create a render farm – although having multiple GPUs doesn't increase the available memory, because each GPU can only access its own memory.^[60]

Integrator[edit]

The integrator is the core rendering algorithm used for lighting computations. Cycles currently supports a path tracing integrator with direct light sampling. It works well for a variety of lighting setups, but it is not as suitable for caustics and certain other complex lighting situations. Rays are traced from the camera into the scene, bouncing around until they find a light source (a lamp, an object material emitting light, or the world background), or until they are simply terminated based on the number of maximum bounces determined in the light path settings for the renderer. To find lamps and surfaces emitting light, both indirect light sampling (letting the ray follow the surface bidirectional scattering distribution function, or BSDF) and direct light sampling (picking a light source and tracing a ray towards it) are used.^[62]

The two types of integrators[edit]

1. The default path tracing integrator is a "pure" path tracer. This integrator works by sending a number of light rays that act as photons from the camera out into the scene. These rays will eventually hit either: a light source, an object, or the world background. If these rays hit an object, they will bounce based on the angle of impact, and continue bouncing until a light source has been reached or until a maximum number of bounces, as determined by the user, which will cause it to terminate and result in a black, unlit pixel. Multiple rays are calculated and averaged out for each individual pixel, a process known as "sampling". This sampling number is set by the user and greatly affects the final image. Lower sampling often results in more noise and has the potential to create "fireflies" (which are uncharacteristically bright pixels), while higher sampling greatly reduces noise, but also increases render times.
2. The alternative is a branched path tracing integrator, which works mostly the same way. Branched path tracing splits the light rays at each intersection with an object according to different surface components,^{[clarification needed]} and takes all lights into account for shading instead of just one. This added complexity makes computing each ray slower, but reduces noise in the render, especially in scenes dominated by direct (one-bounce) lighting.

Open Shading Language[edit]

Blender users can create their own nodes using the Open Shading Language (OSL), although it is important to note that this feature is not supported by GPUs.^[63]

Introduction

This volume presents the Proceedings of the 15th Nordic-Baltic Conference on Biomedical Engineering and Medical Physics. NBC 2011 brought together science, education and business under the motto “Cooperation for health”.
 The topics covered by the Conference Proceedings include: Imaging, Biomechanics, Neural engineering, Sport Science, Cardio-pulmonary engineering, Medical Informatics, Ultrasound,  Assistive Technology, Telemedicine, and General Biomedical Engineering.

Keywords

Assistive Technology Biomedical Imaging Cardio-pulmonary engineering Medical Informatics Neural engineering Telemedicine and MHealth Virtual Instrumentation

Public
Traded as	NASDAQ: AVID Russell 2000 Component
ISIN	US05367P1003
Industry	Computer software, Technology, Multimedia
Founded	August 1987; 33 years ago (1987-08)
Founder	Bill Warner
Headquarters	Burlington, Massachusetts, United States
Jeff Rosica (president &​ CEO)
Products	Pro Tools, Media Composer, Sibelius, Avid VENUE, Avid NEXIS, MediaCentral, FastServe
Revenue	US$413.28 million (2018)[1]
US$13.684 million (2018)[1]
US$-10.674 million (2018)[1]
Total assets	US$265.84 million (2018)[1]
Total equity	US$-166.66 million (2018)[1]
1,446 (2018)[2]
Website	www.avid.com

Avid Technology is an American technology and multimedia company based in Burlington, Massachusetts and founded in August 1987 by Bill Warner.^[3][4] It specialises in audio and video; specifically, digital non-linear editing (NLE) systems, video editing software, audio editing software, music notation software, management and distribution services.

Avid products are now used in the television and video industry to create television shows, feature films, and commercials. Media Composer, a professional non-linear editing system, is Avid's flagship product.^[5]

History[edit]

Avid was founded by Bill Warner, a marketing manager from Apollo Computer. A prototype of their first non-linear editing system, the Avid/1 Media Composer, was shown at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in April 1988. The Avid/1 was based on an Apple Macintosh II computer, with special hardware and software of Avid's own design installed. The Avid/1 was "the biggest shake-up in editing since Melies played with time and sequences in the early 1900s".^[6] By the early 1990s, Avid products began to replace such tools as the Moviola, Steenbeck, and KEM flatbed editors, allowing editors to handle their film creations with greater ease. The first feature film edited using the Avid was Let's Kill All the Lawyers in 1992, directed by Ron Senkowski. The film was edited at 30fps NTSC rate, then used Avid MediaMatch to generate a negative cutlist from the EDL.^[7][8] The first feature film edited natively at 24fps with what was to become the Avid Film Composer was Emerson Park. The first studio film to be edited at 24fps was Lost in Yonkers, directed by Martha Coolidge. By 1994 only three feature films used the new digital editing system. By 1995 dozens had switched to Avid, and it signaled the beginning of the end of cutting celluloid. In 1996 Walter Murch accepted the Academy Award for editing The English Patient (which also won best picture), which he cut on the Avid. This was the first Editing Oscar awarded to a digitally edited film (although the final print was still created with traditional negative cutting).^[9]

Avid, logo, used from 2007

Avid, logo, used from 2009

Avid, logo, used from 2017

Avid, logo, used from 2019

In 1994 Avid introduced Open Media Framework (OMF) as an open standard file format for sharing media and related metadata. In recent years the company has extended its business expertise through several acquisitions and internal investments towards the full palette of multimedia generation products including those to store and manage media files. In 2006 Avid launched new products such as Avid Interplay and Unity Isis. Avid used to be considered just a "video editing" company, but now has consolidated a well-rounded multimedia generation technology company.

In the past, Avid released Avid Free DV, a free edition of Media Composer with limited functionality; Xpress DV, a consumer edition of Media Composer; and Xpress Pro, a prosumer edition of Media Composer. These editions were discontinued in 2008 as the flagship Media Composer has been lowered in price.

On March 29, 1999, Avid Technology, Inc. adjusted the amount originally allocated to IPR&D and restated its third quarter 1998 consolidated financial statements accordingly, considering the SEC's views.^[10]

In February 2018, Avid appointed Jeff Rosica, after Louis Hernandez Jr. was accused of workplace misconduct.^[11]

Awards[edit]

In 1993, the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences awarded Avid Technology and all of the company's initial employees with a technical Emmy award for Outstanding Engineering Development for the Avid Media Composer video editing system.^[12][13]

On March 21, 1999, at the 71st Academy Awards, Avid Technology Inc. was awarded an Oscar for the concept, system design and engineering of the Avid Film Composer for motion picture editing which was accepted by founder Bill Warner.^[14]

Acquisitions[edit]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

External links[edit]