Blender 2.49 – Create TV commercials, visualizations and other 3D animations

A new release candidate (RC) build of Blender has been released. Blender is a software that allows you to create 3D animations such as TV commercials, technical visualizations, character animation and even business graphics. It’s a powerful yet simple application which only takes about 50MB hard disk space & does not require behemoth of a computer to run. Although it may not have all the features of industry leading 3D animation tools such as 3DMAX or Maya, Blender can be used to create some pretty cool animations quickly and easily – not a bad feat considering it’s totally free.

blender logo

One of the downsides of this software is that the user interface is not that user friendly – I found it a bit too cluttered for my liking. And note that Blender is not that easy to learn. Thankfully, there are lots of free video tutorials available on YouTube that’ll make things a lot easier. Just do a search for ‘blender tutorial’ on YouTube and you should get plenty of useful results. Once you get the hang of it, you can do some pretty amazing things with this software.

Download

The current final, stable build of Blender (as at26/4/2009) is v2.48a. A new release candidate build 2.49 (RC1) was also released yesterday. Download links to both are included below

[Click Here] to download Blender 2.48a for Windows, Linux and a wide range of other operating systems from official download page

[Click Here] to download Blender 2.49 RC1 from FileHippo– this is a test build.