With the way current big corporations are pushing their “soulless” “Ai slops”, it feels inevitable and bleak that the reign of proper art is perhaps coming to an absolute end. However despite the attempts of such corporate giants, proper artists and developers are still pushing out their creative arts through the usage of traditional arts as well as digital arts. For digital arts, there have been numerous softwares out there. Yet there is one software called “Blender” that has drastically changed the course of current digital art media entirely.
Digital media has come a long way since Harold Cohen’s “AARON”. Back in its infancy digital art was nothing but a jumble of different mathematical functions without good UIs or front end magics. However as the ages have passed, it evolved into its current form. Blender was no different either. The software was born around 1994 by Ton Roosendaal as an in-house tool at NeoGeo which was later released to the public around 1998 as a freeware tool not yet open source. Then around 2002, Neogeo collapsed and as a result there was an attempt at crowdfunding to make it “open source”. This idea to make it “open source” was the major turning point for this software. Even though there were many free 3d softwares at that time like “Wings 3D”, “Art of Illusion” etc, none of them stayed as relevant as blender in the passing years. Blender’s progressive updates like ui changes, offline rendering engines like Cycles, making “open movies” etc all helped improve blender. The development reached one of the greatest heights after 2017-18 when they started to develop the next version numbered “2.8”. This version was a game changer for blender. It massively improved everything such as offering a real time renderer called EEVEE, modern UI, better shortcuts, update to sculpting system etc.
Blender is currently one of the favorite 3d softwares among all the indie studios because of its open source nature. The ability to do all the things of the current “industry standard” without paying for a single dime makes it a no brainer for almost all the indie artists. There have been so many notions of different artists who are now making their own short films in Blender. This one piece of software has effectively made digital art more accessible to every person who has at least a basic computer setup. Moreover, the community of Blender has been getting larger and larger and as a result there are tutorials for almost every single thing out there on the internet. Recently Blender was used to create an oscar winner movie called “Flow” and this speaks volumes of how good and popular Blender has become. Many game studios are now switching to utilize blender as their go to modelling package. Additionally, since blender has all the things one needs to make any digital art, it has been the best free alternative to Zbrush (a leading sculpting program) as well.
In the foreseeable future, it seems blender will continue to grow and this growth will help the digital artists make better arts amidst all these soulless cash grabbing ai contents. If you wanna learn more about Blender then feel free to check these links below :
