The legendary 3D software has celebrated its 30th anniversary on January 2, 2024.
The story of Blender traces back to the Christmas holidays of 1993 when Roosendaal started working on developing the software. By January 2, 1994, the initial version of Blender was operational, featuring a subdivision-based windowing system. This significant date, preserved in an old backup of its creator's SGI Indigo2 workstation, now stands as the official birthday of the software, signifying that Blender has entered its fourth decade of existence.
Throughout December, Blender also conducted an anniversary donation campaign, urging users to contribute "a Birthday gift for Blender". The response was remarkable, with the studio receiving over 10,000 donations in just one month. As stated by the developers, these contributions will play a crucial role in maintaining their independence and help them "develop the best free and open-source content creation tools".
In other Blender-related news, earlier, the team officially shipped Blender 4.0, a massive update that brought significant enhancements to the application's animation and rigging pipelines, improved the modeling and UV toolsets, enhanced Eevee and Cycles, added new nodes and tools for sculpting, painting, and texturing, and upgraded the software's rendering capabilities.
The standout feature of the update, however, was the ability to set up custom operators using the software's Geometry Nodes toolset, simplifying the creation of personalized tools. With the introduction of Node-based tools in version 4.0, it became possible to customize tools without the necessity of Python scripting. You can learn more and download Blender 4.0 here.
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