Blender For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Making Open Movies and Games

One cool thing about the programmers who write Blender is that many of them also use the program regularly. They're writing code not just because they're told to do it, but also because they want to improve Blender for their own purposes. Part of this motivation has to do with Blender's open-source nature, but it also has to do with Blender's history as an in-house tool built on direct artist input and sometimes written by the artists themselves.

Seeking to get even more of this direct artist feedback to developers, the Blender Foundation launched Project Orange in 2005. The project's purpose was to create an animated short movie using open-source tools, primarily Blender. A small team of artists was assembled in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, and roughly seven months later, Elephants Dream premiered and was released as the first open movie, meaning that not only was it created by using open-source tools, but all the production files — 3D models, scenes, character rigs, and so on — were also released under a permissive and open Creative Commons Attribution license. If you don't like Elephants Dream, you're free to change it to your liking or use the files for something else entirely! How many movies give you that luxury? You can see the film and all the production files at www.elephantsdream.org.

Due to the success of Orange, the Blender Institute was established in 2007 for the expressed purpose of having a permanent space to create open projects, ...