One of the earlier posts on this blog is from 2003 (archived, not available right now) and it was about Blender, the up and coming 3D toolkit that was turning heads of 3D experts 25 years ago. I remember my first lessons with the then also new-comer Cinema 4D, some tryouts with early versions of 3DS-Max, Carrara, Lightwave, Modo, Z-Brush and other tools many of which do not exist anymore today.

Blender however was and is different. Back then it was the underdog with a fully OpenGL accelerated UI, fully customizable, with an impressive featureset (for it’s price (freeware) and the time) that fit on to a single 700MB floppy diskette.

Back then the Blender crew did a tryout into commercial services for about a year or so and offered a premium edition of Blender for roughly 250 Euros. I bought a license and still have it today. I’m a proud owner. A year later NaN, the company behind Blender, closed shop and was bought out and Ton Roosendahl, the projects chief, soon after had the unique opportunity to free up the source of Blender for 100 000 Euros. The community donated and 7 weeks later, Blender (finally) was free and open source software.

A roaring success-story began which more than 20 years later has culminated into an industry that is more and more dominated by Blender and its ever-growing feature-set. The once cute, admirable but usually dismissed FOSS underdog turned into an industry behemoth that these days is on the map of everyone doing professional media production. Blender is a phenomenal FOSS success story, one that makes those of us who where there from the beginning on very proud to this very day.

Blender 5.0 was recently released with a usual plethora of new and often industry-unique features and it still holds dear to its original standards of avantgarde software excellence. This release is as good as an occasion as any other to praise Blender and the people making it. Check it out.