free blender 3d animation open source software

[Roostah]

http://www.blender.org/ good for making animated movies of your projects. or renderings. plenty of tutorials on youtube as well as on the blender site. ^.-

[quequen]

Blender is a fantastic, powerfull software for anyone who has interest on 3D, and its's GNU licenced. It's intendet to be a character's maker, but you'll find a package that is in many ways at the same's Rhino level. I think Martijn, Leo, Victor T, could take a lot from Blender to improve their products.

[Leo Lazauskas]

Originally Posted by quequen

I think Martijn, Leo, Victor T, could take a lot from Blender to improve their products.

How would it do that?

[quequen]

Well, I'm not a programmer (ok, may be a really bad one) but think that having acces to the source code of such a 3D software can reveal some good ideas.
Perhaps you could incorporate animation and quality render to your wave paterns, and a cool 3D viewer; Martijn could make a good Renderer to Delftship Pro, and even animation, and a faster way to select, modify, reorder, smooth the surfaces and nurbs control points, etc.

[Leo Lazauskas]

Originally Posted by quequen

Perhaps you could incorporate animation and quality render to your wave paterns, and a cool 3D viewer

Thanks, but I'm more interested in ship science.
I always output results in simple text formats, so people can use them as input to Blender (or other programs) to produce their own graphics.

Leo.

[CaptBill]

Originally Posted by quequen

Blender is a fantastic, powerfull software for anyone who has interest on 3D, and its's GNU licenced. It's intendet to be a character's maker, but you'll find a package that is in many ways at the same's Rhino level. I think Martijn, Leo, Victor T, could take a lot from Blender to improve their products.

Blender is actually really powerful and would be a good platform for an advanced hullform modeler on par with rhino (even better actually). What they lack is customized tools to 'drive' the interface. They need the final layer of toolsets, developed by boat builders FOR boatbuilders to work without having to become a 3d artist. In stock form they are very broad reaching to appeal to any market, but lack a programming 'framework' that is needed for all but a professional 3d artist.

Like Leo said, you need the ability to feed it 'old school' hull fairing computations by programming a 'hullform plug-in' to provide a familiar interface for boat building.

The idea is very promising because Blender can handle fluid simulations, wind simulation on sails, and also rigging animations. From a programmers standpoint it's nice because the code is open source.

The trick, again as Leo pointed out, is mapping the numbers from a spreadsheet/database of coordinates obtained by traditional methods and mapping them to the Blender object model.

[alanrockwood]

A note about Blender: There is a Blender add on called CADtools. It aims to give blender some CAD-like capabilities. The project is only partially complete, but the author of that project lets you download what he has.

He has also made a fork of blender itself that provides better support for CADtools, though you can also use CADtools with the standard version of Blender.

I'm not really sure if it is worth all the trouble, but it is at least worth looking into.

Here is the key link.

http://www.cad4arch.com/cadtools/index.htm

Also, here is a link with a tutorial on using standard Blender for 3D mechanical modeling.

http://www.rab3d.com/tut_blender.php

Both of these can us Blender 2.49b. They do not work with the 2.5 version(s) of Blender because these versions of Blender are not backwards compatible.

[magwas]

Originally Posted by CaptBill

Blender is actually really powerful and would be a good platform for an advanced hullform modeler on par with rhino (even better actually).

Have you taken a look into freecad yet (the open source one)?
Easier user interface than blender, scriptable in python, both 2D and 3D capabilities. It would not be a really big deal to extend its mesh algorithms with freeship's surface mesh editing capabilities to it. As freeship is also open source, it needs to translate the core algorithm from pascal to c++ or python, and glueing it to freecad interfaces.
The existing 3D capabilities of freecad than would give am even much more powerful modeler than freeship.
From that on hydrostatic calculations are also a matter of translation (with much less glueing needed).
Adding autoextruding based on plate thickness and using its already existing capabilities to export for FEM tools would open a way to do mechanical analysis (and give more realistic look).

I am very tempted to play with it, but I have another source projects to attend to, and limited free time.

[lewisboats]

Freeship was done in Delphi or so I believe Marven said.

[magwas]

Yes, delphi is a pascal IDE, and FreeShip was done in that. Translating pascal to python is not a big deal, and only the core algorithms should be translated: the infrastructure is already there.