Interview with Not a Number

Blender 3D is better known among Windows users. Our readers would like to know a brief history of Blender 3D. What could you tell us?

Blender was originally developed as an in-house 3D modeling and animation tool during 1989-97 in the biggest animation studio in the Netherlands.

Ton Roosendaal, who was a co-owner of that animation studio, founded NaN Technologies in June of 1998 to further develop and exploit Blender software and its underlying technologies. Blender is available as freeware, which is explained by the company’s mission: To enable creativity through the democratization of 3D technology.

There was a small team of developers working very closely together to build efficiencies into a program and as a result, combined with the use of OpenGL, Blender has an amazingly small footprint of 1.6MB. Nowadays, NaN Technologies employs 8 programmers which is quite a small number considering the number of platforms NaN supports Blender on.

Today, Roosendaal is the Technical and Creative Director of NaN Technologies. The company is headquartered in Amsterdam, with offices in Eindhoven and currently employs 23 people.

Could you introduce Blender 3D products to our readers, what kind of benefits can it bring forward potential costumers?

Blender is a fully integrated 3D creation suite. Blender features a versatile animation system, contemporary modeling principles, an advanced rendering engine, character animation tools, an editor for post-production and tools for creating and playback of real-time interactive 3D. Blender is the first and only 3D package integrating a real-time game engine for interactive editing of real-time content. Game logic can be edited with a GUI or can be scripted using the industry standard Python scripting language.

Its 1.6MB file size makes for quick and easy downloading, while its compatibility with OpenGL™ eliminates the need for costly high-end graphics machines. Blender runs on most PC and Workstation operating systems, including all Windows flavors, Linux, FreeBSD, Sun, SGI, BeOS and Mac OS X. Blender Creator is distributed freely over the Internet.

Blender Publisher provides all the tools and licenses needed for 3D publishing, including a stand-alone player. The Blender 3D Plug-in allows playback of Blender produced content by non-Blender users. These two new tools complement the Creator, extending Blenders' professional applications for the user.

Porting an application to a new platform is a very expensive and hard job to do. Could you tell us why Not a Number decided to port Blender 3D to Mac OS X?

Porting to Macintosh is consistent with NaN’s company mission which is to make professional 3D tools available for creatives everywhere. Everywhere refers also to multiple platforms, not only to geographical location. Porting to Mac has always been our plan as the culture and values of the Mac and Blender users are quite similar; a bit rebellious and different, made by and for creatives. However, the port was not feasible for us to do before the launch of the Unix based Mac OS X. Blender is the only 3D tools designed around the artist and less around the programmer which is characteristic by our real time 3D engine – it allows the artist to animate with little to no programming.

The 3D market is a world full of big firms (Alias, Newtek, Avid,...). Is it profitable to release a free 3D applications as Blender 3D is doing? Zero cost is a very powerful sales weapon, but I suppose there are more…

Making money with 3D creation software is extremely difficult as we can see from our competitors who have to charge high prices knowing that a high percentage of their customers use the software illegally. This situation also keeps the 3D market very small as fewer creatives have access to the tools. Blender is changing the rules in this market by offering Blender Creator as freeware to expand the market for 3D. We make our money with the commercial publishing of Blender on the Internet and wireless networks.

What kind of user do you have (large/medium/small 3D studios, freelancers, Postproduction studios, broadcast, game developers…)?

Our user base is very much independent small and medium sized studios and production houses.

Has Blender 3D got the intention of walking alone among the big 3D firms? Or maybe merge with other 3D developer firm?

The market for 3D media is a fast evolving one and Blender has a strong vision of how it should develop. Should one of the other 3D players grasp the new reality for 3D, we’d be happy to talk to them.

Let's talk about Mac. Apple has released Mac OS X, its UNIX based OS. What's Blender's pronouncement about this new OS from Apple (Aqua, OpenGL, Java, Quartz,…)? And for Not a Number, as a developer, is there any advantage with this new OS?

The launch of Mac OS X meant that porting Blender to the Mac had became much easier than it was in the days of OS9. In our initial porting efforts, we found that Apple's OpenGL implementation was actually very good. Since Blender only uses OpenGL for display, we can't say much about Aqua and Quartz. We have been using Carbon and this went pretty straightforward. The major advance with the new OS is that it is based on a UNIX kernel.

Do you receive any kind of support from Apple Computer?

Yes, Apple has been very supportive. We’ve received marketing support and lots of encouragement.

In your opinion, has Apple got any chance to keep Apple Macintoshes in profesional 3D environments such as postproduction houses, broadcast… fighting against Microsoft Windows and PC makers? What do you think Apple must change to increase its presence and market share (in software and hardware)?. Do you think this new OS will change the current situation?

In our opinion, Apple's introduction of Mac OS X seriously increased the chances of growth in the professional 3D market. The first requirement for them to survive is to get the major software packages to move to OS X. The first signs are good, as Maya and Blender have taken that step, along with some other 3D packages that were already available for Mac OS9. In terms of hardware, it would help if high-end graphics card manufacturers would produce their cards (and drivers!) for Mac as well.

If you could ask for something that's not currently in Mac world, what would you ask for (better graphic cards, improved proccessors, more help,...)?

There is not really much to ask for. Development support from Apple is really good and the quality of the hardware is excellent as well. To mention a few wishes; high-end graphics cards would be nice as stated above. Also, we found that it is difficult to develop web browser plug-ins on OS X. This is a big issue for us at the moment because we have browser plug-ins for interactive 3D Blender content on other platforms.