Welcome to the first chapter of Blender 3D—Incredible Machines! This chapter will introduce you to a few concepts and relevant information about this book, and of course, talk a bit about this incredible software called Blender 3D and how we can take advantage of all of the tools of Blender.
Before we start talking about more technical stuff, such as modeling surfaces and polygons for our machines, let's just answer this simple question: What is Blender 3D? Blender 3D is a very powerful 3D graphics suite, which is open source and available for almost all of the operating systems in the market. One of its most impressive features is that it's light weight and can run on computers that don't have updated hardware.
Blender is an open source software available for anyone to use and create 3D content, but it wasn't always like this. When Blender was created, the software was a proprietary platform developed by a Dutch studio called NeoGeo (not related to the NeoGeo game console) and a company called Not a Number (NaN). The primary creator and developer of Blender is Ton Roosendaal. He was involved in the technical development of Blender at NeoGeo and the marketing of NaN.
By 2002, the investors behind NaN decided to end all operations of the company, including the development of Blender 3D. In the same year, Ton Roosendaal created the Blender Foundation to promote the use and development of Blender as an open source project, using the GNU Public License (GPL). With the Free Blender worldwide campaign, the foundation was able to raise 100,000 EUR necessary to buy the source code from NaN and release Blender to the world.
Today, Ton Roosendaal runs the Blender Foundation and the newly established Blender Institute that organizes the development and promotion of Blender.