Blender

Blender is an open source graphics package for building and rendering models. It is extendable through Python. It is available on Linux, Mac and Windows. It is capable of importing and exporting many graphic file formats.

Info

For the real full blown docs see: Blender Home. This is my attempt to condense what I do.

Installing

% yum install blender.i386 ; # [Fedora Core 6 Blender Isn’t Yummy][2]

Running

% blender -w ; # The -w makes it so you can minimize the GUI… took me a bit to find this!

Setting Up Import/Export

See: Attach:blender_prefs_filepaths1.png

1. Select "User Prefs" from middle menu
2. Click "File Paths" option
3. Click itsy-bitsy folder icon for finding the scripts dir
4. Surf to /usr/share/blender/scripts
5. Click the "Select Scripts" button
6. Select File→Save Default Settings ; # next time blender comes up this will be present

If you quit blender, and bring it back up, and select File→Import, you should see something like this.

ToDo

At this point… I only use Blender for import/export!