Yesterday I tried the latest version of Blender (v. 2.5 Alpha 2), a free and very powerful open source 3D program. I have been using Blender for the last couple of years on and off and every new release had significant improvements. This time the first major impression is a completely revamped user interface. If you know Blender it may take a little while to find all of the buttons and tools again, but overall it's a fantastic improvement. Things are structured better, look better, and overall are much more user friendly. It's still incredibly complex to use and to know all the functions available, but that's the same for every powerful 3D software. The Blender user interface may still seem very unique on first sight, but I find that the complete control over it makes it really very flexible to work with.
The new release also comes with significant improvements in performance, modeling, animation systems, physics and rendering and now supports 64 bit on all platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux).
Even though I'm just trialing the Alpha release it seems very stable. The final release version will be available for download later this year. I would imagine that the SIGGRAPH 2010 conference end of July sounds like a likely release date.
As far as I can forsee Blender will play a part in my project, but probably more as supportive software than the main tool. The plan is not to create a full 3D animation.
A few film examples using Blender are the Durian Open Movie projects:
Chaos & Evolutions looks like an interesting non-3D training resource affiliated to Blender.
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