Smile

As result of some personal needs, I spent some time this morning looking for some kind of free CAD program. After searching on the internet and in the apt-get repositories, I found the following free CAD programs: QCad and Blender. QCad is a program similar to Autocad, and Blender is closer to 3D Studio. Since I have sometimes tried 3D Studio in the past, I think I were more familiar to Blender, so I chose it for giving it a try.

The fact is that, nowadays, I have not too much spare time for playing with this kind of issues (not at least in a month), but this morning I decided to take a rest of my usual work plan and I was trying to learn the basics of blender modelling with the help of this book (spanish - creative commons licensed).

And this is the result of my test: a 3D version of the igalia logo (yes, I know… so much original )

I know it’s quite simple (and incorrect, since colors are not exactly those ones from the original logo), but I have not enough time for learning more about blender right now. Maybe in a future I’ll have it… but now it’s time to go back to my current work plan.

Anyway, the main objective this morning was not to get a high-level Blender knowledge and/or a high-quality 3D design, but just learning some basic concepts, and I think I had accomplished that mission. And regarding to model igalia logo… just because seemed to be an easy exercise to get myself familiar with the Blender interface at the same time I got an excuse for writting something on this blog since my last post.

In conclusion, I’d like to tell that, if you like the 3D design world and have a few spare time, I’d encourage you to try blender: it’s good, it’s funny, it seems not to be so much complicated as you can expect after a first look, and it’s free (GPL-licensed).

Update [11/09/06]: Here you can download the source and the text font used for this logo:

Blender source file
Text font used

Note: since my simple 3D logo is a too much basic example, you can take a look into a movie called Elephant Dreams if you are not sure about blender capabilities for making good quality 3D graphics or animations.