This training note intends to describe what Blender is all about.  www.blender.org

What is Blender?

Blender is a 3D content creation software package free to download and to use. It can be used to create large projects like motion pictures or smaller projects like games.  Although it is free of charge, it is a professional grade package due to a large user customer base and continual development efforts.   Blender is good for creating these types of artworks:

• Videos or effects for videos
• Images, and sculptures
• Games

How does Blender help in the content creation process?

Blender provides a variety of tools for creating artwork. Primarily it provides sculpting and geometry definition tools. Using a sculpture, lights and materials/textures can be applied onto the object to adjust properties for rendering.  Blender provides tools for:

• Motion paths and tracking
• Rigging
• Scene layout
• Texturing
• Lighting
• Sculpting
• Geometry definition
• Physics simulation

Performance improves with:

We tested Blender using some 3D models downloaded off the internet to review its viewport performance. We also found a previously official rendering benchmark to test Blender’s CUDA performance. We discovered that for a model of sufficient complexity, a better GPU improves viewport performance. For GPU renderings, a better GPU also provides better performance.

Blender’s supported formats:

• Blender supports the most popular 3D media file formats; Collada, Wavefront, and X3D. This gives Blender excellent interoperability for artistic projects.

END

This training note intends to describe what Blender is all about.  www.blender.org

What is Blender?

Blender is a 3D content creation software package free to download and to use. It can be used to create large projects like motion pictures or smaller projects like games.  Although it is free of charge, it is a professional grade package due to a large user customer base and continual development efforts.   Blender is good for creating these types of artworks:

• Videos or effects for videos
• Images, and sculptures
• Games

How does Blender help in the content creation process?

Blender provides a variety of tools for creating artwork. Primarily it provides sculpting and geometry definition tools. Using a sculpture, lights and materials/textures can be applied onto the object to adjust properties for rendering.  Blender provides tools for:

• Motion paths and tracking
• Rigging
• Scene layout
• Texturing
• Lighting
• Sculpting
• Geometry definition
• Physics simulation

Performance improves with:

We tested Blender using some 3D models downloaded off the internet to review its viewport performance. We also found a previously official rendering benchmark to test Blender’s CUDA performance. We discovered that for a model of sufficient complexity, a better GPU improves viewport performance. For GPU renderings, a better GPU also provides better performance.

Blender’s supported formats:

• Blender supports the most popular 3D media file formats; Collada, Wavefront, and X3D. This gives Blender excellent interoperability for artistic projects.

END

• Human has short term memory and long term memory.  Computers are similar.  Short term memory is the main memory.  Long term memory is the hard disk.  This training note focuses on computer main memory.  Surprising, it is not just short term and it is volatile. The memory will disappear if the computer power is turned off.  This type of memory is called Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM).  DDR3 is DRAM.

• Fortunately USB memory sticks are not volatile so that we can keep data or video files on USB for several years perhaps.  USB memory sticks use the same type of technology as SSD (static state disk) called NAND (Not AND).  NAND is non-volatile but it allows ‘data written to it” for a finite number of times and the speed of writing and reading is much lower than DRAM. 
• DDR3 stands for Double Data Rate Generation 3 and it succeeded DDR2, DDR, and SDR (Single) in reversed chronological order.   All of them are DRAM.  SDR used 1 clock signal to initiate one memory transfer.  DDR used 1 clock signal for 2 transfers.  DDR2 gets 4 transfers and DDR3 gets 8 transfers.  DDR3-800 is therefore based on a 100MHz clock.  These numbers are deceiving as the multipliers do not deliver correspondingly.
• Users care about the effective rate of data transfer and not the physical clock frequency or multipliers.  One literature stated DDR3 as having 11GB/s.  If a motherboard and its CPU are designed with 3 memory controllers, we can expect the data rate to increase to 33GB/s.  Intel Core i7 with 2011pin is designed to have 4 memory controllers and it can hit 44GB/s in theory.
• The specifications for DDR4 have been completed by an international standard organisation called JEDEC.  Preliminary tests claimed a data transfer rate of 24GB/s which is more than double of DDR3.  This increase is not achieved with higher clock frequency along the DDR2 or DDR3 approaches, but is from a complete re-design.  DDR2 and DDR3 use a parallel signal transmission scheme which requires the beginnings and ends of all signal transmission paths to be synchronized.  DDR4 uses a packet signal transmission scheme which does not need to wait to get synchronized.   DDR4 is not backward compatible with DDR3, and it will be available in computer systems on the market in year 2015.