Most of my experience with open source software has been pretty painful. Ugly web sites, broken installs & inexplicable error messages are the norm. Surprisingly, my first 10 minutes with
Blender exhibited none of these problems. On the surface, it has all the core features of its proprietary
competitors. Once you actually start using it the warts start to show, UI inconsistancy, poor work flow for common tasks, etc. But, I'm willing to overlook that. After all it's free.
One of the things that attracted me to Blender was the python scripting, and I'm glad to say I was not disappointed. The API documentation is a bit spotty, and has the stench of
auto-generatation. But they do provide lots of example scripts, so I tore open a simple import script and added
support for
Cylindrix PFD files in no time.
I'm going to use it for my devious character animation experiments. Hopefully, the joy of the strange will remain...
