tonroosendaal

Set IoR to 2.419

We had enough money to buy 1 SGI in 1991 (costing 3 year salaries). Getting 3d software for it would cost a similar amount. So I took the challenge of developing own tools - and never stopped liking that.

The people who look down on Blender are not going to be using it ever. But the younger generation that's been growing up with it now are getting big too!

It's really a perception this. It's not so common that a specialist tool like Blender (which is targeted at people who want to be producing 3d content as a profession) is free (gratis) and open source.

Read my 2013 Siggraph report about how Blender is being perceived positively by industry now: http://archive.blender.org/blenderorg/blender-foundation/press/siggraph-2013/index.html

Haha, that's a legendary story now.

Back in 1998 when we were investigating this, I asked both Perl and Python forums what they would advise. The feedback on Perl forums were all fully convinced of themselves and were quite negative about others. The feedback from Python coders was well balanced, they clearly know other script languages well. So - I decided to go for the nicest people, not the best technology. (Choosing for people you never regret.)

The community (the users and developers) are Blender's best feature yes!

Most surprising use of Blender... eh, NASA shares all their models on their site standard as .blend :) Really I get amazed every day by what people do!