This PACS season the WAM workshop is going to take a look at 3-D Animation using the free, open source Blender software.

3-D design software like Autodesk Maya can cost several thousand dollars, and less expensive software like Electric Rain's Swift 3D can be difficult to learn because of the lack of good training books.

Blender, however, has it all, with free on-line support that includes a detailed FAQ page, a full Wiki Manual, and links to on-line support groups like the Blender Artists Forum. And a search of Amazon will show quite a number of training and reference books, including (at our basic level) The Essential Blender and Blender for Dummies.

I'm not ordinarily that big a fan of Dummies books (though I've found their book on the TI-89 Graphing Caluclator indispensable), but for this PACS workshop I've decided to use the Blender for Dummies. From my use of it so far, I've found it to be pretty good, with a minimum of the "cutesy stuff" we often associate with Dummies books, and it's also the book that seems most readily available at retail in B&N and Borders.

Blender for Dummies comes with a CD (so if you buy it at retail, make sure no one's filched the CD from the back of the book) that includes the Blender software as well as some sample files, and installing Blender from the Dummies CD means that you'll be using the same Blender version as the author, which I'm thinking we might find helpful as we move to more advanced topics. You'll find, at least on Windows, that Blender installation is quite easy, and the installation software on the Dummies CD includes a Windows Installer.

Blender uses Python as its scripting language, so it can be helpful if you have Python correctly installed and configured in the version used by whatever Blender version you've installed. At our basic level, though, I don't think we're going to need any Python installation, so if you don't have Python it's really nothing to worry about.

One word of warning. If you're bringing a laptop with you to the WAM workshop, you may find that Blender is a little difficult to work with. It does require a good deal of processing power; and, even more importantly, it has some odd-ball input methods, which work best if you have a three-button (left, right, and middle) mouse as well as a numeric keypad. There are some work-arounds for using Blender on a laptop, but I'm not sure how successful they are.