Before I got into web development I was involved in several open source blender projects, usually as a modeler (someone who creates the 3d objects, then passes them on to people who color animate and process them). I have used both maya3d (the oracle of the 3d modeling, powerful, industry grade software with a cost prohibiting casual experimentation) and blender, in addition to several other programs in limited amount.

Blender is everything that is right about the open source community.

The feature list is very comparable to commercial applications (which usually run > $500)

http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/features/

The community(s) are great, super helpful, nice, and diverse.

http://www.blender.org/community/user-community/ http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/ http://www.blendernation.com/ (and many more, in other languages)

But one of the most important, and as far as I know, unique things about blender and the community are the open movie projects.

The Blender Foundation establishes clear and detailed roadmaps for features (something many open source projects struggle for). Then they take a small group of some of the best artists and programmers from the community, and pay them to create a open source project using the current goals in the roadmap. The most recent was Project Durian, which created the short CG film "Sintel" with a focus on developing blenders renderer to do high res (4k) renders, and the animation system to allow for crowds and complex animations. They also developed some sfx like fire and explosions. At the end, not only was the film released as creative commons, but all the files from the film were too, so the community could benefit.

Where did the money come from? Presales of the DVD, which contained all the special features and files, and was released before the movie was posted to youtube, giving a "sneak preview". One project serving as fundraising, community support, community outreach, tutorial/teaching, feature development, focus grouping, beta testing/dogfooding, and publicity. Success.

Here are links to some of the other blender open projects.

- http://www.sintel.org/ - Project Durian - Sintel, focus on special effects, high res cinimatic rendering, and animation improvements. - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRsGyueVLvQ

- http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/about/index.php - Project Mango - Big Buck Bunny - focus on hair/fiber, work with outdoor/large scenes, improve animation system for cartoony deformation styled animations. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSGBVzeBUbk)

(Note: Chances are you've seen this somewhere, because of the CC licence, stores and online video hosts love to use it for a placeholder)

- http://orange.blender.org/ - Project Orange - Elephants Dream - This is the project which developed blender into a program that had all the features to compete with the big boys, added the node compositing and spleen animation controls, plus lots more. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFtg0WBD5Hc&feature=fvst)

I would advise watching all of those, besides being great artistically, the stories are actually pretty good.