Suzanne

Suzanne is what happens when a mascot is distributed as code instead of as a campaign. She was modelled by Willem-Paul van Overbruggen, who goes by SLiD3, for Blender 2.25 in 2002, the last release before NaN went under, and she was added as an easter egg, a signature from the people who thought they were about to lose the thing they had built. Blender was bought back and released as open source shortly after, with Suzanne already living in the mesh menu, and she has never left. The name comes from the orangutan in Kevin Smith's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, which is the least corporate origin story available to any character in this Atlas. Because she is a primitive, she became the default test subject for the entire discipline: if you have ever watched a tutorial on subsurface scattering, three point lighting, subdivision surfaces or shader nodes, you have watched somebody light a monkey head. The Blender Foundation leaned into it and named the community's annual film awards the Suzanne Awards, handing out a 3D printed Suzanne statue at every conference since 2003, and people print their own copies at home. She is a mascot with no personality whatsoever who is nevertheless inside every Blender install on earth, which is a fairly humbling result.