Blender – Free Open Source 3D Creation Software

April 5th, 2016 Phil Williams Geeky, Tech 0 comments

The software

Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing, and motion tracking. It even does video editing and game creation. Advanced users employ Blender’s API for Python scripting to customize the application and write specialized tools; often these are included in Blender’s future releases. Blender is well-suited to individuals and small studios who benefit from its unified pipeline and responsive development process. Examples from many Blender-based projects are available in the showcase.

Blender is cross-platform and runs equally well on Linux, Windows and Macintosh computers. Its interface uses OpenGL to provide a consistent experience. To confirm specific compatibility, the list of supported platforms indicates those regularly tested by the development team.

As a community-driven project under the GNU General Public License (GPL), the public is empowered to make small and large changes to the code base, which leads to new features, responsive bug fixes, and better usability. Blender has no price tag, but you can invest, participate, and help to advance a powerful collaborative tool: Blender is your own 3D software.

The organization

Blender Foundation is a Dutch public-benefit corporation, established to support and facilitate the projects on blender.org.

Our mission

We want to build a free and open source complete 3D creation pipeline for artists and small teams.

Read the mission statement about what Blender is by Foundation Chairman Ton Roosendaal.

The license

You are free to use Blender for any purpose, including commercially or for education. This freedom is being defined by Blender’s GNU General Public License (GPL).

Development

Blender is being actively developed by hundreds of people from all around the world. These include animators, artists, VFX experts, hobbyists, scientists, and many more. All of them are united by an interest to further a completely free and open source 3D creation pipeline. The Blender Foundation supports and facilitates these goals—and employs a small staff for that—but depends fully on the global online community.

More help is always welcome! From developing and improving Blender to writing documentation, etc, there are a number of different things you can do to get involved.

Features

Photorealistic Rendering

Blender now features a powerful new unbiased rendering engine called Cycles that offers stunning ultra-realistic rendering.

The built-in Cycles rendering engine offers:

GPU & CPU rendering
Realtime viewport preview
HDR lighting support
Permissive License for linking with external software

Fast Modeling

Blender’s comprehensive array of modeling tools make creating, transforming and editing your models a breeze.

Blender’s modeling tools include:

Keyboard shortcuts for a fast workflow
N-Gon support
Edge slide, collapse and dissolve
Grid and Bridge fill
Python scripting for custom tools and add-ons

Realistic Materials

With Blender’s new rendering engine the possibilities for materials are endless.

Key features are:

Complete Node Support for full customization
Physically accurate shaders like glass, translucency and SSS
Open Shading Language (OSL) support for coding unique shaders

Fast Rigging

Transforming a model into a posable character has never been easier!

Blender offers an impressive set of rigging tools including:

Envelope, skeleton and automatic skinning
Easy weight painting
Mirror functionality
Bone layers and colored groups for organization
B-spline interpolated bones

Animation toolset

Whether it’s simple keyframing or complex walk-cycles, Blender allows artists to turn their still characters into impressive animations.

Animation feature set offers:

Automated walk-cycles along paths
Character animation pose editor
Non Linear Animation (NLA) for independent movements
IK forward/inverse kinematics for fast poses
Sound synchronization

Sculpting

Experience the joy of sculpting organic subjects using the built-in sculpting feature set.

Sculpting set includes:

20 different brush types
Multi-res sculpting support
Dynamic Topology sculpting
Mirrored sculpting

Fast UV Unwrapping

Easily unwrap your mesh right inside Blender, and use image textures or paint your own directly onto the model.

Blender allows for:

Fast Cube, Cylinder, Sphere and Camera projections
Conformal and Angle Based unwrapping (with edge seams and vertex pinning)
Painting directly onto the mesh
Multiple UV layers
UV layout image exporting

Full Compositor

Blender comes with a fully fledged compositor built right in. That means no more exporting to third party programs, you can do it all without leaving the program.

The compositor comes with:

Impressive library of nodes for creating camera fx, color grading, vignettes and much more
Render-layer support
Full compositing with images and video files
Ability to render to multiLayer OpenEXR files
Multi-threaded