Blender is a powerful development tool to create 3D images and animations, whose main advantage regarding other similar tools like 3D studio or Maya is that this is a completely free application. The program lets you model, render, texture, illuminate, animate and post-produce any kind of three-dimensional scenes. Its complex interface lets you work with an endless amount of tools like primitive functions, nurb curves,… Blender is compatible with most formats and standard programs like 3D Studio, Autodesk FBX, Collada, Wavefront or Stl. Maybe the main problem of Blender is its high difficulty which might make learning it quite complex. Without a doubt, it has a big user community and there are endless tutorials and examples on the internet. It’s being used by professional studios and they have even made video games and movies with it. Each new version includes new tools and utilities to apply to our creations: flow simulator, special render filters, completely customizable physics engines or combustion systems among others, which turns Blender into a versatile and complete software.
Blender can be used to create 3D visualizations such as still images, video and real-time interactive video games. Blender is well suited to individuals and small studios who benefit from its unified pipeline and responsive development process. It is cross-platform and runs equally well on Linux, Windows and Macintosh computers with a small memory and disk footprint. Its interface uses OpenGL to provide a consistent experience across all supported hardware and platforms.
Key Features:
- Blender is a fully integrated 3D content creation suite, offering a broad range of essential tools, including modeling, UV mapping, texturing, rigging and skinning, animation, many types ofsimulations (fluid, rigid bodies, etc), scripting, rendering, compositing, VFX, and game creation.
- Cross platform, with an OpenGL GUI that is uniform on all major platforms (and customizable with Python scripts).
- High quality 3D architecture enabling fast and efficient creation work-flow.
- Excellent community support from forums and IRC.
- Small executable size, optionally portable.
