Blender is an open source, cross platform suite of tools for 3D creation that can be used for modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, water and smoke simulations, skinning, animating, rendering, particle and other simulations, non-linear editing, compositing, and creating interactive 3D applications, including video games, animated film, or visual effects.
Blender is one of the best community-supported program with ongoing development by dedicated hackers, making Blender a powerful and viable 3D software solution.
You can build blender directly from CVS or modify it to your own needs, as long as you comply with the GPL License. This requires C programming knowledge. To get started visit the Blender Developer’s Forums. Other forms of customization are Python scripting and Plug-In modules. Plug-In modules come in two types: Sequence and Texture.
Since Blender is completely free, everyone can download and use it in commercial projects. Blender is only 10 MB in size, which is one of the positive aspects of Blender and we can even run it directly from a portable drive.
- Interface
- Modeling
- Rigging
- Rendering
- Animation
- UV Unwrapping
- Shading
- Physics and Particles
- Imaging and Compositing
- Real Time 3D/Game Creation.
As mentioned above blender is a cross platform program, supported platforms are – Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Mac OS X (PPC and Intel), Linux (i386), Linux (PPC), FreeBSD 5.4 (i386), SGI Irix 6.5, Sun Solaris 2.8 (sparc). You can view the detailed requirements to run this application on blenders website.
Latest stable release available for download from the Blender Foundation is Blender 2.49b.