Blender 3D Software

Blender is a free open source content creation suite released under the GNU General Public Licence. Blender can be used for the following things:

Modeling
A range of 3D object types including polygon meshes, NURBS surfaces, bezier and B-spline curves, metaballs, vector fonts (TrueType, PostScript, OpenType)

Very fast Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces with optimal iso-lines display and sharpness editing

Full multiresolution sculpting capabilities with 2D bitmap/3D procedural brushes (Paint, Smooth, Pinch, Inflate, Grab) supporting symmetry

Modifier stack deformers such as Lattice, Curve, Armature or Displace

Mirror modifier with middle vertices clipping and automatic deletion of inner faces

Non destructive real time Boolean and Array modifiers

Mesh modeling based on vertex, edge and/or face selection

Smooth soft selection editing tools for organic modeling

Python scripting access for custom tools

Imaging and Composting

Compositor tightly integrated and aligned with the rendering pipeline MultiLayer OpenEXR files allow to store and reuse raw renderlayer and passes data

Complete list of composite node filters, convertors, color and vector operators and mixers including Chroma Key, Blur, RGB Curves, Z Combine, Color Ramp, Gamma Correct

Preview panel to define the portion of interest. A composite then only happens on this part Threaded and memory efficient (up to 8 processors)

Near realtime sequencer can edit hours of video

Waveform and U/V scatter plots

Open and write many audio & video file formats using ffmpeg

Can render using frameserver-support directly into foreign applications

Supports float images as well as regular 8 bits images

Curves tool allows you to create a mapping from the float range to a displayable result (for HDR images)

The reason why Blender is free:
Blender was originally developed as in-house 3D software by the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo. As a spin-off of NeoGeo, co-founder Ton Roosendaal founded a new company called Not a Number to market and develop Blender, while making Blender available to anyone via the internet. Sadly, NaN's ambitions and opportunities didn't match the company's capabilities and the market realities of the time, and after a turbulent corporate history, Not a Number was shut down in October 2001. (Read more about Blender's history here)

In 2002, Ton Roosendaal started the non-profit Blender Foundation with the goal of resurrecting Blender as an open source software project. A deal was reached with the company's investors to initiate a fund-raising campaign to buy back the rights to Blender, at a cost of ?100,000. Thanks to an enthusiastic group of volunteers including several ex-NaN employees, along with donations from thousands of loyal Blender supporters, the ?100,000 target was reached in seven short weeks. Blender was then freely released to the world under the terms of the GNU General Public License.