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Blender

Description

Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software suite. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, BSD, Haiku, and IRIX and is used for general 3D modeling, animation, digital sculpting, visual effects, rendering, compositing, motion tracking, drawing, 2D animation and video editing. It is widely used to create animated films, visual effects, art, 3D-printed models, motion graphics, interactive 3D applications, virtual reality, and 3D models for video games.

Features

Modeling

Modifiers

Sculpting

Geometry nodes

Simulation

Fluid simulation

Cloth Simulation

Animation

Blender's keyframed animation capabilities include inverse kinematics, armatures, hooks, curve- and lattice-based deformations, shape keys, non-linear animation, constraints, and vertex weighting. In addition, its Grease Pencil tools allow for 2D animation within a full 3D pipeline.

Rendering

Blender includes three render engines since version 2.80: EEVEE, Workbench and Cycles.

Cycles

Cycles is a path-tracing render engine that is designed to be interactive and easy to use, while still supporting many features. It has been included with Blender since 2011, with the release of Blender 2.61. Cycles supports the Advanced Vector Extensions, AVX2 and AVX-512 extension sets, as well as CPU acceleration in modern hardware.

Hydra Storm

Hydra Storm is a real-time leveraged rendering engine by Pixar made to keep a consistent look between render engines. It was added in Blender 4.0 and is faster than EEVEE and Cycles for simple scenes, while compromising on quality. It is an addon and must be enabled in Preferences.

GPU rendering

Multiple GPUs are also supported (with the notable exception of the Eevee render engine).
There are currently five GPU rendering backends:

CUDA
OptiX
HIP
oneAPI
Metal

Integrator

Open Shading Language

Materials

EEVEE

EEVEE (or Eevee) is a real-time PBR renderer included in Blender from version 2.8.

With the release of Blender 4.2 LTS in July 2024, EEVEE received an overhaul by its lead developer, Clément Foucault, called EEVEE Next. EEVEE Next boasts a variety of new features for Blender's real-time and rasterised renderer, including screen-space global illumination (SSGI), virtual shadow mapping, sunlight extraction from HDRIs, and a rewritten system for reflections and indirect lighting via light probe volumes and cube maps. EEVEE Next also brings improved volumetric rendering, along with support for displacement shaders and an improved depth of field system similar to Cycles. As of the Blender 5.0 beta, "EEVEE Next" is to be known simply as "EEVEE".

Plans for future releases of EEVEE include support for hardware-accelerated ray-tracing and continued improvements to performance and shader compilation.

Workbench

Using the default 3D viewport drawing system for modeling, texturing, etc.

External renderers

Texturing and shading

Post-production

Blender has a node-based compositor within the rendering pipeline, which is accelerated with OpenCL, and in 4.0 it supports GPU. It also includes a non-linear video editor called the Video Sequence Editor (VSE), with support for effects like Gaussian blur, color grading, fade and wipe transitions, and other video transformations.

Plugins/addons and scripts

Blender supports Python scripting for the creation of custom tools, prototyping, importing/exporting from other formats, and task automation.