This is the most comprehensive creative software I have ever laid my eyes on.
Blender is an open source, free 3D creation software. It is primarily used for CGI and VFX things, but it is also capable of and pretty powerful at 2D-animations, video editing, particle/cloth simulations, sculpting, character rigging and animation, concepting, compositing and much more.
+ You can install 3rd party render engines in addition to the unbiased, physically correct path-tracer engine Cycles, and the powerful real-time rasterization engine Eevee, FOR FREE, such as
- AMD's Radeon ProRender engine
- LuxCoreRender engine
- OTOY's OctaneRender engine
- Pixar's Renderman engine
- Sony's Arnold engine
- Great selection of plugins/addons to make your life easier.
- Fantastic community and tutorials.
- Diverse import and export options make this a fine choice for creating assets for Unity or Unreal Engine.
- Can be exported into Substance or Quixel tools, and textures created with them can be used and rendered in Blender.
- Create photorealistic fluid, smoke and/or fire simulations with
- Mantaflow, or import OpenVDB's straight from Houdini.
- Efficient camera tracking feature to make VFX a lot less painless to create.
- New Nishita Sky Texture makes dynamic day/night cycle renders super easy and fast.
- Blender supports VR natively
- Nvidia OptiX AI denoiser, Intel's Embree, OpenImageDenoise, NLM, Adaptive Sampling, Multiresolution Subdivision, Adaptive subsurface scattering and many many many more powerful built-in features. There's probably a plugin for something that's not built-in yet.
- Exciting new features being implemented with every update
Blender is released under the "GNU General Public License".
This means that anything you create with Blender is your sole property and Blender can never monetize or take away your creations.
Those are just some things that popped in my head while writing this, there are still numerous features that I haven't even touched yet.
For fairness I'll have to point out at least one negative aspect:
- OpenCL GPU or hybrid rendering with AMD's GPU is borked as of 2.90. Though this should be fixed in 2.91.
Verdict:
If you have the patience to sit through some Youtube doughnut tutorials and learn the program for a couple of months, you will spiral into a 3D rabbit hole and start seeing the world as PBR-textures, light bounces, polygons and geometry.
Your imagination is only waiting to be realized inside Blender. Oh, did I mention that it is completely free?
Download Blender From Official Website