Blender (Software)

Blender is a professional free and open-source 3D computer graphics software product used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, interactive 3D applications and video games. Blender's features include 3D modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, raster graphics editing, rigging and skinning, fluid and smoke simulation, particle simulation, soft body simulation, sculpting, animating, match moving, camera tracking, rendering, video editing and compositing. Alongside the modeling features it also has an integrated game engine.

Features[edit]

Support for a variety of geometric primitives, including polygon meshes, fast subdivision surface modeling, Bezier curves, NURBS surfaces, metaballs, multi-resdigital sculpting (including dynamic topology, maps baking, remeshing, resymetrize, decimation..), outline font, and a new n-gon modeling system called B-mesh.Official releases of Blender for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux,^[19] as well as a port for FreeBSD,^[20] are available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Though it is often distributed without extensive example scenes found in some other programs,^[21] the software contains features that are characteristic of high-end 3D software. Among its capabilities are:

• Internal render engine with scanline ray tracing, indirect lighting, and ambient occlusion that can export in a wide variety of formats.
• A pathtracer render engine called Cycles, which can take advantage of the GPU for rendering. Cycles supports the Open Shading Language since Blender 2.65.^[22]
• Integration with a number of external render engines through plugins.
• Keyframed animation tools including inverse kinematics, armature (skeletal), hook, curve and lattice-based deformations, shape keys (morph target animation), non-linear animation, constraints, and vertex weighting.
• Simulation tools for Soft body dynamics including mesh collision detection, LBM fluid dynamics, smoke simulation, Bullet rigid body dynamics, ocean generator with waves.
• A particle system that includes support for particle-based hair.
• Modifiers to apply non-destructive effects.
• Python scripting for tool creation and prototyping, game logic, importing and/or exporting from other formats, task automation and custom tools.
• Basic non-linear video/audio editing.
• The Blender Game Engine, a sub-project, offers interactivity features such as collision detection, dynamics engine, and programmable logic. It also allows the creation of stand-alone, real-time applications ranging from architectural visualization to video game construction.
• A fully integrated node-based compositor within the rendering pipeline accelerated with OpenCL.
• Procedural and node-based textures, as well as texture painting, projective painting, vertex painting, weight painting and dynamic painting.
• Realtime control during physics simulation and rendering.
• Camera and object tracking.