Blender is an open source software for 3D modeling, rendering, animation, post-production, interactive creation and playback. Available for Windows, Linux, Irix, Sun Solaris, FreeBSD or macOS.

Modeling

  • A range of 3D object types including polygon meshes, NURBS surfaces, Bezier and B-spline curves, metaballs, vector fonts (TrueType, PostScript, OpenType)
  • 'Smooth proxy' style catmull-clark subdivision surfaces
  • Boolean mesh functions

Animation

  • Armature (skeleton) deformation with forward/inverse kinematics, auto skinning and interactive 3D paint for vertex weighting
  • Non-linear animation mixer with automated walk cycles along paths
  • Constraint system
  • Vertex key framing for morphing, with controlling sliders
  • Character animation pose editor

Realtime 3D/game creation

  • Graphical editor for defining interactive behavior without programming
  • Collision detection and dynamics simulation
  • Supports all OpenGL lighting modes, including transparencies, Animated and reflection-mapped textures
  • Playback of games and interactive 3D content without compiling or preprocessing
  • Audio, using the fmod toolkit
  • Multi-layering of Scenes for overlay interfaces

Rendering

  • Very fast inbuilt raytracer
  • Integral support for the famous Yafray render engine
  • Oversampling, motion blur, post-production effects, fields, non-square pixels
  • Environment maps, halos, lens flares, fog
  • Various surface shaders such as Lambert, Phong, Oren-nayar, Blinn, Toon
  • Edge rendering for toon shading

What's New

Blender 4.1 is a solid release with quality of life improvements and performance enhancements all across the board.

Read the complete release notes here.

Save and load data from inside node groups so that its inputs don't have to be recomputed, allowing for performant geometries without losing the procedural workflow.

  • Both still frames and animations are supported, as well as volume objects, and it has been optimized to deliver small file sizes.
  • Baked frame-range is displayed on top of the node, and as a cache line in the Timeline.
  • Additionally, baking (also simulations) no longer loses materials, and doesn't get lost after undo.

The Menu Switch node allows creating custom "enum" menus to allow switching between options in the group interface.

Index Switch

  • Outputs one of its inputs depending on an index value. Only the input that is passed through the node is computed.

Musgrave

  • The Musgrave texture node was replaced by the Noise Texture node, which includes all the same functionality.

Split to Instances

  • Splits up geometry elements into Instances, based on a Group ID.

Sort Elements

  • Rearranges geometry elements by changing their indices.

Rotate Rotation

  • Applies an additional rotation amount to a rotation value.

Active Camera

  • Outputs the scene's current active camera.
  • The mesh "Auto Smooth" option has been replaced by a modifier node group asset.
  • This means geometry nodes now has the ability to set edge sharpness and create split normals without the need for an "original" mesh with the auto smooth option.