Developed by the foundation of the same name, Blender (or Blender3D) is an animation, modeling and 3D rendering software. It’s special because it’s developed under a free license and therefore, it’s entirely free.
The year was 1998 when Ton Roosendaal founded his company Not a Number Technologies with the goal of developing a software dedicated to 3D. He then followed the base of the Traces code, released by Ray Tracer for Amiga at the end of 1990s. That’s how Blender was born. Sold as Shareware (free with certain quantitative and functional limitations and full after purchase), it developed rapidly, but not fast enough to avoid bankruptcy. Thanks to a very dynamic community, Tom Roosendaal rebought the defunct company’s assets in 2002 to create the Blender foundation and change the software’s license to free. With the help of many, the Foundation quickly reviewed all the codes and in early 2003 the new complete version of Blender came out. Several consecutive years have followed with the addition of new features as the community takes care of development and the Foundation supervises projects.
Just like that major competitors distribute their proprietary and paying license, Blender offers an extraordinary number of functions dedicated to 3D that allow it to place itself on the production chain of audiovisual projects or video games. For example, it manages all the modeling techniques with polygons, Bezier curves, metaballs surface and Nurbs subdivision for applied textures. Animation is not outdone by an extremely precise armature system, linear or non-linear animation tools, morphing or other comprehensive modules. Finally, Blender integrates a high-performance rendering engine YafRay and later on, Cycles. The latter uses a global illumination method that produces particularly realistic 3D renderings. This set of features enables modeling a vehicle in 3 dimensions or creating animations around a logo. At last, note that Blender works with a very large number of plugins developed by the community. The dynamics of this type allow you to personalize particular details of the authoring environment with ease.
Like all 3D softwares, a period of learning is required for Blender, too. Here you will find Blender tutorials as well as the complete Blender training. These video courses are offered by experienced Blender instructors who will teach you the fundamentals of this full 3D software.