Blender 4.3.1 / 3.6.18 LTS / 3.3.21 LTS / 4.4.0 Alpha

Overview

Are you looking for an animation and rendering tool? Here’s you answer – Blender! Well, Blender is a software program for animation, rendering, 3D modeling, playback, interactive creation and post-production. It is a professional and powerful 3D graphic tool that will give your work an unique edge. Thanks to its features; you will be able to produce interactive 3D content for stand-alone playback, single 2D stills or 3D movies in cinema quality and broadcast. Just give it a try! And now, let’s take a look and find more about Blender in this quick article.

Installation

You should be happy to find out that you can install Blender for free! And who doesn’t like free stuff? You have two choices on how to install it after you download it. You can either install it via the self package installer or install it via the apt-get install or Synaptics Package Manager. After that, the program will run. In the download package, you will find the installation instructions and a guide for new users. It doesn’t have other programs bundled with it and the requirements are: 128 MB RAM (2 GHz recommended), a 300 MHz CPU (2 GHz recommended), 1024 x 768 display with 16 bit color (1920 x 1200 display with 24 bit color recommended), 20 MB free HDD space, 3 button mouse, Open GL Graphics Card with 16 MB Ram (128 MB recommended). Note that it is available for Linux, Windows, Sun Solaris, Irix, Mac OS X and FreeBSD.

Interface

The interface of Blender is very flexible and interactive. The property editor is very well organized, being easy to understand and navigate. All the window manipulations update in real time and work independently. The GUI controls have a good visual communication of content, type, disabled status or selection. You can easily customize the color, font decoration and font size in the UI control appearance. File management, non-linear video sequence editing, schematic scene diagram, file/image selection, character animation action editor, windows for animation curves/keys, image/UV editing and non-linear animation mixer are provided by it.

Pro

With Blender, you can professionally produce all kind of movies, images or presentations you want in an excellent and unique way. It is a powerful software product that comes with many essential features such as falloff types based on the velocity or age of particles, support for sculpting in constructive modifiers and for Empty Objects, composition guides for camera such as harmonious triangle, thirds, center and golden rule, view controls, HDR textures for displace. It includes bake modes like specular color and intensity, mirror color and mirror intensity or emission for glow and alpha for transparency.

For modeling, the software includes 3D object types like NURBS surfaces, polygon meshes, vector fonts – True Type, Open Type and PostScript and functions for Boolean mesh. For the custom tools it has a Python scripting access and for the organic modeling a soft selection for editing tools. In Blender you will deal with improved animation tools. You can play in character animation with vertex weighting thanks to its interactive 3D paint and auto skinning. It even has a key framing for morphing. You will find display methods, faster and easier skin weighting methods and rigging with bone types that had been added. When you finish your project you can export it for viewing as videos (AVI, MOV), 2D images or 3D formats for you to rework it somewhere else.

Cons

You can get some crashes when opening new windows because of your preferences and rendering, the keymap changes gets lost when loading the .blend file and a few other issues too. I got problems in getting a fluid simulation to bake too. But all in all, I could still overlook these issues because the rest of the functions make up for these.

Alternative

Some alternatives to Blender include the following tools: Maya, 3ds Max, zBrush and many more.

Conclusion

All in all, Blender is a flexible and intuitive program for animation, 3Dmodelling, rendering, playback and interactive creation. It is a complex and powerful 3D graphic tool that will transform your drawings into marvelous creations. With so many features, you will surely don’t get bored while operating it. It is a recommended software product! Be sure you check it out! You won’t be disappointed!