Blender is an open source software that provides high quality rendering, 3D modeling & animation on multiple platforms.

The current version of the Blender software works on Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, Mac OS X (PPC and Intel), Linux (i386), Linux (PPC), FreeBSD 5.4 (i386), SGI Irix 6.5 & Sun Solaris 2.8 (sparc).

This high quality 3D imaging & animation software is released under GNU GPL by the Amsterdam based Stichting Blender Foundation.

You can download free 3D Animation Rendering & Modeling software for the operating system of your choice.

This free software produces extremely high quality images & movies & naturally requires intermediate to advanced expertise to work the software to its fullest capability.

For the basic user, this is a great software to create 3D avatars, 3D architecture models or even start off to create animation from photo series.

Here are some of the key features of Blender software:

Modeling Features of Blender:

• 3D object modeling including polygon meshes, NURBS surfaces, bezier and B-spline curves, metaballs, vector fonts (TrueType, PostScript, OpenType)
• Full multiresolution sculpting capabilities with 2D bitmap/3D procedural brushes
• Modifier stack deformers such as Lattice, Curve, Armature or Displace
• Non destructive real time Boolean and Array modifiers
• Mesh modeling based on vertex, edge and/or face selection

Rigging Features & capabilities of Blender:

• Fast skeleton creation mode
• Interactive 3D paint for vertex weighting
• Fast envelope based skinning
• Automatic Skinning that really works (heat equilibrium based)

Rendering Features & capabilities of Blender:

• Very fast inbuilt raytracer
• Oversampling, motion blur, post-production effects, fields, non-square pixels
• Tile-based and fully threaded
• Render layers and passes
• Render baking to UV maps and object to object baking (full render, ambient occlusion, normals, textures)
• Render engine tightly integrated with the node compositor
• Halo, lens flares and fog effects
• Vector motion-blur post-process effect (using node compositor)
• Integral support for the Yafray render engine
• Export scripts available for external renderers such as Renderman (RIB), Povray, Virtualight, lux render, Indigo, V-Ray

Imaging & Composition Features & capabilities of Blender:

• Compositor tightly integrated and aligned with the rendering pipeline
• MultiLayer OpenEXR files allow to store and reuse raw renderlayer and passes data
• Complete list of composite node filters, convertors, color and vector operators and mixers including Chroma Key, Blur, RGB Curves, Z Combine, Color Ramp, Gamma Correct
• Near realtime sequencer can edit hours of video
• Waveform and U/V scatter plots
• Open and write many audio & video file formats using ffmpeg
• Can render using frame server-support directly into foreign applications

Real time 3D & Game Creating Features & capabilities of Blender:

• Graphical logic editor for defining interactive behavior without programming
• Collision detection and dynamics simulation now support Bullet Physics Library. Bullet is an open source collision detection and rigid body dynamics library developed for Play Station 3
• Discrete collision detection for RigidBody simulation
• Support for in-game activation of dynamic constraints
• Full support for vehicle dynamics, including spring reactions, stiffness, damping, tyre friction etc
• Support for multi-materials, multi-texture and texture blending modes, per-pixel lighting, dynamic lighting, mapping modes, GLSL vertexPaint texture blending, toon shading, animated materials, support for Normal Mapping and Parallax Mapping
• Playback of games and interactive 3D content without compiling or pre-processing

This free 3D Game creation, animation & modeling software can be used from basic 3D artifact creation to highly complex motion study, animation, 3D game creation etc.

The software is supported by a large developer community, which also gives you the option to provide  constructive feedback & lend your contribution to enhancing the software further.

The software is quite complicated & requires you to be familiar with working knowledge of rendering software, 3D modeling tools or even CAD CAM software knowledge. The animation & modeling tutorials are quite elementary but could get you started with the basics in about a weeks time!

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