Blender

About

Blender

Blender is a free open-source 3D creation suite covering modeling, sculpting, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing, motion tracking, and video editing. Founded in 1994 by Dutch developer Ton Roosendaal, opened under the GNU General Public License in 2002, and stewarded today by the Blender Foundation in Amsterdam, the application runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux and has become the reference free alternative to Maya, 3ds Max, and Cinema 4D.

Blender was created in 1994 by Ton Roosendaal at the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo, where it was originally used as an in-house 3D toolset. Roosendaal spun the software out into a commercial company called Not a Number Technologies in 1998, then, after that company's collapse in 2002, raised more than one hundred thousand euros in seven weeks through the celebrated "Free Blender" campaign to buy back the source code and release it under the GNU General Public License. That fundraiser founded the Blender Foundation, which continues to steward the project from Amsterdam alongside the Blender Institute, the studio arm that produces the open-movie projects used to stress-test each major release. Roosendaal has remained chair of the foundation. The application covers essentially every stage of a 3D pipeline in one download. Modeling tools span polygon meshes, subdivision surfaces, curves, NURBS, and metaballs, and the Geometry Nodes system builds procedural constructions non-destructively. The Cycles path-traced renderer and the real-time EEVEE Next engine share materials and lighting, and both are integrated with animation, cloth, fluid, hair, and rigid-body simulation systems. Video editing, compositing, motion tracking, and Grease Pencil 2D animation ship in the same executable, and Python scripting exposes almost every operator for pipeline automation. Blender exchanges assets through FBX, glTF, USD, OBJ, STL, Alembic, and dozens of other formats, and the 5.x release cycle continues to expand USD support for studio interoperability. Blender is distributed free through blender.org as source and prebuilt binaries and mirrored on the Steam and Microsoft Store platforms. Development is coordinated on projects.blender.org with a public code review workflow, and the foundation runs Blender Cloud for training subscribers. Community channels include the official Blender YouTube channel, the Blender Studio open-movie project pages, the Blender Twitter presence, an active Mastodon account, and the Blender Development Fund that supports the paid development team. The software is used by studios, freelancers, educators, and enthusiasts worldwide, and its license permits any commercial creative work without a fee.