Blender 3D Software
Blender is a free open source content creation suite released under the GNU General Public Licence.
Blender can be used for the following things:
Modeling
A range of 3D object types including polygon meshes, NURBS surfaces, bezier and B-spline curves,
metaballs, vector fonts (TrueType, PostScript, OpenType)
Very fast Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces
with optimal iso-lines display and sharpness editing
Full multiresolution sculpting capabilities with 2D bitmap/3D procedural brushes
(Paint, Smooth, Pinch, Inflate, Grab) supporting symmetry
Modifier stack deformers such as Lattice, Curve, Armature or Displace
Mirror modifier with middle vertices clipping and automatic deletion of inner faces
Non destructive real time Boolean and Array modifiers
Mesh modeling based on vertex, edge and/or face selection
Smooth soft selection editing tools for organic modeling
Python scripting access for custom tools
Imaging and Composting
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
Preview panel to define the portion of interest. A composite then only happens on this part
Threaded and memory efficient (up to 8 processors)
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 frameserver-support directly into foreign applications
Supports float images as well as regular 8 bits images
Curves tool allows you to create a mapping from the float range to a displayable result (for HDR images)
The reason why Blender is free:
Blender was originally developed as in-house 3D software by the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo. As a spin-off of NeoGeo, co-founder Ton Roosendaal founded a new company called Not a Number to market and develop Blender, while making Blender available to anyone via the internet. Sadly, NaN's ambitions and opportunities didn't match the company's capabilities and the market realities of the time, and after a turbulent corporate history, Not a Number was shut down in October 2001. (Read more about Blender's history here)
In 2002, Ton Roosendaal started the non-profit Blender Foundation with the goal of resurrecting Blender as an open source software project. A deal was reached with the company's investors to initiate a fund-raising campaign to buy back the rights to Blender, at a cost of ?100,000. Thanks to an enthusiastic group of volunteers including several ex-NaN employees, along with donations from thousands of loyal Blender supporters, the ?100,000 target was reached in seven short weeks. Blender was then freely released to the world under the terms of the GNU General Public License.