Blender: Free Program to Create 3D Graphics and Render Effects

Blender is one of the best programs focused mainly on modeling, lighting control, rendering, animation and 3D graphics creation . This program is completely free and open source, and is more than up to other similar alternatives within the professional field. Even some movie studios (like Marvel) have used it to animate and process their movies and effects.

Blender main features

Undoubtedly, the main feature of this program is that it is a completely free software (even for business use), open source and multi-platform. Any user who wants to use it can use it regardless of its purpose.

Although it is not a particularly simple program to use, it comes standard with a wide variety of primitive geometric figures, including curves, meshes, gaps and metaballs. This will save a lot of work when working with the program. It also has dynamic simulations for soft bodies, particles and fluids, as well as a system of static particles to simulate hair and hair.

The Blender interface is very simple to understand and, in addition, fully customizable. Thus, each user can customize it according to their tastes and their needs.

Blender has a wide variety of animation tools, such as reverse kinematics, deformations, load vertices and static and dynamic particles. It is also designed for game development (their creations get along very well with the Unity engine), so we find collision detection tools and dynamic and logical recreation systems.

This software is compatible with the Python programming language. With it we can automate or control various editing tasks. In addition, the included 3D game engine can be programmed using this language as well.

When rendering, this program has several systems. For example, we can highlight its versatile internal rendering system, as well as the integration with powerful ray tracer systems, or “raytracer”, free as kerkythea, YafRay or Yafrid.

Uses for Blender at home

Except in some specific cases, nobody will use Blender on their own at a professional level. However, if we imagine it, we can use Blender at home, on our computer, to carry out several personal activities:

• Create personal animations.
• Create 3D objects.
• Print the 3D objects that we have created with a 3D printer.
• Create personals or objects for personal games with engines like Unity.
• Create simple games programmed in Python.

And if we want to learn to master Blender we can do it. Whenever we have time and a lot of willpower, since, we repeat, it is not a simple program and hides thousands of tools and possibilities.

Formats compatible with Blender

This program has its own file format used to save all projects (.blend). However, it also has a wide variety of compatible formats, both in 2D and 3D.

Supported 2D formats:

• Images
  • .bmp
  • .dds (DirectDraw Surface)
  • .rgb (IRIS)
  • .png
  • .jpg
  • .jp2 (JPEG 2000)
  • .tga (Truevision TGA)
  • .cin (Cineon)
  • .dpx (DPX)
  • .exr (MultiLayer and OpenEXR)
  • .hdr (HDRI)
  • .tiff
• Video
  • .avi
  • .mp4 (H.264)
  • .mpg (MPEG-1)
  • .DVD (MPEG-2)
  • .mp4 (MPEG-4)
  • .ogg (Theora)
  • .ogv (Theora)
  • .mpg (XviD)

We can also use Blender together with GIMP to create animated GIF images.

Supported 3D formats to import and export projects:

• .3ds (3ds Max)
• .ac (AC3D)
• .dxf (Autodesk Drawing eXchange Format)
• .fbx (Autodesk FBX)
• .xsi (Autodesk Softimage)
• .cfg, .xaf, .xmf, .xrf, .xsf (Cal3D)
• .dae (COLLADA)
• .off (DEC Object File Format)
• .x (DirectX)
• .lwo (LightWave)
• .mot (LightWave Motion)
• .m3g, .java (Mobile 3D Graphics API)
• .md2
• .mdd
• .ms3d, .txt (MilkShape 3D)
• .bvh (Motion Capture)
• .flt (OpenFlight)
• .iv (OpenInventor)
• .svg, .ps, .eps, .ai, .gimp
• .slp (Pro Engineer)
• .map (Quake 3)
• .radio (Radiosity)
• .raw
• .ply (Stanford PLY)
• .stl
• .cob (TrueSpace)
• .stl (VideoScape)
• .wrl
• .obj (Wavefront OBJ)
• .x3d (X3D Extensible 3D)
• .fig

Also, through certain scripts, it is possible to export projects to other formats that are not officially supported.

Download Blender

Blender is a completely free and open source software. To download it, all we have to do is access the following link where we will find the version corresponding to our operating system. In the case of Windows, in addition, we can download a portable version to be able to use it without installing it on the hard disk.

Minimum requirements

Despite being a fairly complex program, the minimum requirements to use this software are not very crazy. What we must accomplish, at a minimum, is:

• 32-bit dual core CPU with SSE2 support.
• 2 GB of RAM.
• Display with 1280 × 768 resolution and 24-bit color.
• OpenGL compatible graphics card and 256 MB of memory.

Of course, we must bear in mind that 3D rendering and processing consume a lot of resources. Especially CPU, RAM and graphics. Therefore, it is advisable to have at least 8 GB of RAM, a 4-core and 64-bit processor and a powerful new generation graphics card with 1 GB of graphics memory capable of processing the graphics as quickly as possible.