Blender

Blender lets users model, sculpt, animate, render, composite, and edit video in one workspace, taking a project from its first 3D forms through final visual output. Artists, designers, developers, and engineers use it for digital artwork, animated films, visual effects, advertisements, television series, feature films, and other 3D production. Published by the Blender Foundation, Blender is freeware licensed under the GNU GPL and runs on macOS.

Its modeling tools handle full N-Gon geometry, edge slides, insets, grid and bridge fills, while sculpting includes advanced brushes, multi-resolution and dynamic subdivision, textured painting, and masking. Python scripting supports custom tools and add-ons, and the animation and rigging system provides envelope and skeleton deformation, automatic skinning, B-spline bones, curve editing, dope sheets, and custom bone shapes. Story Art also supports drawing 2D work directly inside a 3D viewport.

Cycles is Blender’s built-in unbiased path-tracing engine, offering CPU or GPU rendering, real-time viewport previews, PBR shaders, HDR lighting, and VR rendering for photorealistic results. VFX workflows can import raw footage, track cameras and objects automatically or manually, mask areas, reconstruct cameras, preview tracked footage with the 3D scene, and use planar or tripod solvers. Blender 5.0 improves workflows and performance while enhancing Geometry Nodes and volumetric-data support.

Geometry Nodes physics is planned for Blender 5.2 LTS and beyond, along with more memory-efficient rendering of scenes containing many image textures. Its combination of creation, rendering, compositing, tracking, and video tools lets one application cover several stages of a visual project.