Blender is a free software 3D animation program. It can be used for modelling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, skinning, animating, rendering, particle and other simulating, non-linear editing, compositing, and creating interactive 3D applications. Blender is available for several operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, IRIX, Solaris, FreeBSD, SkyOS, MorphOS and Pocket PC. Blender has a robust feature set similar in scope and depth to other high-end 3D software such as Softimage|XSI, Cinema 4D, 3ds Max and Maya. These features include advanced simulation tools such as rigid body dynamics, fluid dynamics, and softbody dynamics, modifier based modeling tools, powerful character animation tools, a node based material and compositing system and an embedded scripting engine based on Python.

Blender Features

• Support for a variety of geometric primitives, including polygon meshes, fast subdivision surface modeling, Bezier curves, NURBS surfaces, metaballs, digital sculpting, and vector fonts.
• A fully integrated node based compositor within the rendering pipeline
• Nearly every function has a direct keyboard shortcut, with the amount of functions Blender offers resulting in several different shortcuts per key.
• Diffuse shaders such as Lambert, Minnaert, Toon, Oren-Nayar, Lambert
• Save all scene data in a single .blend file, even images, sounds or fonts can be packed for easy transportation