Blenderadalah perangkat lunak pembuatan 3D gratis dan sumber terbuka yang populer di kalangan seniman, desainer, dan pengembang. Dikembangkan oleh Blender Foundation, perangkat ini menawarkan rangkaian lengkap alat untuk membuat animasi, model, dan efek visual 3D yang menakjubkan.

Antarmuka pengguna Blender dirancang agar intuitif dan ramah pengguna, sehingga mudah digunakan oleh pemula dan profesional. Ini menawarkan berbagai fitur, termasuk modeling, sculpting, texturing, lighting, animasi, dan pengeditan video. Perangkat lunak ini juga mendukung plugin pihak ketiga, yang memungkinkan fleksibilitas dan kustomisasi yang lebih banyak.

Komunitas Blender juga merupakan aset yang signifikan. Ada banyak sumber daya online yang tersedia untuk belajar cara menggunakan Blender, termasuk tutorial video, dokumentasi, dan forum. Selain itu, komunitas secara rutin memproduksi add-on, aset, dan plugin yang dapat diunduh dan digunakan secara gratis.

Blender memiliki berbagai macam aplikasi. Blender umumnya digunakan untuk membuat model 3D untuk game, film, dan acara televisi. Blender juga populer di kalangan arsitek dan desainer interior untuk membuat visualisasi realistis dari bangunan dan ruang. Selain itu, Blender sering digunakan oleh seniman dan desainer untuk menciptakan seni abstrak atau bergaya.

Blender adalah alat yang serbaguna dan kuat bagi siapa saja yang tertarik pada pemodelan 3D, animasi, atau efek visual. Keterjangkauannya dan fitur yang kuat menjadikannya pilihan yang sangat baik untuk pemula maupun profesional, dan komunitasnya yang aktif memastikan selalu ada hal baru untuk dipelajari atau dijelajahi.

Fitur Utama:

• Alat pemodelan 3D untuk membuat model dengan poligon, NURBS, dan pemahatan.
• Sistem animasi yang kuat mendukung animasi keyframe dan prosedural.
• Mesin rendering canggih dengan dukungan untuk ray tracing dan penerangan global.
• Editor video lengkap untuk compositing dan color grading.
• Alat simulasi untuk fisika, fluida, dan simulasi kain.
• Python API untuk skrip kustom dan otomasi tugas.
• Mesin permainan untuk membuat permainan 3D.
• Kompositor berbasis node untuk pasca-pemrosesan dan kompositing.
• Alat grease pencil untuk menggambar dan animasi 2D di ruang 3D.
• Antarmuka pengguna yang sangat dapat disesuaikan dengan dukungan untuk hotkey kustom, skrip, dan add-on.

Version 2.70

Cycles Rendering
Cycles now has initial support for volume rendering including emission, absorption and scattering. Volume rendering can be used to render effects like fire, smoke, mist, absorption in glass, and many other effects that can't be represented by surface meshes alone.
CPU rendering performance was improved, particularly for hair, textures and Open Shading Language.

Motion Tracker
Trackers can now be weighted, to keep the result stable as feature disappear or become difficult to track. The plane track workflow was improved to be easier to control. Automatic feature detection was made more robust using a new detector algorithm.

User Interface
The toolbar now has tabs to organize tools in categories. Multiple buttons can now be edited at once, for example for XYZ axes or color channels. Transform tools now have a mode to enter expressions and units. Other changes were done to improve lists, header menus, tooltips, buttons, menus and more.

Modeling
The Laplacian Deform modifier was added to pose a mesh while preserving geometric details of the surface, and a new wireframe modifier allows you transform your mesh into a wireframe representation. The boolean modifier now supports ngons, and there are improvements to the bevel, screw and triangulate modifiers.
The bevel tool now offers more control over the bevel profile and results, and the knife tool was improved as well.

Threaded Dependency Graph
An important change that happened under the hood is the threaded dependency graph. This means that object modifiers and constraints, among other things, can now be computed with multiple threads taking advantage of multicore processors. This will be most noticeable with scenes that have many objects, or multiple objects with heavy modifiers. This is the first step in making the dependency graph in Blender more powerful.

Game Development
The Blender game engine now supports discrete level of detail for meshes. For game developers, support for working with Photoshop PSD files has been added.
A new view navigation walk mode has been added, which has a control scheme as typically found in first person shooter games. This can be useful for game developers to navigate levels as if in a game.

Freestyle NPR Rendering
The Freestyle Python API is an essential part that makes it a highly programmable NPR rendering engine. This API has been reorganized.

More Features
Many small changes and features were done all over Blender. Some notable new feature are normalized display for FCurves, derivative map baking, baking to vertex colors, better visualization of masks and control over mask filling, gravity option for sculpting, negative texture values to support vector displacement and a Lamp Data shading node to create more customized NPR shaders.

Feature Videos
For a visual demonstration of some of the new features in this release, check out the feature videos created during the development of this release.

Addons
Several addons have been added and updated, including Node Wrangler (aka Node Efficiency Tools) and a new Sketchfab Exporter addon

Bug Fixes
In addition to the new features, over 560 bugs that existed in previous releases have been fixed.