Blender

Score9.2 out of 10

94 Reviews and Ratings

What is Blender?

Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite available in under the GNU General Public License. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline. Blender Cloud is a related service accessible via subscription, and is a training and content platform providing access to expertise from the Blender Institute for advancing one's use of Blender.

Categories & Use Cases

Carlos Lopez

Animation and VFX Engineer at ENZO (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Blender is a free 3D software that, when applied to audiovisual production, is your best ally when it comes to new ideas, projects, and/or social media content. It's simple, practical, and above all, quite competent compared to other similar software (Maya, Cinema 4D and others) with great support in the free software community as well as a wide range of assets and addons that complement the experience

Pros

3D modeling
Rigging
Animation
Motion Graphics
Renderig
Compositing

Cons

Game Develop
Sculpting
UV mapping
Color and 3D painting

Return on Investment

It has worked quite well for us for product rendering as well as advertising composition.
Excellent for running FOOH ads
More than competent when it comes to animating animated characters and creating Motion Graphics
Our clients (companies) have requested projects exclusively made in these formats.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Autodesk Maya, Cinema 4D and Houdini

Other Software Used

Autodesk Maya, Cinema 4D

Verified User

Team Lead (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

There are many use cases blender have in my current company, our whole pipeline has been shifted to blender. As an advertising firm,we have different departments such as photography, videography and realtime for different products. The base of every department is blender. We receive cad files from client which we cleanup in blender, also sometimes we do modeling from scratch using references in it. After that in blender we do unwrapping and ao of products, further we also do lighting and shading using octane in it. We also use it to produce video animation for different clients. Overall it helps in every department and is solid pillar of our pipeline.

Pros

The tools for modeling and cad cleanup are very good in blender, also there are many good free and cheap plugins which makes the workflow faster and easier.
The compatibility with other tools like octane helping us do realistic lighting for products.
The use of plugins and its open source nature helps us to integrate with our in-house softwares and develop plugins for seamless use.

Cons

As a previous Maya user, I can say that blender is still far away when it comes to modeling and animation. Some tools are great here but some are not up to the mark, we need to install separate plugins for those.
Also this is a personal choice but I personally don't like the interface of blender. Sometimes I feel its not much user friendly but maybe thats because I used Maya previously.
Blender is open source which is its strength and weakness at the same time. I feel its very buggy, the bugs can be very annoying sometimes. Although they have a very helpful support and community.

Return on Investment

Overall it has a very positive impact on our business. It helped us reduce down the cost of the software drastically.
It also helped us turned up our profits because since we don't have to invest in software, we can buy multiple plugins to make our workflow faster with minimal resources.
The training cost is much compared to other softwares and is much suited for our robust pipeline, we need in advertising .

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Autodesk Maya, Cinema 4D and Houdini

Other Software Used

Houdini, Cinema 4D, Autodesk Maya

Benjamin Gwyn

Senior Graphic Designer in Marketing at Nutrition Warehouse (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Blender is a great product that helps us launch new products. One problem we had was when launching a new product, there wouldn't be enough time to do a photoshoot for the product between it arriving and the launch date. Blender allows us to have 3D visualisations of the product before we receive it. Which is used in print assets as well as digital assets. The animation power of Blender has revolutionised our product launches with the animations made for product launches.

Pros

3D Modelling. The way you can model in Blender is quick and powerful. I can practically trace an image of a product jar I'm creating.
The physics simulations that can be done are great tools that elevate our assets.
Having multiple scenes in one file is a tool I find very valuable. I allows me to test settings and simulations on a copy scene, meaning current simulations and settings are there to go back to.

Cons

It would be great to see a render queue added. This would increase my productivity significantly. Currently I don't have budget for a render farm. Meaning I have to do my renders overnight, however some renders only take a few hours. A render queue would allow me to make the most of the 12+ hours I'm out of the office.
UV editing, in particular unwrapping or projecting can produce varied results.

Return on Investment

Blender has had a great positive impact on our business. It has elevated the quality of our product launches.
Another positive impact is the ability to easily mockup product labels and POS displays.
The cost of the product (free) is a great positive impact for our team.

Alternatives Considered

SOLIDWORKS, Autodesk Inventor and Autodesk Fusion 360

Other Software Used

Adobe After Effects, Adobe PhotoShop, Adobe Illustrator CC

Kèlene Poyurs View profile

Co-Founder in Marketing at Conversion Queens (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Blender in our marketing agency to create product launch images, 3D animations for the beginnings of Youtube and Tiktok videos, as well as for the creation of any other product images our clients may need. Occasionally we also use it for the creation of 3D logos and logo animations to present to clients.

Pros

Relatively user-friendly interface given the complexity of what it is capable of
Excellent physics engine which makes it easy to create "realistic" animations and images
Wide array of importable and exportable file formats, make it easy to work within client specifications and with the files that clients provide
Rigging is fairly easy
Very cost-effective, being free.

Cons

Interface, though user-friendly, can be quite intimidating when just starting out
Extremely hardware intensive, requiring a lot of GPU and CPU power.

Most Important Features

The wide library of texture, lighting, etc. plugins
The ability to easily swap between rendering engines, especially when needing to provide quick turnaround for minor client changes
The huge community surrounding Blender and the wide array of tutorials and support

Return on Investment

Great ROI because the program is free
Clients have been impressed at the speed with which we are able to make changes to models

Jitendra Choubisa View profile

AR VR Content Developer in Professional Services at Techno India NJR Institute of Technology, Udaipur (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We at Techno NJR believes in making students future ready by introducing them with the augmented and virtual reality applications. For creating a virtual environment we first need to make a 3d model and animations of it and then we take it into Unity or Unreal Engine to generate final environment with interactions. For creating various 3d models with animations, we were in need of a 3D Design software. Previously we were using Autodesk 3ds max, but due to its high requirement of processing power and high cost, we started looking for a faster and cheaper alternative and that's when BLENDER came into the picture.
It's very light on the processor and storage, also it has very easy modifying tools as compared to other software in the field. Now we can deploy it easily onto several system and students can learn it in quick and easy way. This software is also free to use so there's no issue of budgeting too. The resources of this software are freely available all over the internet and are in numbers, so one can easily start learning it in creating 3d world with the animations.

Pros

Creating complex polygonal geometries is very easy in Blender.
Edit Mode and Sculpt Mode helps in creating non uniform surfaces for objects like rocks, surfaces, terrains etc.
Blender can use various external plugins to make it work in more smoother way. For example to import any 3d object one can use sketchfab plugin and easily import the free assets from web after logging in.
Blender has a better rendering engine known as Cycles, it is far more better than any other stock rendering engine which can generate realistic lightning, shadows and reflections.
The animations can easily be generated with blender animation toolbar and also it incorporate any other animations made in any other software.
The bone generation and its behavior of animations can be achieved easily in blender.

Cons

It doesn't run on the old system. A system must have OpenGL 3.0 at least with a dedicated graphics card installed in the hardware.
The older versions might work without graphics card but it becomes very slow and that make it not usable.
Blender is very less in size, which comes on the cost of cutting some of the features and that increases our dependency on other 3rd part plugins to do some specific works like importing, using HDR's etc

Most Important Features

Editing Mode is used by us in the most cases for modifying objects.
Animations bar is used by us for generating movements and rotation of parts of objects.
Modifiers are being used on regular basis to create complex cutouts.
Sculpt mode is used for character generation and also for carving surfaces.

Return on Investment

It's free to use so one can use it easily and can get most out of it.
The negative part is only one thing that it has more dependency on other 3rd party tools which cannot be free always.

Alternatives Considered

Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya, Unity and Unreal Engine

Other Software Used

Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya, Unreal Engine