Blender started out as an in-house tool for NeoGeo, a Dutch commercial animation

company.[76] Blender has been used for television commercials in several parts of the
world including Australia,[77] Iceland,[78] Brazil,[79][80] Russia[81] and Sweden.[82]
Blender is used by NASA for publicly available 3D models. Many 3D models on NASA's
3D resources page are in a native .blend format.[83]

Experience Curiosity: taking a picture

NASA also used Blender to develop an interactive web application Experience

Curiosity to celebrate the 3rd anniversary of the Curiosity rover landing on Mars.[84] This
app[85] makes it possible to operate the rover, control its cameras and the robotic arm and
reproduces some of the prominent events of the Mars Science
Laboratory mission.[86] The application was presented at the beginning of
the WebGL section on SIGGRAPH 2015.[87]
The first large professional project that used Blender was Spider-Man 2, where it was
primarily used to create animatics and pre-visualizations for
the storyboard department.[88]
The French-language film Friday or Another Day (Vendredi ou un autre jour [fr]) was the
first 35 mm feature film to use Blender for all the special effects, made on Linux
workstations.[89] It won a prize at the Locarno International Film Festival. The special
effects were by Digital Graphics of Belgium.[90]
Blender has also been used for shows on the History Channel, alongside many other
professional 3D graphics programs.[91]
Tomm Moore's The Secret of Kells, which was partly produced in Blender by the Belgian
studio Digital Graphics, has been nominated for an Oscar in the category "Best Animated
Feature Film".[92]
Plumíferos, a commercial animated feature film created entirely in Blender, [93] was
premiered in February 2010 in Argentina. Its main characters
are anthropomorphic talking animals.
Special effects for episode 6 of Red Dwarf season X, screened in 2012, were created
using Blender as confirmed by Ben Simonds of Gecko Animation.[94][95][96]
Blender was used for both CGI and compositing for the movie Hardcore Henry.[97]
The special effects for the TV series The Man in the High Castle were done in Blender,
with some of the particle simulations relegated to Houdini.[98][99]
Blender was used for pre-visual effects in Captain America: The Winter Soldier [100] and
many of the visual effects in the feature film Sabogal were done in
Blender.[101] Director David F. Sandberg used Blender for multiple shots in Lights
Out,[102] and Annabelle: Creation.[103][104] Blender was used for parts of the credit
sequences in Wonder Woman[105] and for doing the animation in the film Cinderella the
Cat.[106]
Some promotional artwork for Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U was
partially created using Blender.[107]
The experimental hip-hop group Death Grips has used Blender to produce music videos.
A screenshot from the program is briefly visible in the music video for Inanimate
Sensation.
The 2018 film Next Gen was fully created in Blender by Tangent Animation. A team of
developers worked on improving Blender for internal use, but it is planned to eventually
add those improvements to the official Blender build.[108][109]
Blender was used to create the character "Murloc" in the 2016 film Warcraft.[110]

New features, such as

the addition of the
warp modifier and
render baking.
Improvements in
sculpting.[24]

Some bug fixes, along with small extensions in GUI

2.58a July 4, 2011
and Python interface.[25]

August 13,
2.59 3D mouse support.
2011

Developer branches integrated into main developer

October 19, branch: among other things, B-mesh, a new
2.60
2011 rendering/shading system, NURBS, to name a few,
directly from Google Summer of Code.

December 14, Render-Engine Cycles, Motion Tracking, Dynamic

2.61
2011 Paint, Ocean Simulator.

Motion tracking improvement, further expansion of UV

February 16,
2.62 tools, and remesh modifier. First version to include the
2012
Cycles render engine.

Bug fixes, B-mesh project: completely new mesh

2.63 April 27, 2012 system with n-corners, plus new tools: dissolve, inset,
bridge, vertex slide, vertex connect, and bevel.
 October 3,
2.64 Green screen keying, node-based compositing.
2012

December 10, Over 200 bug fixes, support for the Open Shading
2.65
2012 Language, and fire simulation.

Rigid body simulation available outside of the game

February 21,
2.66 engine, dynamic topology sculpting, hair rendering
2013
now supported in Cycles.

Freestyle rendering mode for non-photographic

rendering, subsurface scattering support added, the
May 7–30,
2.67 motion tracking solver is made more accurate and
2013
faster, and an add-on for 3D printing now comes
bundled.

Rendering performance is improved for CPUs and

GPUs, support for NVIDIA Tesla K20, GTX Titan and
2.68 July 18, 2013
GTX 780 GPUs. Smoke rendering improved to reduce
blockiness.[26]

October 31, Motion tracking now supports plane tracking, and hair
2.69
2013 rendering improved.

Initial support for volume rendering and small

2.70 March 19, 2014
improvements to the user interface.

Support for baking in Cycles and volume rendering

2.71 June 26, 2014
branched path tracing now renders faster.

October 4, Volume rendering for GPUs, more features for

2.72
2014 sculpting and painting.

January 8, New fullscreen mode, improved Pie Menus, 3D View

2.73
2015 can now display the world background.[27]

Cycles got several precision, noise, speed, memory

2.74 March 31, 2015
improvements, new Pointiness attribute.[27]
 Blender now supports a fully integrated Multi-View and
Stereo 3D pipeline, Cycles has much awaited initial
2.75a July 1, 2015
support for AMD GPUs, and a new Light Portals
feature.[27]

Cycles volume density render, Pixar OpenSubdiv

November 3,
2.76b mesh subdivision library, node inserting, video editing
2015
tools.[27]

Improvements to Cycles, new features for the Grease

Pencil, more support for OpenVDB,
2.77a April 6, 2016
updated Python library and support for Windows XP
removed.[28]

Spherical stereo rendering for VR, Grease Pencil

improvements for 2D animations, Freehand curves
February 28,
2.78c drawing over surfaces, Bendy Bones, Micropolygon
2017
displacements, Adaptive Subdivision. Cycles
performance improvements.[29]

Cycles denoiser, Improved OpenCL rendering support,

Shadow Catcher, Principled BSDF Shader, Filmic
color management, improved UI and Grease Pencil
September 11,
2.79b functionality, improvements in Alembic import and
2017
export, surface deformities modifier, better animation
keyframing, simplified video
encoding, Python additions and new add-ons.[30]

Under
development, New UI, Eevee and Clay engine renders on OpenGL
2.80
expected July 3.3+, workbench viewport[32] and much more.[33][34][35][36]
2019[31]

2.81 October 2019

Legend:

Old version

Older version, still supported

Latest version

Latest preview version

Future release

Features[edit]

Ton Roosendaal, original creator of Blender.

Steps of forensic facial reconstruction of a mummy made on Blender by the Brazilian 3D designer Cícero
Moraes.

Official releases of Blender for Microsoft Windows, MacOS and Linux,[37] as well as
a port for FreeBSD,[38] are available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Though it is often
distributed without extensive example scenes found in some other programs,[39] the software
contains features that are characteristic of high-end 3D software. Among its capabilities are:

 Support for a variety of geometric primitives, including polygon meshes, fast subdivision
surface modeling, Bezier curves, NURBS surfaces, metaballs, icospheres, multi-res digital
 sculpting (including dynamic topology, maps baking, remeshing, resymetrize, decimation),
outline font, and a new n-gon modeling system called B-mesh.
 Internal render engine with scanline rendering, indirect lighting, and ambient occlusion that
can export in a wide variety of formats.
 A pathtracer render engine called Cycles, which can take advantage of the GPU for
rendering. Cycles supports the Open Shading Language since Blender 2.65.[40]
 Integration with a number of external render engines through plugins.
 Keyframed animation tools including inverse kinematics, armature (skeletal), hook, curve
and lattice-based deformations, shape animations, non-linear animation, constraints,
and vertex weighting.
 Simulation tools for soft body dynamics including mesh collision detection, LBM fluid
dynamics, smoke simulation, Bullet rigid body dynamics, ocean generator with waves.
 A particle system that includes support for particle-based hair.
 Modifiers to apply non-destructive effects.
 Python scripting for tool creation and prototyping, game logic, importing/exporting from other
formats, task automation and custom tools.
 Basic non-linear video/audio editing.
 A fully integrated node-based compositor within the rendering pipeline accelerated
with OpenCL.
 Procedural and node-based textures, as well as texture painting, projective painting, vertex
painting, weight painting and dynamic painting.
 Real-time control during physics simulation and rendering.
 Camera and object tracking.
 Grease Pencil tools for 2D animation within a full 3D pipeline.
Deprecated features[edit]
 The Blender Game Engine was a built-in realtime graphics and logic engine with features
such including collision detection, a dynamics engine, and programmable logic. It also
allowed the creation of stand-alone, real-time applications ranging from architectural
visualization to video games. In April 2018 it was removed from the upcoming Blender 2.8
release series, having long lagged behind other game engines such as the open-
source Godot, and Unity.[5]

Using the node editor to create anisotropic metallic materials

A 3D rendering with ray tracing and ambient occlusion using Blender and YafaRay
 

Rendering of a house

The main character from the Blender Sintelopen film

A simple fluid simulation done with Blender

User interface[edit]

Blender's user interface underwent a significant update during the 2.5x series

Blender's user interface incorporates the following concepts:

Editing modes
The two primary modes of work are Object Mode and Edit Mode, which are toggled with
the Tab key. Object mode is used to manipulate individual objects as a unit, while Edit
mode is used to manipulate the actual object data. For example, Object Mode can be
used to move, scale, and rotate entire polygon meshes, and Edit Mode can be used to
manipulate the individual vertices of a single mesh. There are also several other modes,
such as Vertex Paint, Weight Paint, and Sculpt Mode.
Hotkey usage
Most of the commands are accessible via hotkeys. There are also
comprehensive GUI menus.
Numeric input
Numeric buttons can be "dragged" to change their value directly without the need to aim
at a particular widget, as well as being set using the keyboard. Both sliders and number
buttons can be constrained to various step sizes with modifiers like
the Ctrl and Shift keys. Python expressions can also be typed directly into number
entry fields, allowing mathematical expressions to specify values.
Workspace management
The Blender GUI builds its own tiled windowing system on top of one or multiple windows
provided by the underlying platform. One platform window (often sized to fill the screen) is
divided into sections and subsections that can be of any type of Blender's views or
window-types. The user can define multiple layouts of such Blender windows,
called screens, and switch quickly between them by selecting from a menu or with
keyboard shortcuts. Each window-type's own GUI elements can be controlled with the
same tools that manipulate 3D view. For example, one can zoom in and out of GUI-
buttons using similar controls one zooms in and out in the 3D viewport. The GUI viewport
and screen layout is fully user-customizable. It is possible to set up the interface for
specific tasks such as video editing or UV mapping or texturing by hiding features not
used for the task.[41]
Hardware requirements[edit]
Blender hardware requirements[42]

Production-
Hardware Minimum Recommended
standard

32-bit dual core

64-bit eight core
Processor 2 GHz CPU 64-bit quad core CPU
CPU
with SSE2 support

Memory 2 GB RAM 8 GB RAM 16 GB RAM

OpenGL
OpenGL 3.2 compatible card Dual OpenGL
Graphics 2.1 compatible card with 2 GB video 3.3 compatible
card with 512 MB video RAM (CUDA or cards with 4
RAM OpenCL for GPU GB video RAM
rendering)

1280×768 pixels, 24- 1920×1080 pixels, 24- Dual 1920×1080

Display
bit color bit color pixels, 24-bit color

Three-button
Input Mouse or trackpad Three-button mouse
mouse
and graphics
 tablet

OpenGL 1.4 (Blender 2.76 and 2.1 (Blender 2.77 up

3.3 (Blender 2.8)
version earlier) to 2.79b)

Supported platforms[edit]
Blender is available for Windows Vista and above, Mac OS X 10.6 and above,
and Linux. Blender 2.76b is the last supported release for Windows XP and
version 2.63 was the last supported release for PowerPC.[42]

File format[edit]
Blender features an internal file system that can pack multiple scenes into a
single file (called a ".blend" file).

 All of Blender's ".blend" files are forward, backward, and cross-platform

compatible with other versions of Blender, with the following exceptions:
o Loading animations stored in post-2.5 files in Blender pre-2.5. This is
due to the reworked animation subsystem introduced in Blender 2.5
being inherently incompatible with older versions.
o Loading meshes stored in post 2.63. This is due to the introduction of
BMesh, a more versatile mesh format.
 All scenes, objects, materials, textures, sounds, images, post-production
effects for an entire animation can be stored in a single ".blend" file. Data
loaded from external sources, such as images and sounds, can also be
stored externally and referenced through either an absolute or relative
pathname. Likewise, ".blend" files themselves can also be used as libraries
of Blender assets.
 Interface configurations are retained in the ".blend" files.
A wide variety of import/export scripts that extend Blender capabilities (accessing
the object data via an internal API) make it possible to inter-operate with other
3D tools.
Blender organizes data as various kinds of "data blocks", such as Objects,
Meshes, Lamps, Scenes, Materials, Images and so on. An object in Blender
consists of multiple data blocks – for example, what the user would describe as a
polygon mesh consists of at least an Object and a Mesh data block, and usually
also a Material and many more, linked together. This allows various data blocks
to refer to each other. There may be, for example, multiple Objects that refer to
the same Mesh, and making subsequent editing of the shared mesh result in
shape changes in all Objects using this Mesh. Objects, meshes, materials,
textures etc. can also be linked to from other .blend files, which is what allows
the use of .blend files as reusable resource libraries.
Import and Export[edit]
The software supports a variety of 3D file formats for import and export, among
them Alembic, 3D Studio (3DS), Filmbox (FBX), Autodesk (DXF), SVG, STL (for
3D printing), VRML and X3D.

Video editing[edit]
 Video Editor (VSE)

Blender features a fully functional, production ready Non-Linear video editor

called Video Sequence Editor or VSE for short. Blender's VSE has many
features including effects like Gaussian Blur, color grading, Fade and Wipe
transitions, and other video transformations. However, there is no multi-core
support for rendering video with VSE.

Rendering and ray tracing[edit]

An architectural render showing different rendering styles in Blender including default

Cycles

Cycles is the path-tracing render engine that is designed to be interactive and

easy to use, while still supporting many production features.[43] It comes installed
as an add-on that is available by default and can be activated in the top header.

GPU rendering[edit]
Cycles supports GPU rendering which is used to help speed up rendering times.
There are two GPU rendering modes: CUDA, which is the preferred method
for NVIDIA graphics cards; and OpenCL, which supports rendering
on AMD graphics cards. Multiple GPUs are also supported, which can be used to
create a render farm – although having multiple GPUs doesn't increase the
available memory because each GPU can only access its own memory.[44]

Supported features[45]

Feature CPU CUDA OpenCL

Basic Shading Yes Yes Yes

Transparent Shadows Yes Yes Yes

Motion blur Yes Yes Yes

Hair Yes Yes Yes

Volume Yes Yes Yes

Smoke/Fire Yes Yes Yes

Subsurface Scattering Yes Yes Yes

Open Shading Language Yes No No

Correlated Multi-Jittered Sampling Yes Yes Yes

Branched Path integrator Yes Yes Yes

Displacement/Subdivision Experimental Experimental Experimental

Integrator[edit]
The integrator is the rendering algorithm used for lighting computations. Cycles
currently supports a path tracing integrator with direct light sampling. It works
well for various lighting setups, but is not as suitable for caustics and some other
complex lighting situations. Rays are traced from the camera into the scene,
bouncing around until they find a light source such as a lamp, an object emitting
light, or the world background. To find lamps and surfaces emitting light, both
indirect light sampling (letting the ray follow the surface BSDF) and direct light
sampling (picking a light source and tracing a ray towards it) are used.[46]
There are two types of integrators:

1. The default path tracing integrator is a pure path tracer. At each hit it
bounces light in one direction and picks one light to receive lighting from.
This makes each individual sample faster to compute, but typically
requires more samples to clean up the noise.
2. The alternative is a branched path tracing integrator which at the first hit
splits the path for different surface components and takes all lights into
account for shading instead of just one. This makes each sample slower,
but reduces noise, especially in scenes dominated by direct or one-
bounce lighting.
Open Shading Language[edit]
Blender users can create their own nodes using the Open Shading
Language although it is important to note that there is no support for it on
GPUs.[47]

Materials[edit]
Materials define the look of meshes, NURBS curves and other geometric
objects. They consist of three shaders, defining the mesh's appearance of the
surface, volume inside, and displacement of the surface.[43]
Surface shader[edit]
The surface shader defines the light interaction at the surface of the mesh. One
or more BSDFs can specify if incoming light is reflected back, refracted into the
mesh, or absorbed.[43]
Volume shader[edit]
When the surface shader does not reflect or absorb light, it enters the volume. If
no volume shader is specified, it will pass straight through to the other side of the
mesh.
If one is defined, a volume shader describes the light interaction as it passes
through the volume of the mesh. Light may be scattered, absorbed, or emitted at
any point in the volume.[43]
Displacement shader[edit]
The shape of the surface may be altered by displacement shaders. This
way, textures can be used to make the mesh surface more detailed.
Depending on the settings, the displacement may be virtual, only modifying the
surface normals to give the impression of displacement (also known as bump
mapping) or a combination of real and virtual displacement.[43]

Demo reels[edit]
The Blender website contains several demo reels that showcase various
features of Blender.[48]

Rendering engines[edit]
Engines included in Blender:

 Blender Render (Blender Internal) — Is Blender's non

photorealistic renderer. Will be removed from Blender in version 2.8.[49]
 Cycles — Unbiased ray tracing renderer. Included in Blender from version
2.61.[50]
 Clay Render — Renderer overwrites materials in BI or Cycles to
Render clay with choice of diffuse color. Included in Blender from version
2.79.[51]
 EEVEE — Real-time PBR renderer. Render engine has been
nicknamed Eevee,[52] later coined backronym — Extra Easy Virtual
Environment Engine.[53] Currently in development, it will be available in
Blender from version 2.8.[54]
External renderers, free and open-source:[55]

 Mitsuba Render[56]
 YafaRay
 LuxRender and LuxCoreRender
 appleseed Render[57]