Blender
- Website: http://www.blender.org/
- OS: Linux, Mac, Windows
- Cost: Free
- Opensource: Yes
Blender is an open source animation software designed for 3D modelling, rigging, animating and rendering. It’s incredibly feature rich and versatile. Since it’s based on python, there is an active community of people that write scripts to do custom things (like creating gears for instance).
It has a steep learning curve and takes a long time to master, but once you’ve mastered it you can make anything. There are a lot of tutorials to help you get started. Because it’s designed for animation, it isn’t ideal for engineering CAD, but there are always work-arounds. People have started using it more for engineering so community users have begun creating add-ons for engineery stuff. For instance there’s a very useful 3D printing add-on.
