Not the cantankerous robot of Futurama fame, but rather a powerful modelling and animation program, Blender was actually developed for in-house use by a Dutch animation company back in 1998.

The initial Blender distributor went bankrupt, but was able to satisfy creditors to release the software under the GNU public license for a certain sum of money – which was raised via generous donations from interested parties. Consequently, the source code was released and the once-proprietary app is now free, as in freedom.

Blender excels at 3D visualisations, stills and broadcast and cinema quality video; it genuinely is a leading high-end bleeding-edge tool for media professionals and artists. Its features include modelling, uv-mapping, texturing, rigging, weighting, animation, particle and other simulation, scripting (in Python), rendering, compositing, post-production and game creation. It runs on all versions of Windows, Linux, OS X, FreeBSD, Irix, Sun and other operating systems with OpenGL support.

A Wiki site provides up-to-date and detailed help and manuals. Additionally, a wide array of user-submitted Python scripts are available, grouped into broad categories like animation, exporting, meshes, rendering, system, themes and more.

The Wiki comes in handy: Blender has had a reputation of being difficult to learn, although the developer’s stress they have been working hard to alter this perception. Recent releases have enhanced the user interface with transparent floating widgets, colour themes, two distinct primary operating modes, comprehensive context menus, hotkeys and multiple workspace management. Up to version 2.3, it was actually only possible to issue commands via hotkeys but the GUI is now far more developed with hotkeys now being an ancillary feature for advanced users rather than the primary means of working.

As you might imagine, a program like Blender performs a great deal of number-crunching. Pleasantly, pre-compiled 64-bit binary distributions are available, although only for Linux at this time. For modelling and animation at a quality suitable for broadcast, Blender is unbeatable – especially at the price.