Blender is a free, open-source 3D creation suite that covers the full pipeline — modeling, sculpting, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing, and video editing — in a single application.
Developed by the Blender Foundation and a global volunteer community, Blender originated as in-house software at the Dutch studio NeoGeo before founder Ton Roosendaal open-sourced it in 2002 through a public fundraising campaign. It is maintained under the GNU GPL and funded largely through the Blender Development Fund and corporate sponsors.
Its renderers — the path-tracing Cycles engine and the real-time Eevee engine — along with a Python scripting API and a large add-on ecosystem, have made it a standard tool across indie game development, visual effects, motion graphics, and 3D-printing workflows. It is widely regarded as the most capable freely available alternative to commercial suites such as Maya and Cinema 4D.