Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software tool set that runs on Windows, macOS, BSD, Haiku, IRIX and Linux.

It is used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D-printed models, motion graphics, interactive 3D applications, and virtual reality.

Blender was initially developed as an in-house application by the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo (no relation to the video game brand), and was officially launched on January 2, 1994.

The name Blender was inspired by a song by the Swiss electronic band Yello, from the album Baby, which NeoGeo used in its showreel.

[14][15][16] Some design choices and experiences for Blender were carried over from an earlier software application, called Traces, that Roosendaal developed for NeoGeo on the Commodore Amiga platform during the 1987–1991 period.

As a sort of Easter egg and last personal tag, the artists and developers decided to add a 3D model of a chimpanzee head (called a "monkey" in the software).

It was created by Willem-Paul van Overbruggen (SLiD3), who named it Suzanne, after the orangutan in the Kevin Smith film Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

A low-polygon model with only 500 faces, Suzanne is included in Blender and often used as a quick and easy way to test materials, animations, rigs, textures, and lighting setups.

Blender has support for a variety of geometric primitives, including polygon meshes, Bézier curves, NURBS surfaces, metaballs, icospheres, text, and an n-gon modeling system called B-mesh.

While it is capable of driving Blender's real-time viewport for creating assets thanks to its speed, it can also work as a renderer for final frames.

There are three GPU rendering modes: CUDA, which is the preferred method for older Nvidia graphics cards; OptiX, which utilizes the hardware ray-tracing capabilities of Nvidia's Turing architecture & Ampere architecture; HIP, which supports rendering on AMD Radeon graphics cards; and oneAPI for Intel and Intel Arc GPUs.

The toolkit software associated with these rendering modes does not come within Blender and needs to be separately installed and configured as per their respective source instructions.

This added complexity makes computing each ray slower but reduces noise in the render, especially in scenes dominated by direct (one-bounce) lighting.

This was removed in Blender 3.0 with the advent of Cycles X, as improvements to the pure path tracing integrator made the branched path tracing integrator redundant [63] Blender users can create their own nodes using the Open Shading Language (OSL); this allows users to create stunning materials that are entirely procedural, which allows them to be used on any objects without stretching the texture as opposed to image-based textures which need to be made to fit a certain object.

Plans for future releases of EEVEE include support for hardware-accelerated ray-tracing[71] and continued improvements to performance and shader compilation.

A wide variety of import/export scripts that extend Blender capabilities (accessing the object data via an internal API) make it possible to interoperate with other 3D tools.

The software supports a variety of 3D file formats for import and export, among them Alembic, 3D Studio (3DS), FBX, DXF, SVG, STL (for 3D printing), UDIM, USD, VRML, WebM, X3D and OBJ.

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.

Since the opening of the source code, Blender has experienced significant refactoring of the initial codebase and major additions to its feature set.

[94] Official planning for the next major revision of Blender after the 2.7 series began in the latter half of 2015, with potential targets including a more configurable UI (dubbed "Blender 101"), support for physically based rendering (PBR) (dubbed EEVEE for "Extra Easy Virtual Environment Engine") to bring improved realtime 3D graphics to the viewport, allowing the use of C++11 and C99 in the codebase, moving to a newer version of OpenGL and dropping support for versions before 3.2, and a possible overhaul of the particle and constraint systems.

[107] Due to Blender's open-source nature, other programs have tried to take advantage of its success by repackaging and selling cosmetically modified versions of it.

[109] 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.

[112] 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".

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.

[121] The visual effects for the TV series The Man in the High Castle were done in Blender, with some of the particle simulations relegated to Houdini.

[125] This app[126] 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.

[22] It was launched to promote and fundraiser for Project: Gooseberry, and is intended to replace the selling of DVDs by the Blender Foundation with a subscription-based model for file hosting, asset sharing and collaboration.

[174] Corporate members include Epic Games,[175] Nvidia,[176] Microsoft,[177] Apple,[178] Unity,[179] Intel,[180] Decentraland,[181] Amazon Web Services,[182] Meta,[183] AMD,[184] Adobe[185] and many more.

Individual users can also provide one-time donations to Blender via payment card, PayPal, wire transfer, and some cryptocurrencies.

[citation needed] As of 2021, official releases of Blender for Microsoft Windows, macOS and Linux,[241] as well as a port for FreeBSD,[242] are available in 64-bit versions.