Blender 3D Software

Blender is a powerful and free 3D graphics application that can be used for modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, water, skinning, animating, rendering, particle and other simulations, non-linear editing, compositing and creating interactive 3D applications. It runs on a wide range range of operating systems including Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows, along with FreeBSD, IRIX, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Solaris.

Other than the fact that the software is free (thank you open source), something that caught my eye was the low minimum requirements and download size. Whatever platform you’re using, you won’t be downloading over 20 megabytes, and your hardware won’t need to exceed 300 MHz/128MB RAM/20MB disk space so this app should run nice and smooth on your current setup (I’m sure you’re not in the dark ages).

Features are numerous (how this is free I don’t know) and documentation/community support is abundant. Compared to extreme high end 3D software Blender is not in the same class, but as a free mid range application you can hone your skills and create work suitable for pretty much any medium, and thanks to the price, low specs and file size its not like you’ll be wasting time and resources, so give it a try.