Blender is one of the biggest stars of the open source software scene. In the highly specialized niche of 3D software, Blender developed into a serious and well funded competitor for commercial software providers.

Supported by a foundation, Blender is financed by sponsorship from well-known companies such as the games manufacturer Epic Games and the animation studio Ubisoft, but Intel, Nvidia and Meta are also partners, as was Microsoft for a time. These large corporations may not pay millions, but they do pay up to 240,000 dollars a year. This is enough to pay around 20 full-time developers. Above all, they have given Blender a huge development boost in recent years. Blender has been given a new user interface and, thanks to support for the latest graphics hardware (Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Apple Silicone), has seen a rapid increase in speed

The range of possible applications extends from the creation of animated films and game worlds to product design and the creation of objects for 3D printers. Blender offers a choice of two engines for real-time rendering: Cycles works out the lighting of scenes particularly accurately using path tracing, while Eevee rasterizes the images and is therefore particularly fast.

Release policy

Blender publications are numbered with a number before and a number after the dot. The number before the dot indicates the series. A new series is released approximately every two years. The number after the dot is the version number. Individual versions are given the suffix LTS (“long-term support”) and are maintained for two years. Apart from that, the Blender developers always recommend the latest stable release.

Installation

Blender can be installed in Ubuntu from the Universe repository:

sudo apt install blender

This installs the last Blender version available before the release of an Ubuntu version, but no upgrades, which will not be enough for many users.

The easiest way to always get the latest version is installing the snap maintained b ythe Blender Foundation.

Documentation

Blender’s comprehensive documentation is made available in several languages. The user manual can be viewed in a web browser or downloaded in HTML or Epub format. The links to the manual for older Blender versions can be found according to the following scheme: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/X.X/ – where X.X is the version number, e.g. 3.6 for the LTS version from 2023. A developer manual and documentation for Blender’s Python API are also provided.