This is a brief article about Blender. But what is Blender? Blender is (and I might be biased here) a fantastic piece of 3D software. It lets you do modeling, rigging, texturing, animating, rendering, and much more. On top of that, it’s entirely open-source and so is completely free.
But how does one get started with Blender? The most popular way people get started is by modeling a donut. Specifically, through Blender Guru’s donut making tutorial, where he goes step-by-step over the process of how to make a donut in Blender. It goes over modeling, texturing, rendering, and all the skills you might need in between.
For instance, the first video of the series starts by going over the very basics, such as how to move around in Blender, how to move objects, and teaching the barebones of the interface. It’s incredibly approachable, and meant for anyone who genuinely knows nothing starting out.
But what can Blender do, besides donuts? Everything I've mentioned can be done not just through a node system that Blender has, but also with Python scripting. This means that things such as making an environment, or texturing, can be not just “automated”, but one can even ask ChatGPT to generate a Python script for Blender. (And tutorials for that, of course, can be found online. You can find tutorials for a lot of things in Blender, the community is huge.)
If you’re just interested in seeing what Blender can actually do, there’s plenty of speed modeling videos online (such as this one of a dragon, or this one which models an original character), as well as there also being compilations such as these where artists are challenged to create their own version of an idea (in this case, just the camera rotating around a cube, which is made into really impressive renders). Blender is an incredibly powerful tool, and I would really suggest so much as just looking at some of the things people have made with it.
(taken from the compilation linked above)
PS this is how the .blend file for the thumbnail looks, the lighting is the black lines surrounding the Blender model, with the black triangle being the camera (background added in Paint.net):
