blender.pngYou may have already heard of Blender, the 3D open source suite, as an excellent option for creating 3D graphics and models. Well, that is definitely true. Blender is a 3D tool that actually makes sense for me (I successfully created an almost passable castle) and everyone seems to agree that is both powerful and pretty straightforward to use.

What's more, it's a tool that allows you to create your 3D model, shade it, animate it, stick it in a 3D world and either render it or even have it star in a video. The game creation advantages are pretty obvious, especially for artists and indie devs wanting to impress with shiny 3D stuff, but what really impressed me is the fact that Brender actually comes with a complete Game Engine.

The Blender Game Engine may not be the best or easiest to use, mind you, and it definitely isn't Unity, but it does do some pretty amazing stuff like allowing for 3D animated environments and fully supporting physics, particles, detailed collision detection, vehicle dynamics and OpenGL. Oh, it does provide with an excellent tool for designing levels and/or maps too, as well as one of the best ways of approaching UI design. And, lest I forget, scripting in Python is also an option.

Handily, Blender won't cost you a thing either.

Blender can be downloaded for free for Windows 32bits, Windows 64bits, Linux, Mac OSX and FreeBSD here. You can support Blender by grabbing all sorts of handy books and DVDs from the Blender Store.