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Blender really is a gem, for beginners there really is little reason to learn anything else, fully featured, free and runs off a USB or shared drive, can run on pretty old hardware. For examples of what teenagers in the UK are making with Blender see these:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42113898

https://younganimator.uk/submissions/16f0edf9-4fff-43d5-b82b...

https://younganimator.uk/submissions/96059d6c-796e-485f-9582...

If you are remodeling your home, strongly suggest using Bonsai (previously Blender BIM) add-on to model and plan.

In addition to getting my layout just right down to the ft, and using current materials (ie, hardwood, cabinet placement). I modeled out HVAC ducts and overall system.

I had planned on doing major renovations (including plumbing, electric, networking) and would have modeled those as well since the walls would be exposed. But ultimately, due to changing political atmosphere, decided to put these on hold.

It does have a learning curve but would have been made collaboration with at architects much easier (exchanging ifc files).

It's really puzzling (but extremely welcome) that Blender continues to be such an open source success story. Seems rare for such complex pieces of software in a niche space to get that level of development. I wonder what the secret is.

Like others have mentioned, Blender has become quite the successful open-source story. They used to be riddled with bugs and UX issues, much like FreeCAD was. Yesterday FreeCAD released v1 of their software, and they seem to be on the same redemption path as Blender. It's too bad their v1 release didn't gain much traction on here, as more people ought to give FreeCAD another whirl. The improvements there are massive. And it's the only proper parametric CAD software available on Linux.

Blender continues to be an inspiration and aspiration for open source.

Huge congrats and thank you to everyone who contributed.

From a beginners perspective, a good mouse is crucial for working in these kind of tools. It's touched on at the start of the donut tutorial (linked elsewhere) but I just wanted to re-iterate it here.

Now, I haven't done serious 3d work for many years, and recently tried getting into Blender again on my Mac laptop with a Magic mouse. It was a horrible experience.

Can anyone recommend a good mouse you can buy nowadays (so not something like the original SGI workstation mouse that had 3 buttons and no scroll wheel, unless those are still readily available...I loved them!) that works well in these programs. I remember the key differentiator being the scroll wheel which also acts as the middle button. Getting this wrong can make for a frustrating experience as it will zoom the view while trying to middle click.

Love Blender's interface. I wish MS Excel was built like this. Dragging the border to create new viewports, customizable views, ease of binding keyboard shortcuts to functions.. FA-BU-LO-SO

Blender's success is a lot due to how welcoming they are of new contributors.

15 years years back, this was the first big OSS project that I contributed to. Since I was a greenhorn, the patch I submitted (there weren't 'PR's back then :) ) was, to say the least, rather shoddy.

Ton Roosendaal helped me patiently on the IRC (I think they were on Freenode back then, not fully sure), guiding me through the changes needed to make it acceptable to merge it.

I learnt a ton just hanging out in the dev channel. Good times. It was a great product even back then but it's amazing how much more awesome it has gotten since then.

Great work Blender team.

Blender, in my view, is one of the best arguments to develop native desktop applications over web view wrappers like Electron. Everything is responsive and instant, you can open new 3D view windows by just sliding them open at 60 frames a second, performance is stable even with multiple windows open and the download size is a reasonable 334MB.

What's the best way to get started with Blender these days? I'm mostly interested in making art and possibly even 3d printing some stuff (do these skills overlap at all?).

Is it possible to generate code in LLM and create animation using Blender. I want to create Animation for educational video content.

The "Geo Nodes Meets Grease Pencil" demo video is so cool. Makes me want to download Blender again just to play with this 2.5D effect.

I don't think there's any other open source project that does release notes with such amazing quality as Blender.

For that matter, very few commercial software companies reach this level of quality in their product websites. Note how the Blender page doesn't break scrolling, doesn't fluff up everything with useless adjectives like "delightful" and "beautiful", etc.