Blender is absolutely brilliant! I have been modeling with 2.93 the last few days and it’s very enjoyable. Once you get the hang of it the interface is predictable, that is to say you start to know where to look.
Affinity beats Gimp for my type of work at the moment, but it’s cheap enough. I hope GIMP takes a page out of blenders book.
Libreoffice is fine as well, no more need for Office365
Godot is another rising star, 3.3 is great and 4.0 is going to be a leap forward. It uses the Blender model and makes money with Patreon and the like. The user community is absolutely fantastic.
Blender is awesome. It really is one of the best open source projects out there. While it had a reputation for being inaccessible this hasn’t been the case for a long time and 2.8 makes it even easier.
I've worked with blender since 2001 (version 1.9.x, when it was still shareware), and its growth over the past ten years has been outstanding. I'm not a 3d professional but, instead, use it for all kinds of things: Demo and Mock animations / movies, creating icons for apps (almost all my apps' icons were created in Blender), cutting videos (iMovie is a great app, but for quick and short movie edits, the one in Blender is actually superior). It even has a built-in game engine and can be connected to various open source 3d engines. Blender is really powerful.
Blender is, in a way, similar to VIM or Emacs, in that the user interface is highly optimized for keyboard navigation. A lot of things can be done with the mouse and the keyboard without ever having to move through long and convoluted menus or hierachies.
It's also scriptable in Python. It's one of the first apps I install on my machines.
Blender is fantastic. Not only the modelling package is great and free (compared to the alternatives, aren't exactly cheap) and plugins are numerous and really good on average. Then beyond that, the renderer Cycles is GPU powered, and a beast, also for free. I've been using Blender every day for the last 2 years and I can't recommend it enough. Yes the UI will drive you mad at first until you get the hang of it. It's gotten better, but it's still different, at first.
I'm not sure how I feel about Blender, the UI in the older versions was notoriously niche if not outright confusing. Here's a video comparing the versions in a simple example task: https://youtu.be/Vz_GxPMActM
Whatever caused it to succeed and catch enough attention to be continuously improved, I'm thankful for that. Same as with game engines like Godot and other similar FOSS projects, maybe even LibreOffice not dying like OpenOffice did, though that's a whole tale in of itself. Actually, I'll similarly celebrate improvements in proprietary software, too.
Then again, I still think that Inkscape and some of the other software that gets touted as good is actually not very usable, so I'm a bit opinionated.
Yeah, Blender is maybe the best open source software I use. I don't feel a need to use any other 3D modeling software, it's so robust and works so well (from what I can tell, I'm still mostly an amateur and have barely scratched the surface of Blender still).
Blender is an alien in the world of software, but I agree -- it's brilliant. Never stopped using it since I tried it 15 years ago. Took a long time to get productive, but it was definitely a good time investment.
It's also very dev friendly. And exploring its file format makes for very good nerdy times.
Blender (https://www.blender.org/), by a wide margin, is my favourite piece of software. It's so apparent that the team behind it is passionate regarding what they are doing and highly skilled, as well. Each release brings both large and small improvements. What's more... it's open source.
Blender is a really fantastic software, from a professional, a educational, and a tinkering perspective.
I started using Blender in 1998 or 1999 back when it was still closed source (around version 1.6, I think). Back then I also used to use 3D Studio Max and it was a far superior software. Then, NaN went bankrupt and managed to raise enough awareness to collect the required money so that the investors could be paid out and Blender could be released into the public as open source. In the following years, Blender has continously grown in feature-size oftentimes coming quite close to what professional packages offer.
From a professional perspective, one can get a very solid 3D Rendering and Modelling solution for free that offers enough features to get a deep understanding of the whole subject. This makes it easy to learn enough to be competitive when it comes down to searching for a job.
From a educational perspective, Blender is a great teaching tool. The animations that Blender can generate (with particles and hair and bones) look good enough to amaze young kids. Based on this amazement, one can explain the math behind it, or the code behind it, to make computer science and math look more practical.
From a tinkering perspective, Blender is fantastic. The core is written in C/C++ but a huge part of the application is scripted in Python. This makes it very easy to have a look into the source, extend the app, and gain a better understanding of the ideas behind 3D Rendering and modelling. Case in Point: When working on an iPad game recently, a friend and I decided that we did not want to build our own level editor. Since one requirement of each level was the ability to edit nurbs curves, we decided to simply script a lightweight Blender Plugin so that we could use Blender 3D as the level editor. After some initial problems it went fluidly, and we quickly had a great working level editor with an extensible interface, all scripted in Python. If I were to work on another game and if there weren't already a good level editor for the kind of levels I'd need, I'd go with Blender again as it is really easy to extend and already has functionality for lots and lots of use cases.
All in all, Blender is - in my eyes - one of the big success stories of open source software. Especially because there's no big corporation behind it. Open Office has/had Sun, Linux has IBM, RedHat, and many many others, but Blender is really being build by a community of seperate entities and few corporations.
Blender looks great but is a bit oddball too (though less so now). I’d also nominate QGIS as a good open-source app (UI). Maybe not “art,” but I think it’s become almost de facto for what a hobbyist will reach for first, and it’s generally quite user-friendly. But they are rare!
Blender, despite its "odd" UI, is the best open source GUI software out there. I don't use any other GUI open source software -- I pay for Microsoft Office and Adobe Applications -- but I find Blender to be useful, productive, and complete. It's solid, and has a very good community. Unlike other open source "alternatives" to commercial software (like, say Gimp or Open Office), it's actually _better_ in many ways, and not just FUD or useful to casual users.
Blender is great. I use it myself (3D resin printing). But I've also used similar software I had to pay for, which was much better than Blender overall. Same way Photoshop is better than Gimp, and Windows UI is still better than Gnome/KDE. Sometimes to get great software and experience, you have to pay for it. And that's ok, it doesn't make the free software, like Blender, any less eff'ing awesome.
Affinity beats Gimp for my type of work at the moment, but it’s cheap enough. I hope GIMP takes a page out of blenders book.
Libreoffice is fine as well, no more need for Office365
Godot is another rising star, 3.3 is great and 4.0 is going to be a leap forward. It uses the Blender model and makes money with Patreon and the like. The user community is absolutely fantastic.
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