Blender.Official

Yes, Blender is completely free and open source, released under the GNU General Public License, which means commercial studios and individual artists alike can use it without paying any licensing fee. This principle is summed up in Blender's own tagline — "Freedom to Create" — and it's one of the main reasons the software has been adopted across industries ranging from indie animation to professional VFX production.

Blender was originally developed by Dutch programmer Ton Roosendaal and is maintained by the Blender Foundation, headquartered in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The project became fully open source in 2002 after a community fundraising campaign, and has since grown into one of the most widely used 3D creation suites in the world.

The Blender Development Fund — promoted under the #devfund hashtag on Blender's official channels — is a membership program where companies and individuals financially support ongoing software development. Because Blender itself is free to download, the fund is the primary mechanism for sustaining a team of full-time core developers and keeping the project moving forward.

Join the Two Percent is Blender's campaign encouraging professional users and studios to contribute two percent of their project budget or revenue back to Blender development. The logic is that even a small percentage from commercial users who rely on the software heavily helps keep it free and continuously improved for the entire global community.

Blender Studio produces short films and animated projects — known as open movies — that are created entirely in Blender and then released under open licenses for anyone to study, share, or build on. Well-known examples include Big Buck Bunny and Sintel, and these productions double as real-world tests for new Blender features before they reach the public release.

Blender Studio is the in-house creative and production arm of the Blender Foundation, based in Amsterdam, that makes the open movie projects and publishes training content for the community. While the Blender Foundation handles governance and software development, Blender Studio is where the filmmaking and educational material — tagged as #blenderstudio across Blender's official social accounts — actually gets made.

Grease Pencil is a toolset inside Blender that lets artists draw and animate in 2D directly within a 3D scene — essentially combining traditional hand-drawn animation with a full 3D environment. It's one of Blender's most distinctive features and shows up frequently in official content under the #greasepencil hashtag, particularly in open movie projects that use it for stylized animation.

Yes, Blender supports 3D printing workflows and includes a built-in 3D Print Toolbox add-on that checks models for common printability issues like non-manifold geometry or wall thickness problems. It's explicitly listed as one of the topics on Blender's official YouTube channel, making it a popular free alternative to dedicated CAD tools for makers, designers, and engineers.

BlenderCon is Blender's annual community conference — tagged as #bcon25 for the most recent edition — where developers, artists, and enthusiasts gather, typically in Amsterdam, to hear feature announcements, watch project showcases, and shape the software's roadmap. It's one of the major events in the open-source 3D and animation calendar and is streamed publicly on Blender's official channels.

Blender is funded through a combination of the Blender Development Fund (corporate and individual memberships), grants, training subscriptions through Blender Studio, and merchandise sales. Major companies in the VFX, game, and animation industries — studios that depend on Blender commercially — are among the key contributors to the Development Fund, creating a sustainable model that keeps the software free for everyone.