Blender is one of the most popular open-source creative tools and, equally, one of the best. Whether you’re using Blender to render models for 3D printing, or you’re learning it as a new skill for something fun to do, there are many great reasons it works out to use Blender for free over paying for 3D design tools. It has excellent features and community, and you’ll make some awesome 3D design creations using Blender.

6 A Free forever and open-source tool

No worries about price increases

One of the worst things about investing in paid 3D design tools is the cost, on top of the time investment. To learn a tool well, you must spend a lot of time with it. If you pay for a tool, it feels like a sunken cost fallacy to stop using it or switch to a free tool after you’ve spent time learning it.

That isn’t an issue with Blender. Blender is an open-source tool that is pledged to be free forever for all users. You can invest hours in learning Blender and always afford to carry on using it. Or stop, if you wish.

While there are a few reasons to swap from Blender to a paid tool, you can at least benefit from learning how to sculpt, design, or animate in a 3D space without a cost investment by using Blender first. This builds your confidence, skills, and understanding of using a 3D tool, which is as important alone as the specific tool you use.

5 Blender is multi-faceted

Versatility makes Blender great

Blender offers more with 3D design and 3D animation. Compared to paid tools, which often focus on specific aspects of 3D design, Blender offers many features of good quality.

With Blender, you can do:

• 3D modeling
• Animation
• Sculpting
• Rendering
• Visual effects (VFX)
• Video editing

Although Blender might not be the best at each of these things — with software like Maya being better for animating, ZBrush better for sculpting, or Substance Painter better for texturizing — the ability to do so much in one program shouldn’t be a missed opportunity. Especially when it’s free. Blender still does a great job with the features it offers due to its rendering engines, multiple modeling support techniques, and the variety of VFX available.

4 Tons of resources available

Community spirit for all Blender users

Because Blender is free and part of such a large community of open-source users, you’ll find huge amounts of Blender resources online. These might come in the form of tutorials across videos or articles, but mostly, you’ll easily find resources to apply within your Blender workflow.

There are reams of GitHub pages listing hundreds of places to find textures, 3D models, HDRIs, audio, scenes, and anything else needed to make your Blender designs awesome. Blender add-ons are the best way to improve your Blender resultsfurther from the basic offerings in the tool.

Be vigilant when sourcing Blender resources. There are more scams on Reddit or GitHub now than ever before, so don’t blindly download from links until you’ve researched more about the sites you’re using.

3 Procedural workflow for easy editing

Non-destructive workflow

Blender offers a procedural workflow that encourages non-destructive ways to create and edit your 3D designs. This isn't the case in all 3D design tools, so finding this in a free 3D tool like Blender is a huge benefit.

You can create a 3D object and make changes or edit it using procedural workflow. You’ll always have the option to revert edits without destroying the 3D mesh for your object. This helps maintain a clean workflow and, by far, removes the frustration of having to take steps back in your workflow and lose hours of time.

2 Very adaptable and updated often

Frequent updates with handy features

Blender doesn’t have a permanent design team like paid proprietary 3D tools, so you can’t expect routine or rigid updates; however, the open-source community ensures minor updates throughout the year, often resulting in a new version of Blender every few months.

With the adaptability of open-source materials, you can also download the source code for Blender to create your own version. However, this is limited to those who know how to write Python code. But with some coding knowledge, you can edit and adapt Blender to suit your needs. You could also share your newly edited code with others to improve updates or Blender’s ability for other users.

You don’t get these opportunities with paid tools because the source code is not usually shared publicly and is not adaptable to your personal needs.

1 Create 2D animations within a 3D environment

Mix your dimensional spaces

It’s not common across 3D design tools that you can draw 2D illustrations in a 3D space. But it’s possible in Blender. Doing so allows you to use advanced camera movements for your 2D drawing, which otherwise is typically impossible using 2D-specific tools.

Blender users can mix 2D and 3D elements in the same scenes, including using the Freestyle feature, which allows you to make a 3D object appear 2D — which has plenty of fun purposes in your design process.

Although 2D animators might use other tools like Adobe After Effects, using Blender for free is a benefit, as well as being able to easily mix dimensions within your design or animation projects.

Design in 3D for free with Blender

Blender is a great 3D option, and in the cases of learning 3D design as a hobby or working for a startup, Blender is the best choice as there’s no financial investment to lose. However, it must be acknowledged that Blender isn’t the industry standard for 3D design, and if you wish to learn 3D modeling for a career in the 3D design space, you’ll likely need to learn other tools instead of Blender. There’s little to no reason to pay for 3D tools if your career isn’t involved in 3D design, though. Blender is a fantastic resource in that case, and you shouldn’t pay for similar 3D design tools if you have access to Blender.