I use blender constantly to make things for 3d printing and I haven’t spent a cent on it or any plugins I use for it.
So for anyone on the fence about picking up blender and reading this comment above, no it doesn’t require hundreds of dollars of plugins to be useful. Not for every use case.
Same - I make most of my living from Blender and I occassionally use 1 or 2 paid add-ons. With the recent improvements to the compositor and the editor, it has even replaced the last piece of Adobe software I was using - After Effects - very nice feeling. I donate to Blender after every paid job too.
Indeed, geometry nodes are revolutionary in some ways, and volumetric displacement brushes are magic.
The issue is Blender has been in perpetual Beta for decades. Every update something breaks, moves, permutes, or goes missing. It is chaos incarnate in some ways. =3
Every use-case differs. I like Blender even when they break my hobby projects every update.
OpenScad and FreeCad also works for 3D cad files. However, many people that own 3D printers will never sculpt, re-mesh, or cad up their own objects. =3
FreeCAD is great if someone mainly wants to print functional, usable parts. That’s totally valid and honestly even more powerful than Blender for that use case. Autodesk Fusion (prev. Fusion 360) is also a popular option.
I use blender because I also like to do a lot of 3d printed art, and as you mentioned, that sculpt tooling is one of many fantastic tools for that purpose.
Also LLMs know a lot about Blender, making it very easy to describe what I want to do, and then get a walk through of how to do it with Blender.
LLM are sometimes good at organizing the awful documentation for Blenders ever permuting API, but will not help you get better creatively. If you are interested in geometry nodes, than this channel offers a lot =3
There is no such thing as "free" unless the original author released files under CC0 or Public domain. The rest of the ecosystem is a legal minefield even for kids kit-bashing a project for fun.
We spent around $3k conducting a survey of the Blender ecosystem for a game dev project about 2 years ago, and continue to monitor the situation every update. A rather sobering experience in some ways.
Would recommend Poly Haven as the plugin is not required to access their free assets, but it is usually a good idea to support people that make things easier for everyone. =3
I use blender constantly to make things for 3d printing and I haven’t spent a cent on it or any plugins I use for it.
So for anyone on the fence about picking up blender and reading this comment above, no it doesn’t require hundreds of dollars of plugins to be useful. Not for every use case.
Same - I make most of my living from Blender and I occassionally use 1 or 2 paid add-ons. With the recent improvements to the compositor and the editor, it has even replaced the last piece of Adobe software I was using - After Effects - very nice feeling. I donate to Blender after every paid job too.
Indeed, geometry nodes are revolutionary in some ways, and volumetric displacement brushes are magic.
The issue is Blender has been in perpetual Beta for decades. Every update something breaks, moves, permutes, or goes missing. It is chaos incarnate in some ways. =3
Every use-case differs. I like Blender even when they break my hobby projects every update.
OpenScad and FreeCad also works for 3D cad files. However, many people that own 3D printers will never sculpt, re-mesh, or cad up their own objects. =3
FreeCAD is great if someone mainly wants to print functional, usable parts. That’s totally valid and honestly even more powerful than Blender for that use case. Autodesk Fusion (prev. Fusion 360) is also a popular option.
I use blender because I also like to do a lot of 3d printed art, and as you mentioned, that sculpt tooling is one of many fantastic tools for that purpose.
Also LLMs know a lot about Blender, making it very easy to describe what I want to do, and then get a walk through of how to do it with Blender.
We found most of this devs work was popular with artists. May be worth a look.
https://bartoszstyperek.gumroad.com/
LLM are sometimes good at organizing the awful documentation for Blenders ever permuting API, but will not help you get better creatively. If you are interested in geometry nodes, than this channel offers a lot =3
https://www.youtube.com/@TheDucky3D/videos
And these extensions are for what use cases?
Mostly Fun... sometimes replacing commercial software workflows that were already a disaster for the creatives. =3
Or just use free props if you are a hobbist.
There is no such thing as "free" unless the original author released files under CC0 or Public domain. The rest of the ecosystem is a legal minefield even for kids kit-bashing a project for fun.
We spent around $3k conducting a survey of the Blender ecosystem for a game dev project about 2 years ago, and continue to monitor the situation every update. A rather sobering experience in some ways.
Would recommend Poly Haven as the plugin is not required to access their free assets, but it is usually a good idea to support people that make things easier for everyone. =3
https://polyhaven.com/plugins/blender