The price is right

First things first: you don't have to pay for Blender. It is offered free of charge. If it works for you, you always have the option to donate, but Blender doesn't do anything to force this point. It is free now and forever.

Blender is comprehensive

While it's true that Blender is designed for animation because it covers everything from a blank canvas to a finished animation, it contains the ability to model objects, and it's one of the most robust suites of modeling tools anywhere. Learning Blender means that you may never need to learn another 3D modelling software.

It's getting better all the time

Blender is in constant development. If it doesn't have a feature you need, chances are that it may one day. Blender's developers are constantly responding to their audience.

But Blender isn't perfect

Despite Blender's advantages, it has a well-earned reputation for having a difficult-to-overcome learning curve. It's had a long and organic development cycle, which left it with a default user interface that isn't intuitive compared to most other software.

But Blender is also very configurable and, with a few simple settings, it can be made much easier for the beginner to use. The rest of this chapter will help get you past Blender's short comings so that you can start developing awesome 3D models.