An open-sourced 3D modeller released under the GPL. Blender was originally a commercial product, but was open-sourced when the parent company, Not a Number, folded. The Blender Foundation was formed by one of NaN's founders, with the intention of raising enough money to purchase the rights to make Blender open source, and met their goal within a matter of weeks.
Blender is a powerful modeller, featuring built-in ray-trace renderer, NURBS curves and surfaces, Beziers curves and surfaces, powerful mesh modelling tools, meta-balls, skeletal animation and inverse kinematics, non-linear animation, sub-division surfaces, particle systems, etc... A Python interface allows for the creation of custom scripts for import/export, special effects, and so on.
http://www.blender.org
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