Aimed world-wide at media professionals and artists, Blender can be used to create 3D visualizations, stills as well as broadcast and cinema quality videos, while the incorporation of a real-time 3D engine allows for the creation of 3D interactive content for stand-alone playback.

Originally developed by the company ‘Not a Number’ (NaN), Blender now is continued as ‘Free Software’, with the source code available under the GNU GPL license. It now continues development by the Blender Foundation in the Netherlands.

Key Features include:

• Fully integrated creation suite, offering a broad range of essential tools for the creation of 3D content, including modeling, uv-mapping, texturing, rigging, skinning, animation, particle and other simulation, scripting, rendering, compositing, post-production, and game creation
• High quality 3D architecture enabling fast and efficient creation work-flow
• User community support by forums for questions, answers, and critique at http://BlenderArtists.org and news services at http://BlenderNation.com
• Small executable size, easy distribution

Home Page: http://www.blender.org/
Project Page: http://www.blender.org/development/
Language: C, Python
Platform: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD 5.4 (i386), Sun Solaris 2.8 (sparc)
License: GNU GPL

The code is written entirely in C with an object-oriented approach based mostly on the design of GTK+. Careful attention is paid to performance related issues as the initial goal of GTS is to provide a simple and efficient library to scientists dealing with 3D computational surface meshes.

A brief summary of its main features:

• Simple object-oriented structure giving easy access to topological properties.
• 2D dynamic Delaunay and constrained Delaunay triangulations.
• Robust geometric predicates (orientation, in circle) using fast adaptive floating point arithmetic (adapted from the fine work of Jonathan R. Shewchuk).
• Robust set operations on surfaces (union, intersection, difference).
• Surface refinement and coarsening (multiresolution models).
• Dynamic view-independent continuous level-of-detail.
• Preliminary support for view-dependent level-of-detail.
• Bounding-boxes trees and Kd-trees for efficient point location and collision/intersection detection.
• Graph operations: traversal, graph partitioning.
• Metric operations (area, volume, curvature …).
• Triangle strips generation for fast rendering.

Home Page: http://gts.sourceforge.net/
Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gts/
Language: C
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X
License: LGPL