Blender Main Features:
Game engine
The game engine is fully integrated with the shading and rigging system, it features a very powerful visual logic programing system, python scripting capabilities, bullet physics and state of the art graphics.
Render baking
Blender's render pipeline supports rendering to UV texturemaps; ambient occlusion, normals, displacement, color, shadows and full render can be baked.
Map UV and ID Mask
Mesh objects with UV co-ordinates can be saved in a render pass, and used in the Compositor as input to remap textures. ID Mask node converts a number from an Object Index pass to an anti-aliased alpha mask.
Vertex Color Node
For node materials, the Geometry node contains a Vertex Color name field to access non active vertex color layers.
Sculpt Mode
Sculpt is a mode for editing Mesh objects. Unlike Edit Mode, the model's shape is manipulated with various brushes, rather than by editing individual vertices, edges, and faces.
Imaging
Advanced Imaging system featuring MultiLayer image read/write integrated in all editors and Flipbook playback for compositing, sequences or movie files.
3D object
Supports numerous 3D object formats including meatballs, vector fonts, polygon meshes, and more.
Blender is a powerful development tool to create 3D images and animations, whose main advantage regarding other similar tools like 3D studio or Maya is that this is a completely free application. The program lets you model, render, texture, illuminate, animate and post-produce any kind of three-dimensional scenes. Oct 14, 2015 Blender Portable 2.76 has been released. Blender Portable is the popular Blender open source software for 3D modelling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback packaged as a portable app, so you can do your rendering on the go. Blender comes commented templates which are accessible from the text editor header, if you have specific areas you want to see example code for, this is a good place to start. Here are some sites you might like to check on after completing this tutorial. Blender/Python API Overview - For more background details on Blender/Python integration.
Here you can find the whole english Blender 2.76 manual in PDF format.
This Blender manual is a side product of the Bforartists development. It needs a manual too. And the Blender manual is the base for the Bforartists manual.
It is not exactly split in sub pages like the original online manual. But it is split into over 390 single pdf files. The online manual has even more sub pages. I had once planned to have just one pdf per chapter. Which would have meant to have 17 pdf documents. But that didn’t turn out well. Too big and too hard to navigate then. So i ended in having the pdf files nearly split like the original html files. What is missing is most of the links. They did not survive the conversion.
Additionally it comes with the whole manual in ODT format too. Which makes the manual now editable for everybody. ODT is the format for the popular free office suites LibreOffice and OpenOffice.
Note that this manual comes as is. I will not change it anymore. The goal was to have a converted base for the Bforartists manual. Which is reached with this version.
Blender 2.76 PDF Manual, 76.3 Mb
Blender 2.76 Manual in ODT format , 198 Mb
Update 02-07-2016 – Reupload Version 2
Blender 2.76 Free Download
The original Blender manual was for a while under a wrong licensing type. It was unasked put under CC license. Which made this fix and reupload for this files necessary. Now the Blender 2.76 manual is back under OCL license.