blender is one the most packed 3d package you can find on the internet, if you wanted you can make a full length cartoon movie from start to finish without ever living blender, but how would you do that, well thats the question we are going to talk about, lets look at all blender features you should know about.

lets start with the more exciting features and less known about before we jump to features like modeling and sculpting that you probably know already.

Video Editing

blender has always had a video editing workspace dedicated to video editing which has now become as powerful as dedicated suits like premier pro, with audio mixing, syncing, scrubbing, scenes, masks, effects, speed control, adjustment layers, transitions and more.

Motion Tracking:

most vfx shorts start with motion tracking, which is when you match the movement of your 3d camera to the movement of recorded footage, so that you can add 3d objects into the realworld, blender has a full fledged motion tracking system integrated in it, its quite powerful its only limitation is that there is less automation when tracking, if you want an automated solution try flaxtrax which is a blender addon built on top of blender motion tracking feature.

Chroma Keying

did you know blender can remove a greenscreen background, this is a feature of the compositor and its quite easy using about 3 to 4 nodes

Color correction

if you have a video and you want to do some color collection, blender has different color collection tools, like color balance, curves adjustment, hue and saturation, masks and previews like luma waveform, chroma vectorscope and histogram displays.

Proceduralism

over the last few years blender has become a procedural powerhouse thanks to geometry nodes, this has enabled small teams or individuals to create full cities with procedural generators like the city generator, animate large crowds using generators like procedural crowds, or create unique buildings that are fully textured with different details or create human characters in a procedural fashion with tools like human generator.

Fluid Simulation

when you want to create a realistic lake or river blender has a fluid simulation that lets you simulate any kind of liquid you want , you can create splashes, control fluids using curves, add bubbles, foam and spray and more details all built into blender, there also paid addons that use different solvers if you want more control and detail like flipfluids which is great for creating detailed fluids, Cell Fluids which makes rivers really well but its a 2.5d simulation, not very realistic but can be effective for alot of projects. Fluid Painter which is a geometry nodes tool used to paint fluid onto objects without actually simulating anything.

Vdbs and smoke sim

blender also comes with a smoke simulation system that can create fire explosions and more, it also supports vdbs which means you can use standalone applications like embergen and import the results into blender, in blender 4.2 eevee was rewritten and now it renders volumes faster and better which makes vdb libraries like True-Vdb even more valuable

cloth simulation

still on the topic of simulation, you have a complete cloth simulation system built into blender that can make simulating wind and cloth effects very easy from simple things like waving flags to complicated things like character clothes, character clothes can be difficult to make, thankfully there dedicated addons to help with that, starting with simply cloth which comes with its own cloth library and tools to make your own clothes and also divine cut a new tool for generating detailed clothes with starting templates.

soft body simulation

on top of the cloth simulation system, you have a soft body simulation system for simulating things like jelly, bouncing balls and more.

Rigid Body physics

the opposite of the soft body system is the rigid body system, which also comes built into blender, this solver simulates how gravity affects objects and how they collide with each other, its the foundation of a course i worked on with Grant Abbitt in the blender vfx course, where we model a building and destroy it and dust and other effects ontop of the simulation

Object Fracturing

if you want to show something breaking and falling apart, the rigid body system is the way to do it, but before you get to that stage, you need to fracture the object into small pieces to which the physics engine will be applied to, to do that blend comes with a fracture extension called cell fracture that can break things into small chunks in a directable fashion.

Particles System

while the fracturing extension is great for breaking things apart, if you need extra detail, the particle system provides a robust way to add additional pieces without refracturing the object, you can also use the particle system to instance a large amount of objects like grass, scattered rocks, buildings to create a city or create a flock of birds flying using the boids system thats part of it or how we used it to add splashes over ocean waves in the blender vfx course

Animation

when you want to create animation blender is nearly as good as maya here, it has all the necessary tools like character rigging, constraints, a pose editor, a non linear animation for independent movement, forward and inverse kinematic for fast poses and more. and there are several animation movies made in blender as proof, from the netflix series Maya and the Three, and Next gen another feature film on netflix made with blender

Rigging

before you animate, you have to rig your characters, blender comes with bones, and extensions like riggify and cloudrig to get you the best rigs in no time, there also addons like auto rig pro for more advanced quick rigging and rigicar for rigging vehicles that use physics for animation

Drivers

If you are creating advanced rigs you can use drivers, this is a feature of blender that lets you drive one parameter based on expressions or even other parameters in blender.

Constraints

like drivers, constraints can be used to change the behavior of a value depending on some rules, the main difference is that there is a list of already made constraints to choose from while you have to set up drivers your self. i teach about constraints in my latest course blender vfx if you are interested in that

Shape keys

when you want more expression out of your characters, blender gives you shape keys, this is quite usefull for lip syncing and add muscle deformation in characters

pbr workflow

if you want your renders to look realistic blender uses the standard pbr workflow that uses a set of texture maps to determine the roughness, metalness, bumpiness of any surface, these texture sets are everywhere on the internet but if you want them directly inside blender addons like extreme pbr nexus come with hundreds of them to help you mix and blend different pbr materials

UV Unwrapping

if you are adding textures to an object you can use object mapping or uv mapping, this is when you map a 2d texture onto a 3d object, blender has all the right tools for uv unwrapping an object

Texture Painting

If a pbr workflow gives you realistic look, texture painting gives you a stylized look for when you want to create, cartoons, anime and Non photorealistic renders, blender texture painting tools are enough for anything that has to do with texture painting but they can be complemented with addons like deep paint that can turn brush strokes into grease pencil illustrations.

vertex painting

with texture painting, you paint onto an image but blender also gives you the ability to paint directly to the vertex of a mesh, this saves time but the mesh has to be dense enough to capture more detail.

dynamic painting

apart from texture painting, there is also dynamic painting, with this feature instead of painting textures using brushes like texture painting or vertex painting, in dynamic painting you use other objects as brushes, where the two objects tourch paint is added, this can be great for creating effects like footprints, waves, collisions and more.

Baking Tools

In blender you have the ability to create procedural shaders, if you plan using objects with these shaders in other applications you have to bake them onto textures as other applications like unreal engine do not support blender materials or shaders.

Grease Pencil

grease pencil is like a completely independent application inside blender that can be used for 2d animation and 3d as well, it even has its own workspace and animations has been made with just grease pencil. its that good.

Cycles and eevee rendering

when it comes to outputing your final creation, blender comes with 2 main engines, cycles and eevee, cycles is what you use if you want high quality renders with accurate reflections, refractions, global illumination and shadows, while eevee is not as accurate as cycles its faster and can sometimes be a great alternative to cycles when the scene you are rendering does not have glass or alot of sharp reflections.

render layers

speaking of rendering, if you plan to composite in a different application like nuke, cycles and eevee can also export separate layers passes for reflections, shadows, ambient occlusion, depth and more, and you can also view these individual passes directly in the viewport.

Compositing

blender also comes with its own compositor that can take advantage of these render layers too, and more importantly, blender can show the results of the compositor directly in the viewport as well.

Freestyle Rendering

on top of cycles and eevee, you can add freestyle rendering, which an additional render effect that is added to the final image, to highlight or trace edges of objects, so that your render look more cartoonish, the effect is abit limited and sometimes can increase your render time, you can also opt for shader type freestyle materials from libraries like sylized shaders which has alot of different stylized materials you can add to your objects

HDRI & Lighting

lighting is used to convey the mood in a render, show, hide or reveal detail in a shot and blender has all the tools necessary to do this, you addons light light wrangler to enhance your lighting

Shader Level Displacement

if you are using a bump map in your material, blender lets you render more detail on the mesh using that map, you just have to make sure this is activated in your material settings, this works in both eevee and cycles.

Add-ons and extensions

when the built in tools are not enough for what you are doing, the blender python api, provides a way for you to create your own, there many addons that do various tasks faster and easier than the builtin one all because of this. if you want addons check out blendermarket for all available blender addons

Geometry nodes – modifiers

we have already looked at procedural tools that are made with geometry nodes, you can also use geometry nodes to create less procedural tools that work in edit mode of your mesh, like a tool that fractures a mesh into smaller pieces when you click on it.

Asset Libraries

when you create something you like in blender, blender gives you an easy way to reuse it, the blender asset browser is a way to save objects, materials, collections and other setups that can be used in different projects or shared among artists.

Curve tools

there is also curves, these can be used to trace logos, as path for objects to follow, used alot in geometry nodes, for rivers, roads, as hair in both stylized renders and realistic renders

Nurbs surfaces

though rarely used by artists nurb surfaces are another way to model objects especially things like cars that have curved surfaces

meta balls

Similarly meta balls are also another way to model objects in blender but they are limited in use cases thats why you wont see alot of artists using them.

Mesh modeling

A feature that every3d application must have, what sets blender apart from other 3d modeling packages is its extensive tools and key shortcuts that make mesh modeling fast and easy, features like knife project, inset tools, extrude tools, bevel tools and more.

Modifiers

ontop of an extensive suit of modeling tools blender has large collection of modifiers to help with morphing any mesh to any form of shape you want, some of these modifiers are standalone features them selves like the geometry nodes modifier, cloth modifier and more.

Sculpting

z-brush is a dedicated 3d package for sculpting starting around 38$ a month to 800 a year surprisingly everything that zbrush can do blender, though zbrush is still the industry standard and may have more features as a dedicated program for sculpting but you can get the same results using blender.

there probably more features we missed here but these are some of the most important ones