Best Free 3D Modeling Software

Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline. Cycles is Blender’s built-in powerful unbiased path-tracer engine that offers stunning ultra-realistic rendering. Blender’s comprehensive array of modeling tools make creating, transforming and editing your models a breeze. VFX professionals say: “Probably the best tracker in the market”. Blender includes production ready camera and object tracking. Allowing you to import raw footage, track the footage, mask areas and see the camera movements live in your 3D scene. Eliminating the need to switch between programs. Thanks to the high quality rigging and animation tools, Blender is being used for numerous short films, advertisements, TV series and feature films now.

With a workflow optimized for creativity, unparalleled fillets, sophisticated surface modeling, and the most advanced direct editing tools, Plasticity is the perfect choice for those who demand the best. Plus, with no subscriptions, you own your software. Try it free for 30 days and see the difference for yourself. Plasticity is the ultimate tool for creative professionals in the video game industry, product design, vehicle design, and beyond. Say goodbye to clunky CAD workflows designed for manufacturability. Plasticity offers all the power of NURBS modeling combined with the best workflow innovations from modern polygonal modeling software. This unique combination gives you the flexibility and creativity you need to bring your ideas to life. Plasticity's advanced geometry and fillet engine are second to none, thanks to Parasolid's best-in-class algorithms. With Plasticity, you can create the absolute best fillets, booleans, and offsets, and change them whenever you want.

SelfCAD is a 3D modeling for users of all levels. There is an online as well as downloadable versions for Windows and Mac. Most of the CAD programs available are either expensive or don’t generally provide all the necessary 3D modeling and printing tools. Some take months or years to learn and are meant for specific industries. SelfCAD has bridged this gap as it’s affordable, easy to learn and it targets all the industries. It has a simplified user interface too making it a perfect tool for novice users. SelfCAD is fully-featured including modeling, Sculpting, rendering, simple animations, and 3d print slicer, but the aggregate amount of tools is much less than any compatible software package because of its brilliant UX. The in-built slicer of SelfCAD is handy as it helps prepare the designs for printing without having to switch to another program. SelfCAD is very affordable. There are interactive tutorials available that helps one learn 3D modeling with much ease.

Wings 3D is an advanced subdivision modeler that is both powerful and easy to use. Originally inspired by Nendo and Mirai from Izware, Wings 3D has been developed since 2001, when Björn Gustavsson (bjorng) and Dan Gudmundsson (dgud) first started the project. Richard Jones (optigon) maintained Wings and coded many new features between 2006 and 2012. Wings 3D is currently maintained by Dan with the help of the great community. Wings 3D offers a wide range of modeling tools, a customizable interface, support for lights and materials, and a built-in AutoUV mapping facility. Wings 3D is written in Erlang, an open-source, functional programming language distributed by Ericsson. Wings 3D gets its name from the Winged Edge Data Structure (WEDS). This is the data structure used to store the adjacency relationships between edges, faces, and vertices in a Wings 3D model. Wings 3D is open source and completely free for use in both personal and commercial projects.

SuperSplat is the ultimate tool for editing and optimizing 3D Gaussian splats. Clean up your splats with powerful selection tools wrapped up in an easy-to-use interface. SuperSplat is built on the powerful PlayCanvas engine runtime and the PCUI front-end framework. SuperSplat provides a powerful and lightweight visual editing environment that runs in the browser. There is nothing to download and install. SuperSplat operates on the industry standard PLY file format. Use it with any engine you like. Powered by the PlayCanvas engine, SuperSplat can handle even the heaviest 3D Gaussian Splat scenes with ease. Easily select specific splats for deletion. Translate and rotate your scene. Save to PLY, compressed PLY, or SPLAT formats. 3D Gaussian splatting is an exciting new technique to create photorealistic 3D scenes from photogrammetry. However, a captured 3D Gaussian splat may sometimes require some editing.

Universal Scene Description (USD) is an open source framework developed by Pixar Animation Studios for the interchange of 3D graphics data across various digital content creation tools. USD provides a rich and powerful toolset for reading, writing, editing, and rapidly previewing 3D scene data. With many of its features geared towards performance and large-scale collaboration among many artists, USD is ideal for the complexities of the modern pipeline. One such feature is Hydra, a high-performance preview renderer capable of interactively displaying large data sets. USD supports a variety of file formats, including usda, usdc, and usdz (a zero-compression, unencrypted zip archive), facilitating flexibility in data representation and exchange. The framework also includes tools like usdedit, a script that converts any single USD-readable file into its .usda text equivalent for easy editing.

Art of Illusion is a free, open source 3D modelling and rendering studio. Many of its capabilities rival those found in commercial programs. Highlights include subdivision surface based modelling tools, skeleton based animation, and a graphical language for designing procedural textures and materials. The current version is 3.2.0, released January 13, 2021. This version is both stable and powerful enough to be used for serious, high end animation work. We now have an extensive documentation section. This includes the user manual, as well as a number of tutorials covering different aspects of the program. The interface is designed to be clean, easy to learn, and simple to use. Art of Illusion provides subdivision surface based modelling tools for creating smooth surfaces from control meshes of arbitrary shape and structure. A powerful set of deformation tools allow you to "sculpt" objects in a natural, intuitive way.

It is free software and available for Linux/UNIX, Windows and Mac OS X. Unlike most free software for creating 3D models (such as Blender) it does not focus on the artistic aspects of 3D modelling but instead on the CAD aspects. Thus it might be the application you are looking for when you are planning to create 3D models of machine parts but pretty sure is not what you are looking for when you are more interested in creating computer-animated movies. OpenSCAD is not an interactive modeller. Instead it is something like a 3D-compiler that reads in a script file that describes the object and renders the 3D model from this script file. This gives you (the designer) full control over the modelling process and enables you to easily change any step in the modelling process or make designs that are defined by configurable parameters.