The first long-term support of the 3.x series is here!
Discover Blender 3.3 LTS

So this is great news. Blender has been a staple of Open Source software for as long as I can remember and you can basically do everything with it. It has a steep learning curve, so you need to put in some time and effort but it really is an amazing piece of software. See their blog-post on how Blender was used to create the effects of the recent Bollywood blockbuster “RRR”.

A gatekeeper for me was always GPU acceleration. I never really had a personal computer that is that powerful or in recent time even has had a dedicated GPU, but with Blender 3 they offer GPU acceleration using Apple’s Metal framework and this is a Gamechanger even if you are just on a M1 Macbook Air, as a I am.

So to dive right in I chose the now famous Blender donut tutorial series to practice my skills and oh boy this is fun. With all the scripting support it also is an incredible tool to do datavisualization and I can’t wait to spend more time with it.

As for donuts, I just find it amazing that I basically created this out of thin air. Here’s my take: