The Blender Community

Being freely available from the start, even while it was closed source, considerably helped Blender's adoption by the community. A large, stable, and active community of users has gathered around Blender since 1998. The community showed its support for Blender in 2002 when they helped raise €100,000 in seven weeks to enable Blender to go Open Source under the GNU GPL License.

Independent Sites

There are several independent websites such as forums, blogs, news, and tutorial sites dedicated to Blender.

One of the largest community forums is Blender Artists, where Blender users gather to show off their creations, get feedback, ask and offer help and, in general, discuss Blender.

Getting Support

Blender's community is one of its greatest features, so apart from this user manual, there are many different ways to get support from other users, such as Chat, Stack Exchange, and Reddit.

For studios and organizations there is Enterprise support, and for studios looking to add Blender to their pipeline, Blender Studio contains documentation and training material around this topic. If you think you have found an issue with Blender, please report a bug.

More details about support can be found on the support page.

Development

Being open source, Blender welcomes development from volunteers. Communication between developers is done mostly through three platforms:

If you are interested in helping develop Blender, see the Get Involved page.

Chat

For real-time discussion, we have chat.blender.org which uses Blender ID for authentication.

You can join these channels:

  • #general For general chat with the community.

  • #blender-coders For developers to discuss Blender development.

  • #python For support for developers using the Python API.

  • #docs For discussion related to Blender's documentation.