Professional-grade 3D modeling, animation, rendering, and visual FX software used in films, TV, and games, featuring advanced tools, Bifrost effects, and a visual programming environment for intricate simulations.




The best VFX alternative to Blender is Autodesk Maya. It's not free, so if you're looking for a free alternative, you could try Natron or Vue. If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked more than 100 alternatives to Blender and 13 are VFX Software so hopefully you can find a suitable replacement. Other interesting VFX Software alternatives to Blender are Houdini, Autodesk Flame, LightWave and PopcornFX.
Professional-grade 3D modeling, animation, rendering, and visual FX software used in films, TV, and games, featuring advanced tools, Bifrost effects, and a visual programming environment for intricate simulations.




Natron is an open source, cross platform nodal compositing application. It is built around industry standard open source tech such as OpenFX, OpenEXR, OpenColorIO and OpenImageIO. The feature set includes realtime playback/RAM cache, multi-threaded rendering, 2d tracking...


It's not for Composing in 3D!
It does compositing too. If this isn't an alternative, you might want to take Nuke off as well

Most users think Natron is a great Blender alternative.
Houdini covers all the major areas of 3D production, including:



Create vast expanses of terrains, add trees, select the best point of view and render hyper-realistic images of your landscapes in moody atmospheres... in a few mouse clicks.




Vue does landscapes primarily

Some users think Vue is a great Blender alternative, some don't.
Autodesk Flame software is a powerful finishing and visual effects solution with an integrated environment that accelerates creative workflows.




LightWave 3D combines a state-of-the-art renderer with powerful, intuitive modeling, and animation tools. Tools that may cost extra in other professional 3D applications are part of the product package, including 999 free cross-platform render nodes, support for Windows and Mac...




A suite of tools dedicated to real-time visual effects creation, along with ready-to-run mainstream game engine integrations and a runtime simulation framework for custom integration.




Designed for video editors, Motion is a powerful motion graphics tool that makes it easy to create cinematic 2D and 3D titles, fluid transitions, and realistic effects in real time.




Motion is designed primarily for 2D and relatively simple 3D animation, whereas you can model and rig 3D characters in Blender.

EmberGen uses the full power of your GPU—so you can simulate and render volumetric phenomena in real-time for faster iterations than ever before. Utilize random seeds to generate new variations on the fly.

Action Pro is cutting-edge technology that lets you effortlessly create animated movement using familiar (mouse and joypad) and cutting-edge (Leap Motion) input devices.




Lightstream Solar is a new GPU-accelerated high-end compositor for VFX work.
The software provides a node and tree-based workflow, and offers the range of tools one would expect in an app of this type, including layer management tools, colour correction and grading, and addition.




Deep FX Studio is a general purpose 3D computer graphics application that runs on Windows and will be ported to Linux in the future. Tools anyone can use and master. Built from the ground up to be intuitive for artists who only want to focus on their art, and technical artists...



it does not build 3d models, it has no game design, natron is mostly use for videos, and it doesnt allow 3d models in the program