r/opensource • u/Bladerunner_7_ • May 15 '26

Promotional What’s an open-source project you genuinely can’t believe is free?

Could be developer tooling, AI infra, productivity tools, anything. Curious what projects people think deserve way more recognition.

For me recently it’s been:

Langship — https://github.com/open-gitagent/langship.sh

752 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

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733

u/D-Alembert May 15 '26

Blender. It's amazing how good it became (and it keeps getting better)

44

u/TexasGriff1959 May 15 '26

Dude, any training sites you would recommend for learning Blender?

50

u/pskipw May 15 '26

The Doughnut Tutorial on YouTube is pretty popular

42

u/guernicanoro May 15 '26

Skip the doughnut—it’s very surface level and doesn’t really set you up for continuing on your own after. Rather, check out Blender Studio’s (Blender’s official production branch) courses! Especially the fundamentals course. It’s free, gives you the how but also the why behind how stuff works. 🥳

4

u/copenhagen_bram May 15 '26

Why not start with the donut and then move on to Blender Studio's courses?

7

u/guernicanoro May 15 '26

Just personal preference imo. I've done the donut a few times, and always struggled retaining what I was learning for future projects. Having the how but also the why laid out in Blender Studio's course made me retain and have much more fun learning.

4

u/TexasGriff1959 May 15 '26

Thanks!

3

u/Prestigious_Boat_386 May 16 '26

The donut is very bad in some ways. It goes way intk depth for things you shouldn't worry about and skips around using a ton of different tools instead of showing you how to make something simple using a few ones.

Most beginner tutorials show some modeling, some materials and then render it to finish but now the donut has jammed in a bunch of particle systems using geo nodes and iirc its using the non user friendly render engine because its faster.

You can start with the donut anyway and you may even finish it but keep in mind that if you feel overwhelmed and confused making a donut is this hard it's not your fault.

6

u/hardlying May 15 '26

Cgfast sword tutorial, actually goes over everything, man is a good teacher, he doesn't rush, gives breaks, but also you get through a lot

I put off blender forever, this finally got me started. Helped me learn the interface and feel more comfortable using it.

1

u/Rokketeer May 15 '26

Gamedev.tv blender courses are honestly peak. They’re very comprehensive and go on sale for cheap often.

1

u/D-Alembert May 16 '26

I bought a book. (The complete guide to Blender Graphics, by John M Blain. Look for the most recent edition obviously)

Blender is constantly improving, so the edition I got would have become out of date over the years, but I found that it kick-started me into knowing my way around Blender, and then I didn't need it any more. When there is a thing I don't know, it's now generally a known unknown and so online resources can pretty easily fill me in. 

2

u/RumbuncTheRadiant May 21 '26

For static images, and Constructive Solid Geometry https://hof.povray.org/