The Blender Community

Being freely available from the start, even while closed source, helped considerably for 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 IRC and Stack Exchange.

There are also more official sources of support, such as Certified Trainers and the Blender Cloud. If you think you have found an issue with Blender, you can easily report a bug.

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

Development

Being open source, most of Blender’s development is done solely by volunteers. Communication between developers is done mostly through three platforms:

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

IRC Channels

For real-time discussion, there are some Blender IRC channels on the Freenode network. You can join these with your favorite IRC client:

  • #blender For getting answers from the community.
  • #blenderchat For general discussion or off topic chat.
  • #blendercoders For developers to discuss Blender development.
  • #blenderpython For support for developers using the Python API.
  • #gameblender For discussion on issues related to game creation with the GE.
  • #blenderwiki For discussion related to Blender’s documentation.

Note

If you do not have an IRC client, you can access IRC using webchat.

There also several more Blender-related channels not listed here (e.g. channels for speakers of a particular language). We recommend you search Freenode to see them all.