Blender Main Features:
Game engine
The game engine is fully integrated with the shading and rigging system, it features a very powerful visual logic programing system, python scripting capabilities, bullet physics and state of the art graphics.
Render baking
Blender's render pipeline supports rendering to UV texturemaps; ambient occlusion, normals, displacement, color, shadows and full render can be baked.
Map UV and ID Mask
Mesh objects with UV co-ordinates can be saved in a render pass, and used in the Compositor as input to remap textures. ID Mask node converts a number from an Object Index pass to an anti-aliased alpha mask.
Vertex Color Node
For node materials, the Geometry node contains a Vertex Color name field to access non active vertex color layers.
Sculpt Mode
Sculpt is a mode for editing Mesh objects. Unlike Edit Mode, the model's shape is manipulated with various brushes, rather than by editing individual vertices, edges, and faces.
Imaging
Advanced Imaging system featuring MultiLayer image read/write integrated in all editors and Flipbook playback for compositing, sequences or movie files.
3D object
Supports numerous 3D object formats including meatballs, vector fonts, polygon meshes, and more.
In the next few weeks, Blender will receive an update that will bring lots of new features. Among those features, you will find one that is shocking architectural visualization artists! I'm talking about Filmic.
What is Filmic?
In summary, it is a new profile to manage colors in Blender that will dramatically boost dynamic range. Meaning photo-realism with no need for an incredible amount of lights and settings. In most cases, only an environment texture will already give you outstanding results.
To get it in Blender 2.78 you have to download the profile and replace the contents of your colormanagement folder in Blender.
When using add-ons in Blender 2.79 that take advantage of the new data-block pointer properties, the resulting.blend files can't be opened in earlier versions of Blender. Attempting to open such.blend files in Blender 2.78c and earlier may crash. Some Interface Themes may need to be reloaded to work properly. Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline. Blender Foundation; Blender Institute. The basic (un-textured) Blender material is uniform across each face of an object (although the various pixels of each face of the object may appear differently because of lighting effects). However, different faces of the object may use different materials (see Multiple Materials). In Blender, materials can (optionally) have associated textures. When using add-ons in Blender 2.79 that take advantage of the new data-block pointer properties, the resulting.blend files can't be opened in earlier versions of Blender. Attempting to open such.blend files in Blender 2.78c and earlier may crash.
Blender 2.78
Now Filmic will come built in Blender 2.79, and you don't have to download separately. The place to find Filmic remains the same, at the Scene tab in the properties window. Go to the Color Management section and Render/View selector with Filmic there.
Blender 2.79
But, from my initial tests with Blender 2.79 test builds, something somehow different about that Filmic option.
Here is a quick comparison of results of an extremally simple scene using the same settings. First, a render of the scene in Blender 2.78 with the old sRGB. (Sun + Environmental texture)
Blender 2.79 Tutorial
Render 2.78 sRGB
And now using the 2.79 built in Filmic.
Blender 2.79 Filmic
What is wrong with that image? Take a look at the same scene using the custom Filmic profile in Blender 2.78.
Blender 2.78 Filmic
How To Get Blender 2.79
Notice how the light levels using the same settings are much better in Blender 2.78 with the custom Filmic.
Blender 2.79 Addons
The good news is that you can also replace the profile in Blender 2.79, just get the zip from the original repository and replace the contents of your colormanagement folder.