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, even video editing and game creation. Advanced users employ Blender’s API for Python scripting to customize the application and write specialized tools; often these are included in Blender’s future releases. Blender is well suited to individuals and small studios who benefit from its unified pipeline and responsive development process.
Tinkercad is a free, easy-to-use web app that equips the next generation of designers and engineers with the foundational skills for innovation: 3D design, electronics, and coding!
The NIH 3D Print Exchange provides models in formats that are readily compatible with 3D printers, and offers a unique set of tools to create and share 3D-printable models related to biomedical science.
Thingiverse is a website dedicated to the sharing of user-created digital design files. Providing primarily free, open-source hardware designs licensed under the GNU General Public License or Creative Commons licenses, the site allows contributors to select a user license type for the designs that they share.
This site may have the least number of 3D models available, it more than makes up in quality as STL files made available for free lets you fabricate landmark objects in the history of space exploration – like the Apollo 11 landing site, the Curiosity Rover or the Hubble Space Telescope. What makes this site really cool is that you also get to download models of spacesuits and rockets which had been deployed by America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
3DfindIT.com is the next dimension visual search engine that crawls billions of 3D CAD & BIM models from hundreds of manufacturer catalogs for architecture, mechanical and electrical engineering. The platform allows users to search for digital engineering data provided by manufacturers worldwide. 3DfindIT.com reduces search times and increases efficiency in engineering and construction with intuitive search functions.
Free software for converting DICOM files to .STL files
The development of 3D Slicer—including its numerous modules, extensions, datasets, pull requests, patches, issues reports, suggestions—is made possible by users, developers, contributors and commercial partners around the world. The National Institutes of Health(NIH) of the USA has been a major contributor through a variety of competitive grants and contracts.
