Abstract Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a preferred tool for individuals and companies. The advantages of FOSS are minimal expenses, multi-platform and community support, transparent privacy policies, no vendor-related limitations, etc. Blender is a FOSS computer graphics 3D and 2D editor. It offers functions such as modeling, animating, video editing, simulations, image processing, scripting, rendering, etc. It is widely used as a free alternative to existing commercial products. This comprehensive survey examines Blender and its features and explores its usage in research, academic, and industrial projects, based on hundreds of collected and referenced sources. A comparison of Blender with alternative proprietary tools was conducted in terms of rendering performance, popularity, support, and feature set. According to this survey, Blender can be used as an efficient tool in film industry for visual effects composition, for dataset production for scientific experiments or deep learning methods, for educational purposes as a 3D geometrical problems demonstration tool, for the design of industrial models prepared, for example, for 3D printing, usage in augmented or virtual reality applications, etc. More specialized features are available as community-developed add-ons. The main reason why Blender is not used more often is that many professionals are used to other software.

This paper proposes a novel approach for the low-error reconstruction of directional functions with spherical harmonics. We introduce a modified version of Spherical Gaussians with adaptive narrowness and amplitude to represent the input data in an intermediate form. This representation is then projected into spherical harmonics using a closed-form analytical solution. Because of the spectral properties of the proposed representation, the amount of ringing artifacts is reduced, and the overall precision of the reconstructed function is improved. The proposed method is more precise comparing to existing methods. The presented solution can be used in several graphical applications, as discussed in this paper. For example, the method is suitable for sparse models such as indirect illumination or reflectance functions.