When we started Studio 44, choosing Blender was not really a difficult decision. It was free. We could download it, open it, and start learning before we had earned anything from 3D.
There were hundreds of tutorials available on YouTube, and we did not need to spend money on software before we had even earned money from 3D. But after years of using Blender professionally, building a team around it, and creating our own production workflows, being free is no longer the main reason we use it.
Today, we use Blender because of what open-source software gives us: freedom. Freedom to modify our tools, automate repetitive work, train new artists without another software licence, and build our workflow around our business instead of building our business around software limitations.
My journey to Blender
Before Blender, I worked with SketchUp and 3ds Max. Both are capable tools, and both have played a huge role in architectural visualization. But I had problems with each.
SketchUp struggled with the increasingly large scenes I wanted to work with. 3ds Max was considerably more capable, but crashes were frustrating. Opening, saving, and closing large projects could also take significant time.
Then there was the cost. Software costs might not look enormous when you are an established studio, but they feel very different when you are a student or someone trying to start a business with almost no capital.
Blender removed that barrier. I could simply install it and learn. No subscription decision. No wondering whether I would earn enough from 3D to justify another licence. I could concentrate on learning how to create.
Free software matters more when you start hiring
Software cost becomes even more important when you move from freelancing to running a studio. A freelancer needs one workstation. A studio might need five. Then ten. Every per-user subscription gets multiplied by the size of your team.
When your business is young, that money has many competing uses. You can spend it on software licences, or you can spend it on better hardware, employees, training, and growing the company.
Using Blender allowed us to put more of our early resources into manpower and infrastructure instead of 3D software licences. It also makes training easier. If we want to teach a student Blender, they can install exactly the same software at home.
Open source is not just another word for free
This distinction is important. I am a big supporter of open-source software, but not simply because I do not want to pay for software. Studio 44 pays for software when it provides enough value. We have paid for tools such as Photoshop, Affinity, and Gigapixel.
And if Blender became paid software tomorrow, we would still pay for it. The value of open source is deeper than the price.
To me, open source means you have the freedom to understand and modify the tool you are building your business around. There are no hidden fees suddenly appearing because your workflow depends on a particular feature. Development is not solely driven by what investors believe will generate the most revenue.
Blender lets us change the tool instead of changing our workflow
This is probably the biggest reason I have stayed with Blender. Blender has an excellent Python API. That sounds like a feature primarily for programmers, but for an ArchViz studio it is much more important than most artists realize.
A huge amount of visualization work is not creative. It is repetitive: organizing client files, importing drawings, cleaning geometry, preparing scenes, configuring cameras, changing render settings, exporting files, naming things correctly, and checking whether something is missing.
Doing these things manually once is not a problem. Doing them thousands of times is. That is where automation starts becoming extremely valuable.
Python can automate the boring parts of ArchViz
Imagine onboarding a new project. A client sends a folder containing CAD drawings, reference images, PDFs, textures, and various other files. Instead of an artist manually going through everything, a Python script can organize those files, categorize them, and identify files that need attention.
Blender does not provide every CAD or production feature we want out of the box. But we can create our own add-ons and internal tools that clean data, store camera-specific render resolutions, or automate repeatable studio tasks. The software adapts to the studio.
AI makes Blender's Python API even more valuable
There used to be an obvious problem with everything I just described: you needed someone who knew how to program. That is changing quickly.
AI makes creating relatively simple Python tools and Blender add-ons much more accessible. An artist does not necessarily need to become a professional software developer to automate a repetitive part of the workflow.
If you can clearly explain, every time I do X, I then have to do Y and Z, you can increasingly use AI to help turn that process into a script or add-on. For a small ArchViz studio, that is a significant advantage.
Why we use Cycles
Our preference for Blender is not only about automation. We also genuinely like rendering with Cycles. Cycles gives us excellent raw performance and physically based rendering out of the box.
What I appreciate most is the amount of control available when you need it. Nodes such as Light Path, Geometry, and Object Info allow you to build materials and behaviours that go far beyond simply plugging textures into a shader.
Because the renderer is integrated directly into Blender, our modelling, shading, rendering, compositing, and automation workflows can live inside one application.
Not having to open Photoshop for everything matters
Blender is not just a modeller and renderer. It also has compositing capabilities. For many tasks, we do not need to render an image, save it, open another application, and perform another series of repetitive steps.
That does not mean Photoshop has no value. We still use external image tools when they are the better choice. The point is that our pipeline does not automatically depend on another application for every image.
Blender is fast where it matters to us
One thing I have always appreciated about Blender is how quickly we can get in and out of projects. Opening files is fast. Saving is fast. Closing is fast.
When you are working on projects throughout an entire day, software responsiveness matters more than benchmarks sometimes suggest. Waiting repeatedly for software to respond slowly becomes frustrating when you are doing it hundreds of times per week across a team.
Blender is not better at everything
Pretending Blender is perfect does not help anyone. Blender is a generalized 3D application developed for animation, VFX, modelling, rendering, compositing, product visualization, architectural visualization, and many other uses.
That makes it incredibly flexible, but it can also feel like a jack of all trades and master of none. There are areas where specialized or mature commercial applications can be stronger.
If your entire business depends on a workflow that another application handles dramatically better, use that application. Software loyalty should not become religion. The goal is to get the work done.
Hiring Blender artists is harder for us
We are based in Surat, Gujarat. In our local ArchViz market, 3ds Max with Corona or V-Ray is much more common than Blender. That means finding experienced Blender ArchViz artists is harder.
Instead of fighting that reality, we have adapted our hiring strategy. We often prefer fresh candidates and train them around our Blender workflow. Training takes time, but it lets us teach the workflow we actually use from the beginning.
Rapid development has helped us more than it has hurt us
Blender changes quickly. That can occasionally break things. Add-ons may stop working. APIs can change. A workflow that worked perfectly in one version may need modification in another.
But in our experience, the benefits have outweighed those problems. Texture caching, persistent rendering data, denoiser improvements, UI improvements, and ongoing hardware adaptation have all helped production.
There is also something unique about open-source software: if you have the technical ability, you can modify the source code yourself. Most studios will never need to do that, but knowing the possibility exists changes your relationship with the software.
The community is part of the product
One of my favourite things about Blender is not actually inside Blender. It is the community. When you are learning something, there is usually somebody willing to explain it. There are tutorials everywhere. Artists share techniques. Developers publish add-ons. People discuss bugs and workflows publicly.
Blender gave me access to professional 3D tools when I could not justify spending heavily on software. Years later, we are still benefiting from the work of people who contribute to that ecosystem.
That is one reason I think successful businesses using open-source tools should consider supporting the projects they depend on. If Blender helps your work, consider supporting the Blender Development Fund.
Why we also use LibreOffice and GIMP
Our preference for open source extends beyond Blender. We also use tools such as LibreOffice and GIMP where they make sense. But we do not force open-source software into every part of the business.
We are not trying to run a studio where everything must be open source. We are trying to avoid paying for software simply because that is what everybody else uses. Choose tools based on value, not ideology.
Why I recommend Blender to beginners in 2026
If someone asked me today which 3D application they should learn first for ArchViz, I would recommend Blender to most beginners. Not because it is free. That simply gets you through the door.
I recommend it because you can grow surprisingly far without leaving it. You can model, render, animate, composite, write Python, build add-ons, automate production, and increasingly use AI to help customize the software around the way you work.
You can download Blender today as a student and use essentially the same core application years later while running a commercial studio. There is not a financial wall waiting for you when your student licence expires. That is powerful.
But once you are experienced, do not be afraid to use another tool if it solves your problem better. The software is not the skill.
Open source gave us freedom to create
Ultimately, this is why open source matters to Studio 44. It allowed us to start with almost nothing. Then it allowed us to spend money on people instead of licences. It allowed us to teach students without asking them to buy expensive software.
It allowed us to automate repetitive parts of our workflow. And when Blender does not behave exactly how we want, it gives us the freedom to build our own solution.
When every experiment has a software cost attached to it, you naturally start asking whether it is worth paying for. With Blender, we can simply try. Some experiments fail. Some become useful. Some eventually become part of our production pipeline.
For a creative business, freedom to create without constantly thinking about the cost of the tool itself is one of the biggest advantages open-source software can provide.