Best 3D Modeling Software
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Compare the Top 3D Modeling Software as of December 2025
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What is 3D Modeling Software?
3D modeling software is designed to create, edit, and manipulate 3D models used in a wide range of industries such as gaming, film production, architecture, and product design. These tools allow users to create 3D representations of objects, environments, and characters by manipulating shapes, textures, and materials in a digital space. Features typically include modeling tools for mesh creation, sculpting, texturing, and rigging, as well as rendering capabilities to visualize the final design. 3D modeling software is essential for prototyping, visualizing concepts, and preparing models for applications such as 3D printing, virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR). Compare and read user reviews of the best 3D Modeling software currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.
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1
Unity
Unity Technologies
The leading platform for creating interactive, real-time content. Build 2D, 3D and VR games and apps at speed. From artist tools to live-ops, everything you need to bring your vision to life today. The complete solutions for professionals to create and operate. Create and operate amazing applications and immersive experiences with a complete solution for professionals across industries. Change up your splash screen. Or completely remove it. Gain greater insight into what’s happening in your game with real-time data on crashes, exceptions and user feedback. Minimize downtime with access to expert technical support when you encounter issues. Available as a separate purchase through a Unity sales representative. Unity Gaming Services: backend and LiveOps services trusted by world-class studios to support multiplayer and live games at any scale, with any engine or tech stack.Starting Price: $35.00/month -
2
Blender
Blender Foundation
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. Cycles is Blender’s built-in powerful unbiased path-tracer engine that offers stunning ultra-realistic rendering. Blender’s comprehensive array of modeling tools make creating, transforming and editing your models a breeze. VFX professionals say: “Probably the best tracker in the market”. Blender includes production ready camera and object tracking. Allowing you to import raw footage, track the footage, mask areas and see the camera movements live in your 3D scene. Eliminating the need to switch between programs. Thanks to the high quality rigging and animation tools, Blender is being used for numerous short films, advertisements, TV series and feature films now. -
3
Maya
Autodesk
Create expansive worlds, complex characters, and dazzling effects. Bring believable characters to life with engaging animation tools. Shape 3D objects and scenes with intuitive modeling tools in Maya® software. Create realistic effects—from explosions to cloth simulation. A new visual programming environment using dynamic solvers enables you to create blockbuster-worthy effects quickly. Build custom graphs using the Bifrost Graph Editor. Create stunning effects—from snow and sand to dust storms and explosions—with ready-to-use graphs. Render your most complex projects with Arnold. Arnold is built to manage complex characters, scenery, and lighting challenges. Arnold is integrated with Maya, so you can see high-quality previews and iterate changes quickly. Save time with Arnold’s artist-friendly UI and simple, intuitive controls. -
4
Ultimate Unwrap 3D
Ultimate Unwrap 3D
Ultimate Unwrap 3D is a standalone UV mapping software for unfolding and unwrapping 3D models. It includes an easy-to-use UV coordinate editor, a standard set of UV mapping projections such as planar, box, cylindrical, and spherical, as well as advanced UV mapping tools for those difficult to map areas on a model. The Pro version includes a full-featured set of additional UV mapping editing tools, such as straightening, aligning, packing, and seaming. It is ideal for artists, professionals, modellers, game developers, and hobbyists, and easy enough to use for all levels of computer users. Ultimate Unwrap 3D supports over 100 file formats, including FBX, DAE, ASE, DXF, LWO, OBJ, and DirectX. We support 3ds Max, Maya, SoftImage, Cinema 4D, Lightwave, Modo, Sketchup, and many more! Interactive seam picking mode. For marking seams in the 3D views. Repainting UVs for creating texture atlases from multiple textures. AutoTD UV islands. Scales UVs using the average texel density.Starting Price: $59.95 one-time payment -
5
Animation:Master
Hash
Whether you’re looking to create whole three dimensional worlds or have a two dimensional project in mind, Hash Animation:Master is the 3D software you need to design and render amazing imagery and animation from the comfort of your kitchen table! It has been proven to be one of the most easy to use, affordable and powerful 3D programs available. A:M is as advanced as it is easy to learn. Our provided text and video tutorials will guide you through the steps to not only become an A:M professional, but to jump-start your career in the 3D industry as an animator. A:M experts from around the world are always available to help beginners with tutorials and answers on the A:M Forums. Our community is one of the most helpful, knowledgeable and responsive anywhere. And if our users can’t help you, we surely can! -
6
VisualARQ
ASUNI
VisualARQ is a Flexible BIM solution powered by McNeel’s Rhinoceros 3D. VisualARQ enhances Rhino by adding powerful associative object styling and dynamic documentation tools which adapt to fit the professional’s workflow. VisualARQ allows you to with parametric architectural objects, produce 2D drawings from the 3D model, generate dynamic BIM objects driven by Grasshopper, automate many modeling tasks through the VisualARQ components built for Grasshopper, add custom data to geometry and list in schedules and finally deliver BIM models and collaborate with other tools through the IFC import/export capabilities.Starting Price: $95-795 one-time payment -
7
Avoyd
enkisoftware
Avoyd Voxel Editor and Renderer Create, import, export and render large voxel worlds. 3D art and rendering tool for voxel artists, map builders and game developers. Main Features: - Large scenes up to 256k voxels a side. - CPU and GPU path traced rendering. - Export to optimised mesh glTF and OBJ with physically-based materials parameters, and VOX. - Import MagicaVoxel VOX, Minecraft maps, heightmaps, palettes. - Orthographic projection with Isometric presets. - Up to 65k physically based materials. - Physically based light and atmosphereStarting Price: €15 one-time payment -
8
Modo
Foundry
3D modeling and rendering platform designed to help businesses create 3D drawings and configure UV mapping and texturing workflows. Modo’s powerful and flexible 3D modeling, animation, texturing and rendering toolset empowers artists to explore and develop ideas without jumping through technical hoops. Modo® is your starting point for creative exploration. With fast direct modeling, flexible procedural modeling, the award-winning MeshFusion Boolean toolset and built-in sculpting tools all working together, Modo’s modeling moxie is unmatched. Free yourself from creativity-killing constraints, with Modo’s intuitive, artist-friendly toolset. From roughing out volumes to creating highly detailed forms, Modo lets you focus on creation, not construction. Build your own kit of specialized tools by combining different operations, with Modo’s flexible tool assembly system. With Modo, every job you do becomes easier, as you continually develop new efficiencies.Starting Price: $65 per month -
9
Autodesk Flame
Autodesk
3D visual effects (VFX), finishing, and color grading software. Flame® 3D VFX and finishing software provides powerful tools for 3D compositing, visual effects, and editorial finishing. An integrated, creative environment means faster compositing, advanced graphics, color correction, and more. Extract mattes of the human body, head, and face with AI-powered tools for color adjustment, relighting, and digital cosmetic and beauty work. Isolate skies and salient objects quickly for grading and VFX jobs. Edit, composite, and color correct in one environment, without toggling between software. Create and iterate quickly for more productive client sessions. Tools for fast and interactive visual effects finishing and 3D compositing. A timeline-centric, fully compatible assistant station for Flame. A fully compatible creative assistant station for Flame in collaborative VFX workflows. Real-time color grading software for creative look development.Starting Price: $331.11 per month -
10
3ds Max
Autodesk
3ds Max offers a rich and flexible toolset to create premium designs with full artistic control. Create massive worlds in games. Visualize high-quality architectural renderings. Model finely detailed interiors and objects. Bring characters and features to life with animation and VFX. The built-in Arnold renderer provides a rich experience and can handle your more complex characters, scenes, and effects. Save time with centralized creative tools for interactive light mixing, color correction, and lens effects on the rendered image. Work faster with an artist-friendly user experience and intuitive controls. Iterate and produce high quality renders and variations faster. 3ds Max lets you scale your workflow with automation, allowing you to spend more time on creativity. Use 3ds Max as a compute engine to scale content production. Extend built-in workflows with accessible APIs.Starting Price: $215 per month -
11
LightWave 3D
NewTek
NewTek LightWave 3D® is designed for independent artists who desire control of their vision from start to finish. Affordable, complete, easy to learn and use, LightWave is well established as one of the leading 3D systems on the market. With the ability to model, animate and render stunningly realistic imagery and animation, LightWave allows you to create new worlds, build your brand and shatter expectations. LightWave 2020 refined and retooled. Don’t take our word for it — try LightWave 2020, unrestricted for yourself. Download and register to unlock a full-feature trial version of LightWave 2020 for Windows & Mac today. LightWave 2020 gives you the tools you need to deliver any project on time and on budget. Add the power and efficiency of LightWave 2020 to your pipeline today. And start creating with a stable, streamlined, effective workflow. Fresh. Fast. Easy. Proven.Starting Price: $995 -
12
V-Ray
Chaos
Chaos® V-Ray® is a 3D rendering plugin available for SketchUp, 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, Rhino, Revit, and more. It is widely used in architectural visualization, advertising, and visual effects for film and television. With V-Ray, artists and designers can explore and share their projects with real-time ray tracing and render high-quality visualizations. V-Ray has a large community of users and is recognized for its incredible versatility. V-Ray has been honored with a Sci-Tech Academy Award® and an Engineering Emmy Award® for bringing fully ray-traced photorealistic CGI to the film and television industries. For more information, please visit chaos.comStarting Price: $60 per month -
13
3DCoat
3DCoat
3DCoat is the one application that has all the tools you need to take your 3D idea from a block of digital clay all the way to a production ready, fully textured organic or hard surface model. Today 3DCoat is available to learn at 300+ Universities, colleges and schools worldwide. 3DCoat is one of the most advanced software applications for creating detailed 3D models. Where other applications in this market segment tend to specialize in one specific task, such as Digital Sculpting or Texture Painting, 3DCoat provides High-End capability across multiple tasks in an asset creation pipeline. These include Sculpting, Retopology, UV Editing , PBR Texture Painting and Rendering. So it can be called a 3D texturing software and 3D texture painting software and 3D sculpting program and Retopology software and UV mapping software and 3D rendering software all combined. In short, 3DCoat removes the need to purchase (and learn) multiple specialty software titles.Starting Price: $49 one-time payment -
14
iClone
Reallusion
iClone is the fastest real-time 3D animation software in the industry, helping you easily produce professional animations for films, previz, animation, video games, content development, education and art. Integrated with the latest real-time technologies, iClone simplifies the world of 3D Animation in a user-friendly production environment that blends character animation, scene design and cinematic storytelling; quickly turning your vision into a reality. Animate any character instantly with intuitive tools for face and body animation. Create facial animations with accurate lip-sync, puppet emotive expressions, muscle-based face key editing, and an unparalleled iPhone facial capture. Create realistic or stylized, animation-ready humanoid 3D characters in a short time. Powerful animation features get scenes moving thanks to ultimate creative control.Starting Price: $599 per license -
15
anima
AXYZ design
People and crowd animation software was developed specifically for architects and designers to add 3D animated characters to their projects quickly and easily. With anima®, 3D people become human beings. The new 4D Digital Humans are able to preserve every detail of the clothing and offer impressive facial animations. In addition, with the Ambient 3D characters you can populate the middle and front planes of a scene increasing the realism. anima® uses the same high-quality 3D people found in our metropoly® collections, so there’s no need to compromise on quality. Our actors are driven by real mocap data and a sophisticated AI engine with an automatic procedural motion to achieve super-realistic crowd animations. Add life to your Archviz or any other visualization project! anima® brings up a toolset to easily populate your still renderings and animation videos using our 3D Scanned Metropoly® Ready-Posed and Metropoly® Rigged 3D Human models.Starting Price: €279 one-time payment -
16
Sketchfab
Sketchfab
The best 3D viewer on the web. Manage your 3D assets. Distribute 3D & AR experiences. Collaborate with others. Showcase your work. Buy & sell 3D models. Market-leading 3D player for the web. Share and embed 3D models anywhere online. Interactive and configurable, VR and AR ready. Works with all operating systems, browsers and devices. Embeddable everywhere, for eCommerce, advertising and social media.Starting Price: $79 per month -
17
Cinema 4D
Maxon
3D computer animation, modeling, simulation, and rendering software. Cinema 4D Subscription Release 24 (S24) includes functionality to easily browse and obtain models, materials and other assets, and to intuitively place them within the scene. The release also includes key workflow enhancements and a sneak peek at the continued progress on the Scene Nodes and Scene Manager interfaces to the new core. Cinema 4D is a professional 3D modeling, animation, simulation and rendering software solution. Its fast, powerful, flexible and stable toolset make 3D workflows more accessible and efficient for design, motion graphics, VFX, AR/MR/VR, game development and all types of visualization professionals. Cinema 4D produces stunning results, whether working on your own or in a team. Cinema 4D is widely recognized as one of the easiest and most accessible 3D packages to learn and use. To soften that learning curve Maxon offers thousands of tutorials on Cineversity and hundreds of Quick Tips.Starting Price: $16.58 per month -
18
Geomagic Freeform
Oqton
3D design software combined with touch-based haptic devices that transforms traditional handcraftsmanship into organic, digital design for custom manufacturing. Create sculpted shapes, especially products that precisely fit the human body. Add aesthetic and functional details that are difficult or impossible in CAD. Ensure designs are ready for additive, subtractive, or formative manufacturing. Transition from handcrafting to digital design with an intuitive haptic interface. Geomagic® Freeform®—the industry’s most comprehensive, organic, hybrid design software on the market—enables you to solve complex, precision design and manufacturing challenges and easily address challenging tasks within existing scan-to-print or CAD-to manufacturing workflows. Geomagic Sculpt™ offers simple, fast organic design-to-3D print tools. Geomagic Freeform provides more tools for advanced design including a comprehensive design and sculpting toolset for sculpting. -
19
Realsoft 3D
Realsoft Graphics
Open design combined with a rich set of features has been the main strength of Realsoft 3D. Feature wise, Realsoft 3D challenges the most famous competitors and offers a better price/performance ratio. In some areas (e.g. SDS modelling, ray tracing), the product is the best on the market. Another major advantage is that the intelligent, context sensitive user interface is suitable for both novice users and skilled professionals. The program grows with and adapts to the skill level of the user. The program is used in different applications, for example by artists working in the advertising industry, architects, product designers, educational institutions, game industry and hobby users. As a versatile yet affordable product ($700), Realsoft 3D has quite a large group of potential users. Realsoft 3D is a powerful tool for making best quality photorealistic images, and there is a huge number of people who need images every day.Starting Price: $700 -
20
Daz 3D
Daz Productions
Founded in 2000, Daz 3D is a 3D modeling software and content company specializing in morphable, posable human models, two of which are the most widely used 3D figures worldwide (Victoria and Michael). Used by top brands and illustrators, Daz Studio gives amateurs and professional graphic artists a free, time saving tool to create and customize their creations. Daz is used in film, TV, animation, video games, web design, print illustrations and more. Download Daz Studio and explore our huge library of free and premium 3D content. Start building custom scenes and characters in seconds with our smart content library. Export beautiful photo-realistic images and animations with studio-class processing. Explore our huge library of free and premium 3D content, like characters, hair, creatures, vehicles, environments, and more. Build your own universe with Daz Studio, the free 3D software. Export beautiful photo-realistic images and animations with studio-class processing. -
21
Clara.io
Clara.io
Clara.io is a full-featured cloud-based 3D modeling, animation and rendering software tool that runs in your web browser. With Clara.io you can make complex 3D models, create beautiful photorealistic renderings, and share them without installing any software programs. This is the perfect Three.JS or Babylon.JS editor for creating and tweaking your web game content. Huge photorealistic material library. Easy advanced materials. Flexible lighting setups. Blazing speed. Simultaneous multi-user editing. Always on versioning. Per-user permissions. Review tools. Familiar UI. Responsive workflows. Undo/redo. Drag/drop. Context menus everywhere. Clara.io is the latest innovation from the trusted and experienced team at Exocortex. Exocortex's suite of products are trusted by hundreds of creative teams at studios around the world.Starting Price: $10 per month -
22
SOLIDWORKS Visualize
SOLIDWORKS
Turn your 3D CAD data into photo-quality images, animations, and interactive 3D content that bring your products to life. Quickly and easily create professional, photo-quality images, animations, and other interactive 3D content to get your products to market faster. SOLIDWORKS® Visualize allows you to leverage your 3D CAD data to create photo-quality content in the fastest and easiest way you can–from images to animations, interactive web content, and immersive Virtual Reality. Bring your products to life. SOLIDWORKS Visualize is the “camera” for your CAD data! SOLIDWORKS® products are easy to learn and use, and work together to help you design products better, faster, and more cost efficiently. A seat of SOLIDWORKS Visualize Standard is included with each seat of SOLIDWORKS Professional and Premium on active Subscription. SOLIDWORKS Visualization solutions enable you and your team to quickly transform new ideas into great products, beating your competition to the market. -
23
ZBrush
Pixologic
ZBrush is a digital sculpting and painting program that has revolutionized the 3D industry with its powerful features and intuitive workflows. Built within an elegant interface, ZBrush offers the world’s most advanced tools for today’s digital artists. With an arsenal of features that have been developed with usability in mind, ZBrush creates a user experience that feels incredibly natural while simultaneously inspiring the artist within. With the ability to sculpt up to a billion polygons, ZBrush allows you to create limited only by your imagination. Designed around a principle of circularity, the menus in ZBrush work together in a non-linear and mode-free method. This facilitates the interaction of 3D models, 2D images and 2.5D Pixols in new and unique ways. ZBrush gives you all of the tools needed to quickly sketch out a 2D or 3D concept and then take that idea all the way to completion. You can create realistic renders directly in ZBrush with lighting and atmospheric effects.Starting Price: $39.95 per month -
24
MotionBuilder
Autodesk
Capture, edit, and play back complex animations with MotionBuilder® 3D character animation software. Work in an interactive environment optimized to help you work faster and more efficiently without compromising creativity. Produce high-quality 3D character animations with prebuilt moves. Create realistic character movements using one of the industry's fastest animation tools. Fine-tune character animations with production-proven tools used to manipulate motion capture data. Included software development kit and FBX data exchange enable easy interoperability with other 3D applications. MotionBuilder software is available with a subscription only. We no longer sell perpetual licenses. Your MotionBuilder subscription gives you access to install and use the 3 previous versions. With a subscription to MotionBuilder software, you can install it on up to 3 computers or other devices.Starting Price: $1,950 per year -
25
metropoly
AXYZ design
Stunning photo-scanned 3D people models. Add life to your architectural visualization projects and renders with metropoly® 3d People Characters. Compatible with 3ds Max®, Maya®, Cinema 4D®, Blender®, Unreal Engine®, Lightwave®, SketchUp®, Rhino® and anima® with support for the best renderers in the industry. We work with passion combining technology and craftsmanship, a perfect union to obtain realistic 3D characters. Through the use of modern 3D photogrammetric scanning technologies and the craftwork of our group of artists, we strive to make Metropoly 3D People near to perfection. Our 3D human models are designed and optimized to offer the best performance during rendering, adding details where they are really needed. For our static models, we create meshes with about 40K polygons while the 3D characters for animation are retopologized to offer the best deformation during the animation and designed to be easily edited and modified.Starting Price: €19.90 one-time payment -
26
Bforartists
Bforartists
Bforartists is a complete, free and open source 3D suite to create 3D content. It offers you the full 3D art pipeline to create game graphics, prerendered movies and stills. From modeling, sculpting, texturing, rigging, animation, rendering, up to post processing. Bforartists stands for Be For Artists. A reminder to develop for the user, not the programmer. Bforartists is a fork of the popluar open source 3D software Blender. Developed by some 3D enthusiasts to make Blender even better. The primary goal of the Bforartists fork is to deliver a better graphical UI and a better usability. This means a complete switch in the usage philosophy. Away from the hotkey and speed centered usage. Towards a user friendly and intuitive graphical UI. Bforartists is fully compatible with the Blender files and addons. Every feature that works in Blender should also work in Bforartists. And we are always up to date with the newest Blender version. The toolset is the same. -
27
Placez
Horizon Business Services
Placez is visualization software for the next generation. Design the custom space you imagine – anytime, anywhere, with any number of users. Review the space in 2D or 3D renderings, or put yourself and your client there with the state-of-the-art Augmented Reality tool. Change the world around you – literally – with the touch of a finger. Placez gives you the power to turn your vision into reality. Handy tools let you place objects anywhere you want in a space. 2D and 3D views make it easy to showcase the overall layout and setup. And state-of-the-art Augmented Reality tools let you actually move through the finished space – even in an empty room! -
28
Character Generator
Autodesk
With powerful 3D design and animation tools, Character Generator offers artists a web-based laboratory to create fully rigged 3D characters for animation packages and game engines. Blend 2 source characters from a library to create your own unique 3D character. Customize and fine-tune your 3D character from a catalog of over 100 body types, outfits, hairstyles, and physical attributes in a few simple steps. Choose from a selection of character rigged models for use in animation packages and game engines. Display of the current skin selection and of paid offerings in the female and male catalogs. New character generator export options for Autodesk 3D products and for unity. You can now choose higher quality genetics and ancestors to customize, generate and download your characters for use in your Autodesk 3D software or in a game engine such as Unity by selecting a character preset from the 11 Premium character presets.Starting Price: $60 per user per year -
29
Houdini
SideFX
Houdini is built from the ground up to be a procedural system that empowers artists to work freely, create multiple iterations and rapidly share workflows with colleagues. In Houdini, every action is stored in a node. These nodes are then “wired” into networks which define a “recipe” that can be tweaked to refine the outcome then repeated to create similar yet unique results. The ability for nodes to be saved and to pass information, in the form of attributes, down the chain is what gives Houdini its procedural nature. While the nodes are what makes Houdini unique and give it power, there are lots of viewport and shelf tools that allow for artist-friendly viewport interactions. Behind the scenes, Houdini builds up the nodes and networks for you. Houdini lets artists explore different creative paths because it is easy to branch off a new node to explore alternative solutions. -
30
Cheetah3D
Cheetah3D
Cheetah3D is a powerful and easy to learn 3D modeling, rendering and animation software which was developed from the ground up for Mac. So jump right into the world of computer generated imaging, create 3D artwork for your next iPhone game or make your first animated character. With a full set of polygon, subdivision surface and spline modeling tools the artists can focus on creating, safe in the knowledge that Cheetah3D has a breadth of features for the task. Cheetah3D makes modeling in 3D a breeze for new and experienced users alike. Character rigging is part of the seamless animation system of Cheetah3D where just about every property of an object can be animated. Breathe life into a character for your next iPhone game or animate an architectural fly-through by the powerful animation system built into Cheetah3D. Cheetah3D smoothly integrates the industrial strength Bullet physics engine to simulate rigid body and soft body dynamics.Starting Price: $99
