An easy Blender alternative for beginners
Blender is free, open-source 3D software that does nearly everything a film studio needs: modelling, sculpting, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering and video editing. That reach is why it is a lot to learn before a first model comes out the way you meant. The Forge, Jabbertoon's 3D builder, does far less on purpose: it builds characters and things from parts, in your browser, so a first build takes minutes, and the ideas it teaches are the ones Blender uses. When you outgrow it, your build opens in Blender.
How the Forge builds
Every build starts as one part, its spine. You grow parts off it in any direction, then shape each one: stretch it, turn it, round it, colour it, and say what it is made of. A part can be a box, a ball, a cylinder, a cone, a wedge or a capsule; a turned shape (a vase, a nose, a wheel); a cut-out from a flat outline (a fin, a letter); a lofted shape through cross-sections (a wing, a hull); a limb, or a bone. A build holds up to 90 parts, and a part placed "a pair on both sides" counts once. You see it from the side, the front and above, and all the way round.
There is no mesh of thousands of points to edit and no modifier stack to keep in order: a turned part or a cut-out has a handful of outline points, and each part stays a clean solid, so it prints, it draws, and it moves.
What you learn here that Blender uses too
| In the Forge | In Blender |
|---|---|
| a part grown off another part, which moves with it | an object parented to another (Object › Parent) |
| the joint a part turns about | the object's origin |
| a pair on both sides | the Mirror modifier |
| Repeat it (so many copies, each moved and turned a little more) | the Array modifier |
| Solid or a hole (a hole cuts what it overlaps) | the Boolean modifier, Difference |
| Turned (round outline) | the Screw modifier, or the Spin tool |
| Cut-out (flat outline) | a flat shape extruded |
| Lofted (through cross-sections) | Bridge Edge Loops between sections |
| a bone, and a body that bends on its joints | an armature and its bones |
| Made of (paint, metal, glass, wood and the rest) | a material |
So a student who has built a robot in the Forge already knows what a parent, an origin, a mirror and an array are when Blender asks.
It moves
A character you build is a cast member straight away: in the editor's Cartoon it walks, talks with lip sync, waves and jumps with ready-made moves, and you can make moves of your own from blocks. A part can move on its own too, a wheel that spins or a door that swings, while the rest of the build stands still.
Then on to Blender
Press ⬇ Export and pick glTF (.glb): each part is its own object in Blender, in its colour, at its real size (File › Import › glTF 2.0). Export it back from Blender with Include: Custom Properties ticked, and the Forge opens it again as the very build it was. A model from anywhere else comes in as parts you can reshape. The same build also goes to a 3D printer as STL or 3MF, onto paper as blueprints, and into Minecraft as blocks: see take your build out of the Forge.
Where Blender is the right tool
For sculpting a face by hand, a photoreal render with light that bounces, cloth and fluid that simulate, or a film's worth of animation on a professional rig, use Blender: the Forge does none of those. For a first character, a model to print, a robot for a cartoon, or a class that has an hour and a Chromebook, start in the Forge.
Build it with an AI
An AI assistant that can use tools can build in the Forge for you with the Jabbertoon tools, step by step, the same steps you would take, and hand you a link that opens the build. How to connect your AI