Blender

Blender covers most of what game art needs before the engine: blockouts, hard-surface and organic modelling, retopology, UV layout, baking and animation. Its scripting API also makes it a tooling platform, which is why asset exporters and batch jobs are often written around it.

In practice it rarely stands alone. Pipelines combine it with Substance for materials, ZBrush for sculpting and Unreal or Unity for integration, and an artist is expected to move assets between them without losing scale, pivots or naming conventions.

For smaller teams the licence cost makes Blender the default; larger studios often run Maya or 3ds Max as the main package and still accept Blender work, so adverts frequently list several tools and mean fluency in one plus the willingness to switch.