Blender 5.3 is currently in Alpha until September 30, 2026. See schedule.

Under development in main.

Animation & Rigging

Assets

Compositor

Core

Cycles

EEVEE & Viewport

Geometry Nodes

Grease Pencil

Modeling & UV

Motion Tracking

Physics

Pipeline & I/O

Python API

Rendering

Sculpt, Paint, Texture

User Interface

Video Sequencer

Virtual Reality

Compatibility

• gpu.types.GPUBatch.draw_instanced prefers to use gpu_InstanceIndex which has the base_instance baked in. This for better alignment how Metal/Vulkan internally works. (6f64632716)

Original source

Blender 5.2 LTS was released on July 14, 2026.

Check out out the final release notes on blender.org.

This release includes long-term support and will be maintained until July 2028, see the LTS page for a list of bugfixes included in the latest version.

Animation & Rigging

Assets

Compositor

Core

Cycles

EEVEE & Viewport

Geometry Nodes

Grease Pencil

Modeling & UV

Motion Tracking

Physics

Pipeline & I/O

Python API

Rendering

Sculpt, Paint, Texture

User Interface

Video Sequencer

Virtual Reality

Compatibility

• Evaluated meshes created from scratch in Geometry Nodes will no longer end up with the same name as the object's original mesh (5e1e4de9d9).
• The python API for paint.eraser_brush and paint.eraser_brush_asset_reference is removed as it is no longer used (8c22be8d89).
• The Python API for accessing Geometry Nodes modifier properties has changed. For more information, see the Python API release notes (1561c1ea4a).
• Similar to 5.1, asset files with Geometry Nodes tools must be re-saved to be used properly in 5.2 (1561c1ea4a).
• Socket identifiers for the Compare and Random Value node changed (3a5cd7862b).

Bugfixes

• Fixes for issues present in previous versions

Original source

The Long Roar Ahead

Node-powered physics, online asset libraries, and fierce new features throughout with 2 years of LTS updates.

Showcase Reel

Blender 5.2 LTS showcase reel featuring work by the Blender community.

Watch the Recap Video

Watch the Recap Video

New features overview by Jonathan Lampel and Wayne Dixon from CGCookie, Cartesian Caramel, Paul Caggegi

Blender 5.2 LTS splash artwork by Joanna Kobierska, featuring the now-extinct Panthera spelaea

Released July 14th, 2026

GEOMETRY NODES

Music to your Nodes

Imagine driving your nodes with imported audio files, how does that sound?

The Sample Sound Frequencies node, coupled with the new Sound socket, brings audio-reactive animations and simulations to Geometry Nodes. Sound files can be loaded directly into the node tree. To hear them during playback, add them to the Video Sequencer as well, and set Playback Sync to “Sync to Audio”.

Sample Sound Frequencies node.

Download Demo File

GEOMETRY NODES

Bevel and be well

Bevel and be well

A new node enters the chat: Mesh Bevel.
The long awaited power of detailed procedural control over the edges or vertices.

Physics: Solved

Physics: Solved

Reimagined, node based: Blender 5.2. LTS introduces a brand new procedural approach to physics for hair and cloth simulations.
The power behind experimental node-based physics lies within the new built-in XPBD Solver node.
While built-in assets contain use-case specific declarative systems around it, advanced users can customize the simulations further. Adapt existing node groups by editing constraints as needed or create a new simulation system from scratch.

What the community is creating with node-based physics

Bundle Up

Blender 5.0 introduced the concept of bundles, which can now be attached to geometry to carry arbitrary data across modifier and object boundaries.
Use new Get Geometry Bundle and Set Geometry bundle nodes to unlock new workflows and possibilities.

Set and Get Geometry Bundle nodes.

More Geometry Nodes

Lists

• New core data type that allows storing a sequence of arbitrary length (e.g. numbers or strings). Lots of new nodes were added to provide control.
• Create lists through Field to List and Closure to List nodes.
• Access lists with List Length and Get List Item nodes.
• Modify lists with classic Math nodes as well as new Filter List and Sort List nodes.

Attributes

• The Capture Attribute node now supports selection.
• The new Rename Attribute node renames attributes with a specific prefix.
• The Get Attribute Names node outputs a list of the names of attributes in a geometry, optionally filtered by domain and data type.
• The new Transfer Attributes node can transfer an arbitrary number of attributes from one geometry to another.
• Attributes can now be stored as 4D float vectors (note that Geometry Nodes currently only operate on 3D vectors).

Strings

• Geometry Nodes now support String fields.
• The Find in String node can now find the first occurrence from the end.
• Remove specific characters at the start or end of a string with the new Trim String node.
• Reverse the character order in a string with the new Reverse String.
• Switch between upper and lower case through the new Set String Case.
• String and String to Value Baseinput.
• Split text into a list based on a delimiter with new Split String node.

Empty Objects

• Geometry nodes modifiers can be now applied to empties. Recommended use: custom effectors for simulations, procedural effects that don’t require original geometry.

Curves

• You can now access built-in attributes to control the computation of the final curve with the new Set NURBS Order and Set NURBS Weight nodes.

Node Tools

• Node tools inputs are remembered between operator invocations.
• Node tool inputs can now be assigned in Python.

Performance

• Internal fields pre-evaluation deduplication.
• Face corner evaluation is now avoided in some sampling nodes.
• Preferences: configure a new call stack depth limit for Geometry Nodes.

Other

• New in: Collection Children node for accessing all the Child Objects and Collections of a Collection as a list.
• New in: Principal Component Analysis nodes.
• 3 new building block nodes associated with Merge by Distance for expanded control over merging.
• Node group inputs: new Scene Frame default input type.
• Object sockets can now have Self Object as a default input mode.
• Access the internal attribute which tells instances what geometry to instance with the new Instance Reference node.
• Extract a single component of a geometry or edit it in a new simpler way with the Get Geometry Component node.
• Closures can now be called recursively.
• Display data-block name in Viewer Node.
• Data-blocks sockets can now be compared to each other and to None.
• Bone Info: New “Exists” output.

CYCLES

Cached In

On scenes with many image textures, the new Texture Cache significantly reduces memory usage and startup time by automatically generating smaller, optimized texture files that load only the tiles and resolutions needed for rendering.

Easy Savings

One toggle, loads of memory savings.
Under Performance → Texture Cache, enable Auto Generate or click Generate. A corresponding .tx file will be generated for each image and automatically updated whenever the image file is modified.
Memory savings and performance improvements are highly scene-dependent. Using Texture Cache comes at the cost of a small rendering performance impact and increased disk space usage.

CYCLES & EEVEE

Paper-thin wall

Render physically accurate thin materials such as paper, leaves, and window sheets with the new Thin Wall mode in the Principled BSDF node.
When Thin Wall is enabled, the surface is treated as a slab with its layers mirrored around the base, and the thickness is assumed to be zero.
This new mode provides a more accurate approximation of thin transparent and translucent materials, combining reflection and transmission for thin glass surfaces, and diffuse and translucent scattering for thin subsurface materials.

COLOR MANAGEMENT

Awesome in Space

Organized color spaces into menus, adding new input color spaces for Apple, ARRI, Blackmagic Design, Canon, and Sony cameras, as well as support for Adobe RGB, common gamma values, and wide gamut textures.

More Cycles & Rendering

Cycles

• Added: negative anisotropy support for Subsurface BSDF and Principled BSDF’s Subsurface component.
• The Random Walk radius scaling and anisotropy to albedo mapping adjustments for matching other renderers better.
• Added: Cast Shadows options for World.
• Geometry memory usage optimization and improved sync performance.
• Raycast Node: Access to custom attributes at intersection point.

Rendering

• New: disable option for render output saving.
• New: easy copy to selection for light/shadow linking.
• Shader nodes: new Time Node, behaves similar to its Geometry Nodes version.

EEVEE

Eevolved

Blender 5.2 LTS is a major release for EEVEE, addressing long-standing usability issues from the transition to the EEVEE Next project architecture.

What’s New

• 2x speed-up in instance-heavy scenes
• Reduced banding using dithering
• Removed limit of 8 attributes per material
• Support for Normal Map Base
• Added Raycast visibility toggle
• Added 1.5GB and 2GB Shadow Pool sizes
• Added Camera visibility for lights
• Plane Light Probes now support Blended materials and Shader to RGB
• Improved consistency rendering across platforms
• Added Anisotropic Filtering

Behind the Screen

The new Backface option under Screen Tracing controls how rays that intersect the back faces of visible geometry are handled.
When enabled, intersections with back faces are treated as valid hits instead of misses.
This can reduce light leaking when using screen-space global illumination, and lets you fine-tune the appearance of global illumination. It affects both Screen Space GI and Fast GI Approximation.

What Got Better

• Screen Space Raytracing overhaul
• Principled BSDF sheen accounts for Coat normal
• Critical Fast GI issues fixed
• Shadow visibility fixes
• Depth of Field bokeh fixes
• Shadow artifacts fixes
• Faster and less noisy Fast GI
• Fixdd light culling at shallow FoV angles
• Light render passes consistency with Cycles
• Motion blur fixes
• Volume shader compilation fixes
• Improved Refraction BSDF light evaluation
• Improved Vector Transform normals on non-uniform scale objects
• Mix node consistency with Cycles
• Subsurface Scattering indirect lighting fixes

ASSETS ♥ ONLINE

Essentials On Demand

Dozens of new parametric materials, compositing effects, HDR world backgrounds, Geometry Nodes setups, and many more assets have been added to the Essentials library.
The best part? Blender isn’t any larger. These new assets are hosted online, ready for download whenever you need them.

Make Them Yours

Watch this demo on customizing online assets by Simon from Blender Studio

Host Your Own

Need more? Host your own or add your favorite creator’s online asset libraries.
Smart indexing makes browsing thousands of assets a breeze.
Keep your assets up to date with a single click.

More in Assets

• New Asset Libraries tab in Preferences
• Per-asset Import Method
• Added “All Libraries” and “Essentials” to the Asset Libraries list in Preferences
• Organized built-in catalogs
• Better handle deleted libraries in asset shelves

COMPOSITOR

New nodes, unlimited possibilities.

Do more in the Compositor with six new socket types supported: Matrix, Rotation, String, Object, Font, and Integer Vector.
Plus 35 new nodes all-around, from string manipulation to , many of which will already be familiar to Geometry Nodes users.

Instant Looks

Whether you’re after a realistic filmic finish or a hand-painted watercolor or oil painting style, the new compositing assets provide a quick starting point for a wide range of looks.
Additionally, you’ll find new utility node groups that can be used as building blocks or incorporated into your own setups.

• 3D to Screen Space: transform 3D coordinates from world to normalized camera space. The inverse is available as Screen to 3D Space. Use it, for example, to drive the Sun Beams position with a 3D object.
• Transform and Project: lower level generalised variation of 3D to Screen Space that inputs from Transform and Projection to compute coordinates.
• Project with Depth: transforms 2D coordinates with their corresponding depth into a 3D vector.

Gizmos Go Further

Compositor gizmos now support auto keying.
Transforming a gizmo will automatically insert keyframes, providing a direct way to animate compositing setups from the backdrop or the Image Editor, which now supports gizmos too!
As for the viewer gizmo, it now follows the image display offset, so handles stay aligned with the backdrop as you pan and zoom.

MORE IN COMPOSITOR

Performance & Quality

• Much more responsive interactive compositor.
• Switch nodes with a fixed condition (unconnected or directly connected to Group Input) now use lazy evaluation, saving execution time.
• The Distance Threshold mode of the Dilate/Erode node is now faster for relatively large sizes, with execution time independent of the size or inset inputs.
• The Group Output node now displays the total execution time of the node tree.
• Anisotropic sampling now works with Transform nodes and can be used for higher quality scaling down. Previously, it silently used Bi-Cubic sampling.

Changes

• The mask rasterizer now uses “Delaunay” tessellator by default providing robust support for overlapping regions.
• The interactive compositor now supports animation playback.
• The interactive compositor runs only when needed: fewer redundant executions, correct updates for referenced scene data, and no blocking from unrelated undo.

Additions

• File Extension checkbox in File Output node independent of scene render settings ‘File Extension’ checkbox.
• EEVEE only: the depth of Grease Pencil objects reflection in the viewport compositor depth pass.
• Blank Image node that returns a new image of a given size and constant color.
• Integer Vector sockets are now supported and used by default where possible.
• New Frame input in the Stabilize 2D node.
• Levels node got Minimum and Maximum outputs.
• Support for Object sockets and Active Camera, Camera Info, Input Object, Object Info nodes from Geometry nodes.
• Objects can be now dragged and dropped from the outliner to the node editor.
• The Node Editor now displays a render region when the backdrop is enabled.
• Socket value inspection support.
• Sockets representing pixel values now show pixel units.
• New masks can now be directly created from the Mask node.
• Support for Default Input Types.

It’s a keeper.

The LTS in Blender 5.2 LTS stands for “long-term support”, meaning it will get fixes for up to two years, until July 2028.

GREASE PENCIL

Fill Good Ink.

Welcome the new Grease Pencil Delaunay fill algorithm. It creates exact geometry from boundary strokes, with automatic gap detection, inverse filling, zoom-independent results, and much faster performance.

Ready. Set. Go Random.

Dots and Squares line materials now feature Placement settings to control the distribution of shapes along a stroke.
Strokes are now generated at render time instead of as extra geometry, significantly improving performance compared to subdividing strokes with the modifier.

Even more Grease Pencil

• Move to Layer operator now shows layers groups matching the layer tree structure
• Vertex Brush got blend modes support
• UI updates (icons) for Vertex Paint mode’s toolbar
• Shift + L now deselects strokes that are completely selected
• New Draw Tool settings for picking a curve type
• Eraser now uses the last activated eraser brush
• New Fill Strokes option lets generated strokes to carry fill material
• New Scene Units toggle in the SVG importer for scale the import in the scene units
• PDF and SVG exporters now support corner types export

ANIMATION

Loop Mood

Introducing Playback Loop modes!

• Infinite
• Stop at End Frame
• Stop at Start Frame
• Restore Frame
• Bounce

MORE ANIMATION & RIGGING

Graph Editor

• Improved UI feedback when using Smooth and Cycles F-Curves modifiers
• Batch delete F-Curve modifiers (All, First, by Type)
• Ctrl+Click on the channel visibility setting in Graph Editor now isolates that channel
• Local View to isolate selected F-Curves.
• Normalize button click in the Graph Editor now performs a normalization even if Auto Normalization is disabled

Playback

• New: Allow Preroll option in the Playback popover for playing back frames that are before the defined playback start frame.
• New: screen.animation_pause operator that always pauses playback.

Pose Library

• Blender auto corrects rotation mode mismatches when a pose is applied. Closest Euler for quaternion poses, XYZ assumed for Euler-to-quaternion, unchanged when modes already match.

Workflow & Rigging

• In-Between tools now available in Object mode.
• Copy Constraints added to Link/Transfer Data menu (Ctrl+L).
• Auto IK reverse behaviour now works with non-connected parent bones.
• New in Dope Sheet: an operator to select keys by type (Select → Select by Type)
• New operator in Armature Edit mode: use Duplicate and Rename to duplicate selected bones and perform a search/replace on the name.
• Only Insert Available user preference is on by default.
• Motion paths no longer update on the current frame during auto-keyed transforms.
• New Head/Tail slider for adjusting position along a bone when using Bone parenting.
• Additional Space, Align, Length, and Deform options in the redo panel for adding bones.
• New operator for selecting markers left or right of the playhead with [ and ] hotkeys.

Fixes

• In Pose Mode, parent/child bone selection with hotkeys now works on all selected bones instead of just the active.
• Mirror bones no longer ignore transform lock settings.
• The In-Between tools now work with X-mirror in Pose Mode.
• Correct motion paths display when “Bake to Active Camera” is used with animated camera properties like Focal Length.

EXPAND

YOUR BLENDER

The Blender Extensions platform keeps growing, with over 1100 free add-ons and themes to customize your workflows.
You can also share your own add-ons and themes!

MODELNG

Stay In The Loop

To Circle, Space Edge Loops Evenly and Flatten operators from the popular Loop Tools add-on are now available as native operators.
Rewritten from scratch in C++ for improved performance, while also fixing several corner-case issues.

MORE IN MODELING

• Support for snapping to Lattice object
• Interpolate custom vertex data when merging
• Select through back-face culled faces
• Improved rotation alignment option in Array modifier
• 3D Text: Fixed placement on marks (e.g. accents) over their base characters

MORE IN UV EDITING

• Added Base Snap support
• Delimit seam, sharp in material in Select Linked
• Axis options in Copy Mirrored UV coordinates
• New Select by Winding operator
• Island support for select overlap
• New Original bounding box unwrapping option

Get the artwork

Blender splash artwork source files are available for you to play with!

SCULPT

Not So Primitive

Sculpt mode expands its toolkit: drop primitives straight into sculpts with the Add Primitive tool.
Insert Cubes, Cones, Cylinders, UV and Icon Spheres while in Sculpt mode.

Scene! Project!

Wrap surfaces onto nearby geometry with the new Scene Project brush, and keep painted color intact through repeated voxel remeshing with a smoother color workflow along the way.

See the new Scene Project brush in action in this live demo by Daniel Bystedt.

The voxel remesher now interpolates vertex and corner attributes, instead of taking the value of the nearest point in the original mesh.
This update provides better preservation of vertex painted meshes after repeated remeshing.

EVEN MORE SCULPT & PAINT

Sculpt

• The Color Filter tool in Fill Mode now uses the scene “unified” colors for its operations.
• Extra user confirmation for entering Dyntopo is now removed.

Paint

• Vertex and Weight Paint received 3D brush cursor support.
• Autosave is now extended to Texture Paint.

VIDEO SEQUENCER

STACK, STYLE, SCOPE

The Video Sequencer mastering kit gets real in 5.2 LTS: share compositor effects as modifier assets, style titles and toggle modifiers per preview or render. All of that and more plus grading with HDR scopes.

COMPOSITOR + VSE

A new Compositor effect strip runs compositor node trees directly on the timeline with zero, one, or two inputs, plus an effect fader on the input group.
Strip modifiers now expose inputs in the panel, driven by the node group interface like Geometry Nodes. Save compositor node trees as Strip Modifier assets to add them from the Add Modifier menu later. In the modifier extras menu, you can hide the node group selector so shared assets feel like built-in modifiers.
Last but not least: modifiers and effects can now run on the GPU, a real solution needed for heavier graphs and large blurs.

Write in Style

Text strips now support style presets.
Font, outline, shadows, layout, all settings in the Style panel are stored.

Three presets come built-in:

• Subtitle: classic movie subtitles.
• Main Title: big, centered text.
• Corner Title: smaller titles in the bottom-left corner.

Make Space

Line Spacing can now be adjusted in text strips relative to the font height, or in absolute pixels.

Now you see me, now you don’t.

Strip modifiers now have a preview visibility toggle just like object modifiers, so you can cut heavy processing from playback without touching the final export.
This also means that cached frames are kept in memory after rendering, making the next preview faster with the same result.

PERFORMANCE BOOSTS

• Footage and compositor results now convert to sequencer color space on demand.
• Compositor modifiers detect fully opaque results and use a faster render path instead of always assuming transparency.
• Mask inputs render faster, especially in compositor strip modifiers.

THERE’S EVEN MORE SEQUENCER

Timeline & Scene

• Stepping back a few frames while editing now feels much faster as Prefetch now loads five frames before the playhead.
• Timeline Strip thumbnails at start/end of strip are visible by default and also can be shown across the whole strip.
• Scene strips have a view layer selector, initially set to the scene’s default view layer.
• New override workbench world settings for tweaking background color for all scene strips at once.
• The Add menu shows “No other scenes” under Scene Strip when only the Edit scene exists in the file.

Strip Modifiers

• Extras menu on strip modifiers similar to object modifiers: duplicate, copy to selected strips, move to first/last in the stack.
• Linear Modifiers strip option was removed.

Python API

• New collection strip property .connections returns all strips connected to a given strip.
• strips.new_movie and strips.new_sound accept an optional stream parameter to pick the video/audio stream index.
• Removed strip property .use_linear_modifiers.

USER INTERFACE

DETAILS MATTER

Long-term support comes with a long list of small UI improvements that make a huge difference for those who blend on daily basis.

Do a Quick Flip!

Need portrait instead of landscape? Right-click Resolution X or Resolution Y and use new Swap Dimensions operator to quickly flip render dimensions.

OUTLINER

Active Focus

Turn on Scroll to Active in the Outliner to keep focus on the active object.
Elements inside collapsed Collections, and children of collapsed parents, are ignored in order to keep your Outliner tidy.

Cozy Sidebar

Fit more on your sidebar!
Compact mode turns the sidebar tabs into squares fitting the first two letters of the name, first two letters of each word, or even an icon.
Similar to bl_category for the panel name, define bl_icon and the ID of your icon.
Additionally, you can now click-drag to switch the active tab, and the sidebar is always visible even with a single tab.

PLUS ALL THESE USER INTERFACE IMPROVEMENTS

General

• New Preference: Save Modified Images prompt
• With right-click selection, File and Asset Browsers still open a context menu when right-clicking files/assets.
• When resizing areas, aligned edges no longer move together by default: hold Shift to move them as a group.
• When Developer Extras is enabled, the property’s icon ID is shown in the tooltip.
• Circle/Lasso Select order is consistent across editors.
• Frame the active element with Mouse Button 4 by default (alongside Numpad dot/comma).

Tree View

• Auto-scroll the list when the mouse is near the edges during drag-and-drop.
• Invert sorting for root and nested list items.
• Invert the search filter to show items that don’t match.
• Navigate Tree View and Asset Shelf grid view with arrow keys.
• Numpad period brings the active item into view (tree and grid).

Widgets and Icons

• New text-box widget for multi-line text input.
• New “link” widget type allows to style buttons as links (blue, underline, or custom via theme)
• Pan menus and popovers with the middle mouse button, just like in other Blender areas.
• Color widgets now allow direct paste of hex values.
• Sub-panels inside popovers can be collapsed.
• Number widgets: the unit is no longer part of the selected text, a unit hint appears after the value instead.
• New icons: FILTER_FILLED, DOWNLOAD, DOWNLOAD_DONE, PACKAGE_INDIRECT.
• Set Parent To menu shows icons for data/object type

Node Editor

• Make Group operator avoids type conversion on multi-connected inputs and duplicate output sockets.
• Ungroup operator adds proxy input and converter nodes so behavior stays the same after ungrouping.
• New Implicit Conversion nodes for fixed data-type conversion.
• New constant input nodes for Menu sockets and Font data-blocks in all node editors.
• Shader Editor welcomed Boolean, Integer, and Vector input nodes.
• Vector input nodes support 2D and 4D vectors.
• Hold Alt to affect all selected tree interface items.
• Multiple nodes can be now resized at once.
• More renaming directly inside nodes.
• Add dynamic sockets directly on nodes.
• String input nodes update evaluation on text edit.
• Float, Integer, Vector, and Integer Vector sockets now support Pixel subtype.
• Node Wrangler merge supports Integer Math nodes.
• Linked node groups moved to a submenu in the Add menu; indirectly linked groups hidden.
• Image drop into the World shading editor now creates an Environment Texture node instead of a regular Texture node.
• Searchable AOVs in the AOV Output node.

Other Editors

• 3D Viewport: cameras now have gizmo for orthographic scale adjustment.
• 3D Viewport: Brush popover Advanced section is transformed into collapsible sub-panel.
• Image Editor: UV Grid overlay options are now visible in all modes.
• Outliner: individual shape keys display.
• Outliner: filter panel is reorganized with sub-panels (the icon is removed).
• Animation: improved readability of Mirror menu for keys.

Preferences and Platforms

• Theme Editor: color, text style, and UI panels reorganization.
• After disabling Allow Online Access, choose to continue offline or allow internet access again.
• Linux (Wayland): key shortcuts work with non-Latin layouts when a Latin fallback layout (A–Z) is available.
• macOS 26+: new Liquid Glass application icon.

VIRTUAL REALITY

Great Scout

Jump straight into your 3D scene with Location Scouting!
Block camera vantage points and assess camera properties in VR with full 3D environment immersion.

Full Control

The VR Controller default bindings deadzone threshold was adjusted to provide a smoother user experience.

I/O

Alembic

• Import support for object visibility from Alembic archives, including animated visibility as F-Curves.
• Animated camera data now imports as F-Curves.
• Subdivision meshes keep their original coordinates on import.
• Subdivision meshes rebuild correctly when Alembic changes their structure between frames.

OpenUSD

• Color space support: import converts colors to the .blend working space; export tags prims and image textures with their color space.
• New export option to control how often USD data is flushed to disk and reduce peak memory usage on large exports.

Images

• OpenEXR: Faster writing of half-precision (FP16) EXRs.

Video & Audio Output

• Stereoscopic metadata is written to exported video for correct playback in video players.
• Panoramic camera metadata export support for full equirectangular cameras.

STL

• New option to decide which evaluation (Viewport/Render) will be used in export.

glTF: New in Import/Export

• Point Cloud support.
• Meshopt compression via EXT_meshopt_compression and KHR_meshopt_compression.
• Iridescence and dispersion materials via KHR_materials_iridescence and KHR_materials_dispersion.
• KHR primitive attributes for the official glTF primitive attribute set.
• Errors raised by glTF Hooks now stop the export.
• Performance: inline material is used when possible.
• Performance: animation export enhancement by viewport disabling.
• Nodes are now sorted by name.
• Fixed: retrieve sockets by index instead of names when they are named the same.
• Fixed: scripts reloading crash.
• Fixed: Vertex Color export for a subset of materials only use case.
• UI filter for glTF Collections.
• Fixed: crash on import multiple custom attributes.
• Animation Pointer fixes.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

MORE

• Theme
  Viewport: Added axis brightness setting.
• Core
  Autosave: Programmatic triggering via new operator.
  Autosave & recovery: Unsaved image edits are now kept in backup files.
  Outliner: Remove override rules directly from the Library Overrides menu.
  Library Overrides: Geometry Nodes packed bakes are now supported on modifier stacks.
• Motion Tracking
  New: “Move to Layer” operator for masks in the Movie Clip Editor (M).
  Mute footage shortcut moved to Ctrl+H.
  Faster high-resolution footage playback in the Movie Clip Editor on OpenGL.
  Proxy building no longer creates *.blen_tc timecode index files.
• Python API
  Geometry Nodes: modifier inputs and outputs are now RNA properties instead of custom modifier["..."] keys. Scripts that set Geometry Nodes values the old way require updates.
  Expanded image-buffer API: conversion between file formats, direct pixel access, and grey-scale/RGB/RGBA support.
  New bpy.data.all_ids iterator to loop over all data-blocks at once.
  New options for bpy.data.file_path_foreach to expand UDIM tiles, image/volume sequences, and cache files (including Cycles texture cache).
  New: gpu.init() to use the GPU in background mode ( --background ).
  Sculpt Mode automasking settings moved to MeshAutomaskingSettings on Paint and Brush.
  mathutils types (Vector, Matrix, Color, Euler) now support slice step (e.g. vector[begin:end:step] ).
  New functions to add, edit, and remove annotation strokes and points.
  bpy.data.libraries.load() now exposes linked library blend-file paths.
  New: Window.screenshot method to access screenshot pixel data without saving to disk.
  New: UILayout.link and UILayout.textbox for styled link buttons and multi-line text in panels.
  Blender reports are now exposed as a read-only list on WindowManager, with session-wide unique IDs.
  Grease Pencil: new functions layer.layer_masks.add and layer.layer_masks.remove to add/remove layer masks.
  Grease Pencil: new fill_id and hide_stroke properties to strokes in the high-level python API.

Plus hundreds of bug fixes, code cleanups and refactors.
See the full list of changes.

CREDITS

Blender is a community project.
Learn more on how you can contribute to Blender.
List of developers who contributed to Blender 5.2 LTS and all-time contributors.
Splash artwork: Joanna Kobierska, based on a model by Ken Barthelmey.
Thin Wall renders by Christopher 3D. VR Location Scouting image by Daniel Bystedt.
Huge thanks to everyone involved!
The Blender team. July 14th, 2026

Artistic freedom starts with Blender
The Free and Open Source 3D Creation Suite

Original source

Blender 5.1 was released on March 17, 2026.
Check out out the final release notes on blender.org.
In memory of Germano Cavalcante.

Animation & Rigging

Assets

Compositor

Core

Cycles

EEVEE & Viewport

Geometry Nodes

Grease Pencil

Modeling & UV

Motion Tracking

Pipeline & I/O

Python API

Rendering

Sculpt, Paint, Texture

User Interface

Video Sequencer

Virtual Reality

Compatibility

• Libraries have been upgraded to match VFX platform 2026, including:
  • Python 3.13
  • OpenColorIO 2.5
  • OpenEXR 3.4
  • OpenVDB 13.0
• Node Tools now have a global unique idname requirement. This can be set automatically by opening and saving files in 5.1, or chosen manually in the node editor header.
• Grease Pencil fills have been revamped. Blend-files are automatically converted to the new system but some procedural setups using Geometry Nodes and Grease Pencil materials might need manual adjustments. See the Grease Pencil section for more details.

Bugfixes

• Fixes for issues present in previous versions

Corrective Releases

Original source

Performance meets stability in Blender 5.1

Released March 17th, 2026

Watch the Recap Video

New features overview by Jonathan Lampel from CGCookie.

RENDERING

El Rey Cast

The new Raycast node allows you to cast rays against scene geometry.
Similar to the existing Geometry Nodes node but now available for shaders in both Cycles and EEVEE.
This enables a wide range of effects, including NPR stylization integrated with scene shading. When using EEVEE, it is currently limited to screen-space tracing.

EEVEE & VIEWPORT

Quick Start

EEVEE materials now compile faster by precompiling GPU pipelines in parallel.
GPU shaders also compile more quickly across all platforms thanks to preprocessing of the shader sources.

Memory Savings

Memory is getting expensive these days, so it might as well multitask.
EEVEE now saves texture memory by overlapping framebuffer and render textures at different points within a frame.

MORE EEVEE & VIEWPORT

Control Light Path intensity
Theme major grid lines
Better planar reflections
Performance timing statistics overlay
Improved grid performance and occlusion
Higher max AOV
Support for Light Path node in World.
Improved Reference Spheres handling and space lighting
Improved Quad View

ANIMATION

PLAY FAST

Blender 5.1 delivers a major boost to animation playback performance.

Shape Keys

Shape Key evaluation has seen a significant performance boost since Blender 5.0, especially on high-poly meshes.
All tests are an average time per frame when playing back. The tests were run on a 12 core 24 thread CPU (AMD Ryzen 9 9900X) on Linux. For benchmarks on different systems see the daily benchmarks.

Actions

Actions now evaluate much faster now, especially on armatures with many bones keyed.
These tests were done with an armature of 2600 bones that are keyed for ~1000 frames.

Smooth Sailing

Meet “Smooth (Gaussian)”, a new F-curve modifier to reduce detail and noise in a curve, the same operation as the Smooth operator, but in a non-destructive way.

Be Precise

When “Show Subframes” is enabled, decimal values for frames will be displayed in the playhead.

Color Match

Quickly see the interpolation type between keyframes at a glance.
Interpolation lines in the Dope Sheet are now colored to indicate their type, matching the theme colors used by the corresponding icons.

MORE ANIMATION

General

• Replace actions on multiple objects.

Shape Keys

• New: “Apply to Basis” applies the deformations of selected shape keys to the Basis and then removes them.

Rigging

• Loop selection is now possible in Weight Paint mode when using Vertex Selection

Python API

• ANIM_OT_convert_legacy_action has been removed since all actions are automatically layered.

I/O

OpenUSD

• Improved UsdPreviewSurface import/export with support for transparency and translucency.
• UsdUIAccessibilityAPI support for authoring and loading on all data-block types that allow Custom Properties.
• Mesh export now writes indexed UV coordinates, enabling UV island connectivity reconstruction in other apps.
• Python Hooks (Export): New get_prim_map API in on_export, providing a mapping between Blender objects and created USD prims.

FBX

• Export shapekey normals when base normals are enabled, fixing some game engine import issues.

glTF

• Import: Fix crash when missing GPU instancing properties.
• Export: Fix light normalization.
• Export: Fix light temperature conversion.
• Export: Fix alpha animation with KHR_animation_pointer

Images

• New: Support for AV1 Image File Format (AVIF).
• JPEG 2000: Use multi-threading to speed up file saving.
• OpenEXR: New lossless encoding option HTJ2K.

Video & Audio Output

• Video encoding now allows “Custom” quality level by manually specified ffmpeg CRF value.
• Audio bitrate can be set to higher values than 384kb/s now.

Stability is a feature.

It’s not just about shiny new tools. Reliability is a feature too.

Winter of Quality

During the past December-January, similar to last year, Blender developers focused on improving quality of the code base and overall stability through a coordinated effort called the “Winter of Quality.”
More than 350 reported issues were fixed. Additionally, developers worked on addressing technical debt, as well as improving documentation.

Issues Addressed per Module

Animation & Rigging: 16
Asset System: 9
Core: 14
Grease Pencil: 22
Modeling: 58
Nodes & Physics: 37
Pipeline & IO: 8
Platforms, Builds & Tests: 2
Python API: 7
Render & Cycles: 20
Sculpt, Paint & Texture: 24
User Interface: 50
VFX & Video: 53
Viewport & EEVEE: 35

COMPOSITOR ❤ SEQUENCER

Strip Info

Unleash your creativity with node-based transition effects thanks to the new “Sequencer Strip Info” node.
Simple transition using the strip’s start and end frames to control the size of an ellipse mask.

Simple, yet powerful.
This new node provides timing and transform data such as frame range, position, rotation, and scale.
Note: Blender 5.1 computes Sequencer Compositor effects on the CPU. In the upcoming Blender 5.2 LTS, they run on the GPU.

Smooth Dat Form

The new “Mask to SDF” node lets you turn any image or shape into signed distance fields.
It’s time to revisit those masks.

MORE COMPOSITOR

Mix Node now properly mixes alpha
Relative To Pixel now works with non-single values
Group Input up to 30% faster in some cases
New Compositor workspace layout
Glare, Directional Blur, Lens Distortion, Anti-Alias, Blur, and Vector Blur up to 2x faster
Image and File Output nodes now read/write custom metadata
Group now performs implicit input/output conversions
File Output allows specifying directories again
Improved Movie Distortion handle of image display window
Viewer Region has been temporarily hidden

EXPAND YOUR BLENDER

The Blender Extensions platform keeps growing, with over 900 free add-ons and themes to customize your workflows.
You can also share your own add-ons and themes!

CYCLES

Faster All Over

• Improved GPU rendering performance by up to 10% on various benchmark scenes.
• CPU rendering performance on Windows up to 20% faster.
• For AMD GPUs, hardware ray-tracing is now enabled by default through HIP RT.

Better Custom Normals

Cycles now uses per-corner normals instead of splitting geometry, improving consistency with Blender and fixing sharp-edge shading issues.

Smoother Denoise

Albedo and normal denoising passes now use smooth transitions instead of hard cutoffs, reducing artifacts in both the passes and the final denoised render.

Aligned Views

Cycles render results and Blender overlays now line up better when moving the camera.

Not-so Normal Maps

Normal Map node now includes an option to apply the normal map to either the smooth undisplaced mesh or the displaced mesh.

GREASE PENCIL

Filling good.

Blender 5.1 overhauls the fill workflow, making it easier to use while adding support for holes and operators to assist with selection and editing.

Free from Materials

Previously, materials determined whether strokes and fills were used. Now, you can decide as you draw.
Adding or removing strokes and fills is now handled by drawing tools and dedicated operators to select and edit, rather than materials.

Fills & Holes

Because fills are defined per point, joining them can generate holes, similar to how curve objects behave when curves are nested inside each other.
Two operators make this easy: Join Fills, Separate Fills.

Not So Primitives

The primitives drawing tool has also been updated to let you draw strokes, fill, or both.

Support All Over the Place

The new fills workflow is supported throughout Blender, from import and export to the internal operators familiar from working with curves and meshes.

Find What You’re Looking For

Dealing with too many layers? The Move to Layer menu now features a “Search…” entry to find what you’re looking for, faster.

Community Shout-out

Watch Dantti’s video BIG Grease Pencil Changes Coming!

MORE GREASE PENCIL

Make Parent to Lattice objects works again
Performance improvement when drawing long strokes
New Python API collection properties

INDUSTRY READY

Several libraries in Blender 5.1 have been updated to align with the VFX Reference Platform 2026, making studio pipeline integration and maintenance easier.
Updated libraries include Python 3.13, OpenColorIO 2.5, OpenEXR 3.4, and OpenVDB 13.0, among others.

GEOMETRY NODES

Bonegiorno

Meet Bone Info, a new node that provides Geometry Nodes access to armature bone transforms, opening the door to rig-driven node setups and armature deformation.

Bare Bone

The Bone Info node reads a bone from an armature and outputs its Pose, Local Pose, Transform Pose, Rest Pose, and Rest Length.

Say More

Blender 5.1 improves text motion graphics with a better String to Curves node and improved text and curve rendering.

More Than Words

The String to Curves node takes a leap in customization.
Every input is now an adjustable field, including Font, a new socket type in Blender 5.1.
The new Word output gives you even more control to level up your motion graphics.

Off the Grid

The volume grid system introduced in Blender 5.0 has been further expanded:

• Cube Grid Topology
• Clip Grid
• Grid Mean
• Grid Median
• Grid to Points
• Grid Dilate & Erode
• Improved Set Grid Background

UV News

The UV Unwrap node now supports Minimum Stretch (SLIM), and a new “No Flip” setting.
The Pack UV Islands node now has inputs to define a custom pack region.

MORE GEOMETRY NODES

• New Get Bundle Item and Store Bundle Item nodes
• New Fill Rule socket in Fill Curve node
• New Matrix SVD (Singular Value Decomposition) node
• Search node warnings with Ctrl+F
• “Mix” color mode now mixes alpha
• Node Tools are now registered as operators
• New Font socket

Get the Artwork

Blender splash artwork source files are available for you to play with!

MODELNG & TEXT

Next-Gen Text

3D Text now uses a new fill algorithm that improves rendering, correctly handling modern fonts with overlapping outlines.

MODELING

Find Your Center

A highly requested feature, snap to Face Center has been added to Blender 5.1.
It snaps the selection to the centerpoint of the face under the mouse cursor.

Set Your Limits

Loop and ring selection now support delimiters, giving you more control over where a selection stops.

Boundary Loop selection can stop at inner corners, outer corners, plus the existing n-gon stopping behavior.

Flip Out

A common workflow after mirroring an object is to apply its transforms, which can result in flipped normals. A new option now fixes the normals automatically and is enabled by default.

MORE MODELING & UV

• 35% faster Exact Booleans

• ~5x faster filling concave n-gons
• New Select Tile UV operator
• Improved Vertex Slide adjustments
• Lasso/Box/Circle selection in Curves Sculpt mode
• Accurate freehand Bézier and Grease Pencil strokes curve fitting
• Bevel: added Snap (Ctrl) and Precision (Shift) support
• UV Editor: Edge Opacity overlay

PLATFORMS

Windows

User fonts now show System fonts too.
File Browser: USB and cloud storage volumes now show corresponding icon.

macOS

Added iCloud Drive support.
Cursors improvements.
Cmd +/- can now be used to zoom in/out the Animation Player.

Linux

Client-side decoration support under Wayland.
Better-centered Blender icon.

WAIT, THERE’S EVEN MORE

Editors

Preferences: Search!
Outliner: Auto-scroll to items when renaming.
Spreadsheet: Show Min Voxel for grids.
Image Editor Keymap: Additional Ctrl+1 and Shift+1 convenience shortcuts to reset zoom to 1x.

User Interface

Improved icons.
Improved color picker hex color code auto-completion.
Persistent sidebar width
Improved “Remap users”.
Alphabetical sort option in Tree View.
Hide dot-prefixed data blocks from search results.
Way too many changes to list here. See them all.

Assets

Asset Libraries can now be individually disabled.
Asset Shelf: Thumbnail previews can be as small as 24px.
Improved label when no asset catalogs.
Asset Browser: Support fuzzy search.

Rendering

Normal Map: Option to switch OpenGL / DirectX.
Join Bundle node.
Vector Math node option for element-wise rounding.
OpenColorIO updated to 2.5 and new configs.

Core

Undo: Edit mesh and other undo is now up to 30% faster.
Undo: Deletion of linked data can now be redone.
Linux: Support opening windows without decorations.
Linux: Replace JEMALLOC with TBB_MALLOC_PROXY.
Blender switched from C++17 to C++20.

Sculpt, Paint, Texture

Boundary-aware brushes (Smooth, Relax, Automasking) now correctly handle face strips.
Texture Paint strokes can be cancelled with Esc.
Texture Paint property changes create undo steps.
New “Paint Debug” option available when Developer Tools is enabled.
Vertex Paint color sampling now reads mesh attribute data.
Sculpt mode color sampling can add to the palette.
Color sampling now accumulates for smoother blending.
Sculpt mode includes a new Blur brush.
Temporary Mask toggle (Alt+LMB) and mask erase (Ctrl+Alt+LMB) in Sculpt mode.
sculpt.face_set_change_visibility now supports an active_face_set parameter.
Overlay warnings appear if face sets or masks are hidden.

Python

Upgrade to Python 3.13, matching VFX Platform 2026.
Python API changes for the Video Sequencer.
Python user-site-directory no longer loaded by default.
See all API changes.

Video Sequencer

Blade Box Ripple
Reverse speed footage.
Retiming keys can now be hidden.
Preview: Snap scale/rotation to increments.
Time panel clean up.
Sound: Pitch modifier.
Sound: Echo modifier.
New meta-strips volume property.
See all changes.

XR / Virtual Reality

Arc Teleportation overhaul.
New View Scale property.
OpenXR on macOS.
Major performance boost on Vulkan.

Motion Tracking

New anamorphic coefficients to Nuke lens distortion model.

Plus hundreds of bug fixes, code cleanups and refactors.
See the full list of changes.

On April 14th 2026, Blender 5.1.1 was released featuring 71 additional bug fixes. See the changelog.
On May 19th 2026, Blender 5.1.2 was released featuring 12 additional bug fixes. See the changelog.

CREDITS

Blender is a community project.
Learn more on how you can contribute to Blender.
List of developers who contributed to Blender 5.1 and all-time contributors.
Splash artwork: CC-BY – Blender Studio
Huge thanks to everyone involved!
The Blender team. March 17th, 2026

Artistic freedom starts with Blender
The Free and Open Source 3D Creation Suite

Original source

Blender 5.0 was released on November 18, 2025.
Check out out the final release notes on blender.org.

Animation & Rigging

Assets

Color Management

Compositor

Core

Cycles

EEVEE & Viewport

Geometry Nodes

Grease Pencil

Modeling & UV

Motion Tracking

Physics

Pipeline & I/O

Python API

Rendering

Sculpt, Paint, Texture

User Interface

Video Sequencer

Virtual Reality

Compatibility

• Maximum Data-Blocks name length has been increased to 255 bytes.
• Removal of (Unsupported) Access to Runtime-Defined Properties Storage Data.
• Big endian support has been removed.
• Support for LZMA or LZO compressed point caches has been dropped
• Support for Intel Macs has been removed
• Support for pre-2.50 animation has been dropped.
• Increase Minimum GPU requirements for Blender
• Cycles: The minimum supported NVIDIA compute capability is sm_50 now (~GeForce 900 cards)
• Cycles: Increased minimum GPU driver requirements for AMD HIP on Windows
• Blendfile Compression on saving is now enabled by default.
• Theme API was rewritten and custom themes saved in older versions are not carried over

Bugfixes

• Fixes for issues present in previous versions

Corrective Releases

Original source

Hi Five

The full spectrum of creativity, powered by freedom.

What’s New Recap

What’s New Recap

New features overview by Jonathan Lampel from CGCookie, Harry Blends, Paul Caggegi, Wayne Dixon, Aidy Burrows, Károly Zsolnai-Fehér, and Martin Klekner.

Color me impressed.

Blender 5.0 introduces a completely overhauled color management pipeline that natively supports wide-gamut and HDR color spaces.

HDReady HDR eady

Blender can now display and export HDR and wide-gamut colors for both images and video.

New display and views:

• ACES 1.3 and 2.0 views as an alternative to AgX and Filmic and for compatibility with ACES pipelines (both standard and HDR).
• Rec.2100-PQ and Rec.2100-HLG displays. May be used for color grading for HDR video export.
• AgX HDR view.

Your Safe Space

Your Safe Space

Introducing: Blend file Working Color space.

With support for Linear Rec.2020 and ACEScg, it is now possible to use a wider gamut of colors for materials, lights and compositing, and to follow common ACES workflows.

Rendering in the Rec.2020 working space allows for the use of a wider internal color gamut.

Set a custom Working Space per file and Sequencer…

…or use the Convert Colorspace node in the Compositor.

Team Player

Blender 5.0 includes essential support for ACES 1.3 and 2.0 workflows with the ACEScg working space.

ACES 2.0 view transform and OpenEXR images saved in the ACES2065-1 and ACEScg color spaces.

This covers most needs when working in an ACES pipeline. For more complete support, the official ACES configurations can be manually installed and set through the OCIO environment variable.

Blender 5.0 improved compatibility with the OpenColorIO configuration for ACES 2.0.

When a blend file is loaded that was created with another OpenColorIO config, a warning is now shown.

See the color management documentation for how to make a configuration file work well with HDR and wide gamut in Blender.

MORE COLOR MANAGEMENT

MORE COLOR MANAGEMENT

• New Convert to Display node
• Brush and palette colors are now scene linear
• New Linear/Perceptual toggle in color pickers
• Tooltips now include descriptions of displays, views, and color spaces

The sky is not the limit.

The Sky Texture node now supports multiple scattering, providing more realistic effects procedurally out of the box.

The new sky model works great for accurate reflections indoor too. The old “Nishita” model is still available as “Single Scattering”.

Night & Day

Generate a sunset scene instantly by animating only one parameter.

Beautiful out of the box, in both Cycles and EEVEE.

Radial Tiling

The new Radial Tiling node is a building block for creating shapes and tilings, including rounded corners.

Radial textures with ease.

Multiresolution Baking

Baking from meshes that use the Multiresolution modifier has been greatly improved in Blender 5.0.

• Added support for baking Vector Displacement.
• Added support for n-gon faces.
• Bake only to selected and active images (as opposed to all active images).
• Subdivision Level and UV Interpolation matches the Subdivision Surface modifier.
• Several issues related to baking at non-zero subdivision levels have been resolved.

On and on and on…

Shading nodes now support Repeat Zones, just like Geometry Nodes.

EEVEE supports dynamic iteration count, while Cycles is limited to a fixed number at the moment, with plans to improve this in the future.

Download this background .blend file and try it out yourself!

MORE RENDERING

MORE RENDERING

• New Bundle and Closure nodes
• Added support for Menu Switch node
• Faster Voronoi Texture
• “Use Nodes” removed
• Light Linking can now be overriden
• Render passes renamed to avoid abbreviations
• Point Density removed

CYCLES

Unbiasedly Smooth

A new unbiased null-scattering volume rendering algorithm is now the default. It removes blocky artifacts in overlapping volumes and eliminates the need for step size, max steps, and homogeneous volume settings.

Subsurface Scattering

Blender 5.0 introduces a more accurate random walk subsurface scattering algorithm with multiple bounces, reducing darkening artifacts at the cost of some render time.

Metallic Thin Film Iridescence

The physically-based iridescense effects caused by dielectric thin film introduced in Blender 4.2 LTS, is now supported by metals too (Metallic BSDF and Principled BSDF).

Subdivide and Conquer

Adaptive Subdivision is no longer an experimental feature, and always available in the Subdivision Surface modifier.

It features a new Object Space option to set edge length in object space instead of pixel size. This allows object instancing to use minimal memory by subdividing the mesh once, independent of camera size, and instancing it many times.

MORE CYCLES

MORE CYCLES

• New Linear 3D Curves
• New Portal Depth light pass
• New Render Time pass
• Better OptiX denoiser quality
• Smoke & fire simulations now render with NanoVDB
• Stochastic sampling for cubic and linear interpolation to improve performance
• Default Cycles material now matches EEVEE
• Improved OSL Camera UI
• Removed Use Tiling
• New driver and hardware requirements

Give back to Blender.

Releases are possible thanks to donations by the community.

Become a member

Become a member

The Blender team. November 18th, 2025

EEVEE Quick Start

Materials now compile much faster across all backends. This means a faster startup and overall experience.

Configurations using NVIDIA and Vulkan backend are up to 4 times faster.

3D VIEWPORT

Better MatCaps, no cap

Blender 5.0 features new and updated MatCaps that include optional specular light. This increases shading quality and readability on dark surfaces.

MORE EEVEE

MORE EEVEE

• Added support for Material, World, and Samples View Layer Overrides
• Up to 3x faster overlays of mesh instances
• Refactored Curves drawing and rendering
• Improved depth-aware operators
• Faster Light Probe Volume baking
• Image Texture node supports 32 bit HDR
• New Surface Picking object visibility setting
• Light Probe Volume compatibility breaking changes

Free to Play

New demo files and updated asset bundles by the community!

The Human Base Meshes asset bundle has been updated with a new fully realistic skeleton asset.

Use it to study, practice, or even in commercial projects! It’s public domain, free as in freedom.

COMPOSITOR Drag & Comp

The Compositor in Blender 5.0 features a new asset shelf, filled with built-in effects to get from nothing to stunning in no time.

Chromatic Aberration

Simulate color fringing caused by lens chromatic aberration.

MORE COMPOSITOR

MORE COMPOSITOR

• Compositor setups are now re-usable and can be linked or appended
• Added interpolation to Displace node
• New Convolve node
• Added support for Menu sockets
• New Alpha Over Disjoint and Conjoint operations
• Split now supports rotation
• Added support for custom Extension Mode to many nodes
• New Sun Beams mode in Glare node
• New Kernel option in Glare node
• New Switch Menu node
• New node Convert to Display
• Most nodes input/output sockets inlined
• Lens Distortion now preserves transparency
• Better quality Glare effect
• Physically based Fog Glow effect
• Added Bilinear and Bicubic interpolation to Map UV
• Faster and more efficient 2D vector images
• Z Combine renamed to Depth Combine
• Composite node is now Group Output
• File Output, Map UV, Corner Pin, Plane Track Deform, and Bokeh Blur nodes now use translation
• Re-designed File Output node
• Most nodes now expose their menu options as inputs
• Smarter File Output frame append
• Alpha Over image inputs renamed to Background/Foreground
• Bokeh Blur Size now defined in pixels
• Color Balance Lift/Gamma/Gain is now linear
• Color Correction Lift is now Offset
• Compatibility and removals

INDUSTRY READY

Just like all other Blender releases in 2025 (Blender 4.4 and Blender 4.5 LTS), all libraries in Blender 5.0 are aligned with the VFX Reference Platform 2025, making studio pipeline integration and maintenance easier.

GREASE PENCIL

A Little Blurry

Grease Pencil objects now support motion blur.

The number of motion blur steps can be adjusted for better quality.

Sharp Corners Ahead

Grease Pencil strokes can now have different corner types set per point.

• Flat
• Sharp
• Round (default)

Go Full Circle

Cyclical strokes now correctly connect start and end segments without gaps or overlaps.

Community Shout-out

Watch Mumu Mundo’s recap of what’s new for Grease Pencil in Blender 5.0.

MORE GREASE PENCIL

MORE GREASE PENCIL

• New Edit Mode Curve Data panel in the 3D Viewport sidebar
• New Pen Tool
• Interpolation tool support for Bézier and Catmull-Rom curve types
• Join Strokes operator
• Bézier handles now match Curve colors
• Export Bézier, Catmull-Rom, and NURBS curve types to SVG
• Python API breaking changes

SEQUENCER OVERHAUL

Blender 5.0 brings unprecedented integration of the Video Sequencer across areas.

1. Proper Properties

Strip properties now appear where you’d expect them: the Properties Editor.

A dedicated Strip tab contains all the settings previously located in the Sequencer sidebar.

A new Strip Modifiers tab lists all modifiers in a familiar stack layout, including drag & drop support.

The Add Modifier menu now includes icons, search functionality, and a new modifier * …

2. Set the Scene

Previously, the Sequencer was tied to whichever scene was currently active. With Blender 5.0, you can now choose a different scene for the Sequencer allowing multi-scene workflows.

Turn on the new Sync Scene Time option to switch the active scene as you scrub through your edit.

3. Bound to Slip

Sliding or slipping strips now clamp to the content’s limits by default. This can be overridden by pressing C (Clamp). It also works with the new sidebar Slip tool.

Two new selection tools were added: Select Circle and Select Lasso.

4. Time on Your Side

Meet: Playback Controls, a region built-in the Sequencer (and other animation editors). No need to have a Timeline editor just for playback or set frame range.

*…Compositor Modifier

The power of hundreds of nodes from Blender’s production-ready compositor is now available in the Video Sequencer. Meet your new favorite modifier.

EVEN MORE SEQUENCER GOODIES

EVEN MORE SEQUENCER GOODIES

• HDR Histogram scope
• Unlimited Text Strip content
• Add Scene Assets from the Add menu
• Bulk add images
• Up to 6x faster histograms
• New Duplicate Linked operator
• Improved Prefetching
• Improved Text Strip bounding box
• Faster Waveform, Vectorscope of Overexposed overlay
• Strip modifiers in local space
• New Keyframe operators
• Sound strips preserve pitch
• Copy/Paste strips in Preview
• Pie Menu on Drag to add keyframes
• Better positioning when pasting strips
• Removed Tweak Handles preference
• Transform effect removed
• VSE Python API changes

Video Sequencer + Grease Pencil: Ultimate Storyboarding

MODEL RENEWED

Say hi to the new Array modifier! With support for circular distribution, randomization, gizmos, and more.

This modifier is built using Geometry Nodes, allowing you to customize and expand them as you like.

…plus these five new modifiers built using Geometry Nodes!

• Scatter on Surface
• Instance on Elements
• Randomize Instances
• Curve to Tube
• Geometry Input

UV EDITING

UVerhaul

The UV Sync feature has been completely overhauled, fixing long standing issues and adding new features. It is now enabled by default.

Additionally:

• Pack custom region
• Min and Max Align Vertically/Horizontally

And two new operators:

• Arrange and Align selected UV Islands
• Move Selected UV’s on Axis

MORE MODELING & UV

MORE MODELING & UV

• New Lattice Deform Selected operator
• Improved Undo performance
• Improved Merge by Distance
• Auto Merge support for Symmetrize and Bevel
• New Curve Data panel in sidebar for Curves
• Freestyle edge and face tags are now stored as generic attributes
• No more attribute length limit for curves, Grease Pencil, and point clouds
• C++ Copy Mirror UV Coordinates
• Boolean solver “Fast” is now “Float”

EXPAND YOUR BLENDER

The Blender Extensions platform keeps growing, with over 700 free add-ons and themes to customize your workflows.

You can also share your own add-ons and themes!

VR & XR

Turn for the Better

New features were added to the movement system in VR Scene Inspection.

• Vignette Effect: To help reduce motion sickness.
• Snap Turning: Flicking the right thumbstick left or right now moves the camera in discrete amounts by default.
• Control Fly Speed in VR Session settings.
• New VR Navigation Preferences.

Additionally, Teleportation has received some quality of life improvements:

• Improved visuals for valid/invalid teleport targets.
• Teleport ray now arcs downward.
• If no object is hit, the ray will collide with the ground for easier navigation in sparse scenes.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

Geometry Nodes

• Bundles & Closures
• New Socket shapes
• New Volume Grid & SDF nodes
• Improved Viewer
• New Essentials built-in assets.

Core

• Longer data-block names.
• Introducing Packed Data-blocks
• Support for larger buffers in .blend files.
• New Path Template Variables
• Saving with .blend file compression is now enabled by default
• Node Groups Custom Properties UI
• Command Line Argument for GPU VSync
• Improved debug logging
• Big Endian Support Removed

Keymap

• Shortcuts for collection visibility (1, 2, 3, etc.) have been moved from the 3D Viewport to the Outliner.
• Jump to next/previous keyframe with down/up arrow.

Linux

• Paths in the title bar now show ~/ for Home.
• Support for the cursor-shape protocol under Wayland.

Assets

• Entire Scenes can now be marked as assets.
• The Human Base Mesh Bundle has been updated with a new full realistic skeleton asset.
• Undo: At least 10% less memory usage

User Interface

• Simplified Theme settings.
• New Reduce Motion option to avoid non-essential animation effects.
• Node Editor visual improvements.
• New and improved icons.

Animation

• The Copy Global Transform add-on is now built-in Blender.
• New Playback Controls region in animation editors.
• Jump Time by Delta: Jump forward/backward in time by a user-specified delta, in frames or seconds.
• Timelines in all animation editors now draw grid lines always on full frames.
• Cache visualization is now available in Dope Sheet (all modes)
• The Timeline editor now has the channels region hidden by default, better filtering, and its (empty) sidebar removed.
• The W axis color can now be themed.
• Keying popover now displays active Keying Set name and keyframe type.
• Slot selectors now show the slot type icon.
• New Show Scene Strip Range overlay in Dope Sheet editor.
• Backward Compatibility breaking changes.

Rigging

• New constraint: Geometry Attribute.
• Bone Custom Shape Affect Gizmo: Places the Gizmo at the location of the Override Transform bone.
• Bone Custom Shape Use As Pivot: When rotating, the bone will pivot around the origin of the Override Transform bone.
• Improvements to working with multiple Armatures instances.
• Shape Keys now support “Copy to Selected” and adjusting multiple shape keys at once, by selecting multiple shape keys and holding Alt while adjusting.

Clip Editor

• Axes in Graph view now follow theme colors.

Physics

• PointCaches LZO and LZMA compression removed in favor of ZSTD.

I/O

• Collada (.dae): support has been removed.
• Alembic: Import additional point cloud attribute types as geometry attributes.
• USD: Improved UsdGeomNurbsCurves(NURBS) I/O
• FBX: The much faster C++ importer is now default.
• FBX: Added Material Name Collision import option.
• BVH: Always use the name “Slot” for Action Slots of imported animation.
• OBJ: Added Material Name Collision import option.
• OBJ: New Apply Tranasform import option.
• OBJ: Improved Bézier/NURBS knot patterns I/O.

Sculpt & Texture Paint

• New Paint Pixel Art and Erase Pixel Art brushes.
• Multiresolution modifier: New “Conform Base” operator
• Brush size, strength and jitter properties now have a customizable pen pressure curve.
• Updated template with some overlays by default.
• Grab, Snake Hook, Elastic Deform, Pose, Boundary, Thumb, and Rotate brushes no longer show pressure sensitivity toggles.

Images & Movies

• Video: Added support to read and write HDR and wide gamut video files.
• Multilayer OpenEXR now saves multi-part files by default for more efficient interoperability.
• OpenEXR files now support Color Interop ID metadata, to automatically detect the file colorspace.
• Save wide gamut images in P3 and Rec.2020 colorspaces.

Weight Paint

• Weight values of less than 0.0001 are rounded to 0 when painting.
• Zero Weights overlay setting defaults to Active instead of None.

Python API

• New Inline Shader Nodes API
• API additions
• API deprecated
• Breaking changes

Plus hundreds of bug fixes, code cleanups and refactors.

See the full list of changes.

On December 16th 2025, Blender 5.0.1 was released featuring 132 additional bug fixes. See the changelog.

CREDITS

List of developers that contributed to Blender 5.0

Blender is a community project.

Learn more on how you can contribute to Blender.

Splash artwork: CC-BY-SA – Juan Hernández

Working Color Space teapot and Sky scattering reflections demo by Christopher 3D. SSS demo by Metin Seven. Thin Film by geedoubleu. Grease Pencil motion blur demo by Dedouze.

Huge thanks to everyone involved!

The Blender team. November 18th, 2025

Artistic freedom starts with Blender

The Free and Open Source 3D Creation Suite

Original source

Blender 4.5 LTS was released on July 15, 2025.

Check out out the final release notes on blender.org.

This release includes long-term support and will be maintained until July 2027, see the LTS page for a list of bugfixes included in the latest version.

• Animation & Rigging
• Compositor
• Core
• Cycles
• EEVEE & Viewport
• Geometry Nodes
• Grease Pencil
• Modeling & UV
• Motion Tracking
• Physics
• Pipeline & I/O
• Python API
• Rendering
• Sculpt, Paint, Texture
• User Interface
• Video Sequencer

Compatibility

• macOS Intel support is deprecated. Due to the high maintenance cost of tracking down and fixing graphics related issues specific to Intel and AMD GPU Macs, it was decided that this will be the last release with an official Intel macOS build of Blender. Learn more.
• Big Endian platform & blendfiles are deprecated and will be removed in Blender 5.0. Learn more.
• Collada import/export has been deprecated since Blender 4.2 LTS, Blender 4.5 LTS will be the last release to support it, and it will be removed in Blender 5.0. Learn more.
• Cycles: The minimum driver version required for OptiX has increased to 535. (0add3f31a2)
• Add-ons that use built-in shaders should use POLYLINES_* or POINT_* shader variants to support Metal and Vulkan.

Bugfixes

• Fixes for issues present in previous versions

Original source

Your Best Companion

With 2 years of updates, full Vulkan support, and quality-of-life improvements, Blender 4.5 LTS is every Blenderhead’s best friend.

What’s New Recap

Round-up of what’s new in Blender 4.5 LTS, in detail.

VULKAN

BLEND ME UP

The Vulkan backend is now fully supported in Blender 4.5 LTS

The final frontier.
After years of work, support for the popular backend in Blender is now on par with OpenGL.
It’s not enabled by default yet; make it so in the Preferences.
Make sure to keep your drivers up to date! Blender works closely with hardware manufacturers to ensure Vulkan performs as well as possible.
See the supported platforms and drivers, and the current limitations.

GEOMETRY NODES

BRING ’EM ON

Got OBJ, CSV, STL, VDB, PLY, or a custom text file? Bring them all together with Geometry Nodes.

Mix & Match

Assemble your scenes by importing all kinds of files.

• CSV (.csv)
• Stanford PLY (.ply)
• OpenVDB (.vdb)
• STL (.stl)
• Wavefront (.obj)
• Text (.txt)

Drag & Drop

Import files by dragging and dropping them onto the Geometry Node Editor.

Smart Sequencing

When combined with the new Format String node, importing sequences is as flexible as it gets.

THE NEW NORMAL

Custom mesh normals are now editable in Geometry Nodes with the new Set Mesh Normal node! Modify both “Tangent Space” normals and a new, faster “Free” format.

Grease Nodes

Grease Pencil creation with Geometry Nodes just got better, including added support for custom Node Tools.
Plus these new nodes:

• Set Grease Pencil Color: Writes stroke/fill color and opacity.
• Set Grease Pencil Depth: Controls the depth (rendering) option.
• Set Grease Pencil Softness: Controls the “Softness” attribute.

Additionally, the Named Layer Selection node now supports search.
All these nodes are now organized inside a dedicated Grease Pencil sub-menu.

Node Tools

Custom node tools are now easier to organize thanks to support for collapsible panels, including the use of boolean sockets as checkboxes in their headers, just like native built-in operators!
This is part of a refactor that allows the Adjust Last Operation panel to share the same code as modifiers, so future improvements will benefit both systems.
For example, you can now search for attributes within the Adjust Last Operation panel.

All New Nodes

Blender 4.5 LTS brings a solid set of new Geometry Nodes focused on data access and string handling.
Meet these new nodes:

• Camera Info
• Instance Bounds
• Match String
• Bit Math
• Field Average, Field Variance, and Field Min & Max

Plus the already mentioned Format String and Grease Pencil nodes.

ON PERFORMANCE

• Vertex to Edge attribute domain interpolation 1.7x faster
• Corner to Vertex attribute 1.4x faster
• Face to Vertex domain interpolation up to 7x faster
• Face Corner and Custom Normals twice as fast

EEVEE & VIEWPORT

Start Me Up, Fast

Blender 4.5 LTS is noticeably faster thanks to performance improvements such as faster texture loading, quicker startup times, and multi-threaded shader compilation by default on supported platforms.
A new user preference allows choosing between multi-threaded and subprocess compilation.

EEVEE

Hasta La Vista

A new shadow terminator bias has been introduced, helping eliminate self-shadowing artifacts on low-polygon geometry. This is a per-object setting to shift the shadowed position along the shading normal.
Cycles introduced this feature in Blender 3.0, and it has now become a global setting shared by both engines.

MORE EEVEE & VIEWPORT

• Reverse-Z: new algorithm to reduce depth buffer artifacts
• Improved selection and navigation auto-depth
• Shadow normal issues fixed
• GPU based subdivision
• Light leaking issues fixed
• New profiling command line argument

INDUSTRY READY

All libraries used in Blender 4.5 LTS are aligned with the VFX Reference Platform 2025, making studio pipeline integration and maintenance easier.

COMPOSITOR

Go Procedural

All the procedural texture nodes you know and love from Shaders and Geometry Nodes, are now available in the Compositor.
The usual suspects:

• Brick: Highly customizable texture producing bricks.
• Checker: Simple checkerboard texture.
• Gabor: Noise visually characterized by random interleaved bands.
• Gradient: Color band gradient.
• Magic: Classic Blender’s magic sauce.
• Noise: Fractal Perlin noise.
• Voronoi: Worley noise.
• Wave: Procedural bands or rings with noise distortion.
• White Noise: Random number based noise.

Compositing Harmony

The Compositor is now more unified than ever.
Common nodes have been added and can be easily copied across Shader and Geometry Nodes setups.
The following common nodes are now available in the Compositor:

• Vector Math
• Vector Rotate
• Mix Vector
• Math
• Clamp
• Float Curve
• Blackbody

Plus these brand new nodes:

• Image Info: provides resolution, dimensions, and image transformations.
• Relative to Pixel: converts values that are relative to the image size to be in pixels.
• Image Coordinates: provides various types of pixel coordinates, including normalized and integer pixel coordinates.

MORE COMPOSITOR

• Denoise node now supports GPU devices
• Added support for boolean sockets
• Box & Ellipse mask nodes gizmos
• Viewer node added by default
• New clamp input in Glare
• Scale node interpolation
• Corner Pin node interpolation
• Split node gizmo
• Image Editor render size overlay
• Vector images consume less memory
• Image node support vector outputs from EXR images
• Mix Color clamp factor and result
• Improved Map Range
• Vector Curves new factor input
• Removed or deprecated duplicate functionality

EXPAND YOUR BLENDER

The Blender Extensions platform keeps growing, with 600 free add-ons and themes to customize your workflows.
You can also share your own add-ons and themes!

GREASE PENCIL GLOW UP

This release is a big one for Grease Pencil. Featuring integration with the Compositor, introducing support for Geometry Nodes tools, missing features have been brought back, and strokes look better than ever.
Blender 4.5 LTS is the perfect match for your next 2D/3D animation project.

Pencil Perfect

A new render pass outputs the visible Grease Pencil strokes and fills into a separate layer.
This pass is useful for isolating, enhancing, or applying effects to Grease Pencil elements during compositing.

Full Control

In addition to the render pass, Grease Pencil rendering can be completely disabled per View Layer using the Filter option, similar to Surfaces, Volumes, and other types.

LOOKING SHARP

A new supersampling anti-aliasing (SSAA) method improves line quality for smoother lines.

MORE GREASE PENCIL

• Support exporting animated SVGs
• Support for Node Tools
• No minimum thickness clamping
• Filter modifiers by Layer Group
• Geometry Nodes improvements
• Improved Boundary Strokes, now Fill Guides
• Show only active object onion skinning

PUT IT TO THE TEST

Share and compare your computer’s score with openly accessible benchmarks provided by the Blender community.

UV EDITING

UVs Everywhere All At Once

View UVs for the active or all selected objects, in any mode, at all times.
Previously limited to Edit Mode, UVs are now visible across all object modes in the Image Editor’s Mask and Paint views.
UVs visibility and opacity can be controlled through the Overlays popover.

Make Your Point

Meet Point Cloud, a new object type for representing large numbers of individual points in 3D space. Ideal for visualizing 3D scan data, particle simulations, or sparse datasets.

Checkpoint

Point Cloud objects are much more performant than regular meshes.
Each point in a point cloud can store data using Attributes that define properties such as radius, position, color, and more. Future updates may expand support to include simulation systems like particles.

To the Point

Add a Point Cloud object directly from the Add menu in the 3D Viewport, or generate it procedurally using Geometry Nodes.

MODEL

What a Filling

The Grid Fill operator can now replace or correct existing geometry, as well as fill holes as before.

FILLS LIKE MAGIC

It can be used to clean up an area with bad geometry, which will be replaced with a fresh, smooth, grid-filled set of quads. It almost feels like cheating.

MORE MODELING

• Snap to Cursor now supports rotation
• New Curves operators
• New Manifold Boolean option in modifier and Geometry Node
• Improved Vertex Parent UI
• New default Retopology Overlay offset

Play the Splash!

This release splash artwork features DOGWALK, the latest open game project by Blender Studio.
The game is free and open source like every Blender Studio project, with a DLC available for those who wish to support the team.

PAINT

Jitter Creeper

Painting in Sculpt, Vertex Paint, and Texture Paint modes supports randomization of hue, saturation, and value either throughout the entire stroke or on a per-stroke basis.

SCULPT

Chop Chop

Manifold is the new faster solver for Trim tools in Sculpt mode. Its name comes from the term “manifold” (also called ‘water-tight’ meshes), and refers to the limitation that it works best on this type of geometry.
It uses the same Manifold library as the Boolean modifier and Geometry Node.
It’s much faster than the previous Fast mode, now called Float.

AND MORE

• Improved Pen Tablet Tilt support
• Mask by Color support redo
• Improved undo for Vertex/Weight Paint modes
• Brush assets now support toggle
• Faster Clay Strips brush
• Duplicate brush assets in the current file
• Improved sculpt brush performance
• Faster node tools changes

USER INTERFACE

LOOKING GOOOOD

Blender’s user interface continues to get more polished, more intuitive, and more accessible than ever.

NODE EDITORS

Easy Frames

Adding nodes into frames is easier than ever:

1. Press F
2. Give it a name (optional)
3. Done!

Detaching them is just as simple: press F while dragging the nodes.
You can now create empty frames. Labels are better positioned, and nested frames now alternate in value for easier reading.

PROPERTIES

Clean Workspace

Not using a tab in the Properties Editor? Hide it to reduce the clutter.
This is especially useful for tailoring the editor to specific workflows. For example, in the Video Editing workspace, you might hide the Object and Shading tabs to reduce visual noise.
Tabs can be brought back at any time through the top-right popover menu.

ASSET & FILE BROWSER

More at a Glance

The Asset and File Browser now allows you to see more in two ways:
Labels will now wrap to two lines, prioritizing the beginning and end to clearly show the file extension.
A new Horizontal List mode lets you fit more content on screen, and adjust the preview and column sizes individually.

ASSET BROWSER

Quick Capture

Making previews for your assets just got much easier!
Simply capture what’s on the screen, no need to render.

MORE UI

• Spreadsheet: Columns can be manually re-ordered.
• Columns width can be adjusted manually.
• Fit column width on double-click.
• Show column name on hover.
• Greyout unavailable geometries in sidebar.
• Show internal attributes.

Core

• Some file paths can now contain variables.
• Dependency Graph is now up to 18% faster when there are many data-blocks.
• Crashes on Windows now show a popup with recovery options.
• Big Endian support is now considered deprecated.

Library Overrides

Individual linked IDs can now be relocated, instead of the entire library.

Motion Tracking

• Keyframe selection is up to 50% faster.
• Added support for Preview Range visualization.

Physics: Fluid Simulation

• Liquid simulation up to 1.5x faster.
• More stable viscosity.
• Improved smoke dissolve.
• Fixed hollow interiors when importing OpenVDB cache.
• Improved user interface for volumetric settings.

Python API

• New GeometrySet API.
• New light controls.
• Several API additions.
• Breaking changes.

Lights

• New: Exposure control.
• New: Temperature.
• New: Normalize, to disable normalization of the light intensity by area.
• Light unit (W) removed.

Shading

• New node: Volume Coefficients

Rendering

• Video rendering to FFV1 codec now supports 10, 12, and 16 bits output.
• Added support for pixel density. Including PPI/PPM and base unit.
• The BMP format now supports alpha channel.

I/O: glTF

• New option to import scenes as collections.
• Export Vertex Color of a given name.
• Export Viewport Material.
• Several fixes.

I/O: USD

• Import animated camera properties.
• Import USD Skeleton rest pose.
• Import primitives: Plane, Capsule_1, Cylinder_1.
• Import DomeLight_1 schema.
• Export: MaterialX now writes Principled BSDF as OpenPBR Surface.
• Export: better support of point instancing
• Export: support Blender Text objects.
• I/O support for UsdPrimvarReader_TYPE for UsdPreviewSurface materials.

I/O: FBX

• New, much faster FBX importer.
• Export: New smoothing option to write smoothgroups.

I/O: OBJ

• Export: Improved smoothgroup.

I/O: SVG

• Import multiple SVG files at once.

I/O: Images & Movie Files

• Add support for writing ProRes codec videos.
• OpenEXR: Read and write ACES2065-1 colorspace metadata.
• OpenEXR: Preserve compression and bit depth settings when re-saving files.
• Color Management: Support OpenColorIO file rules to auto detect color space.

Plus hundreds of bug fixes, code cleanups and refactors.
See the full list of changes.

CREDITS

List of developers that contributed to Blender 4.5 LTS
Blender is a community project.
Learn more on how you can contribute to Blender.
Splash artwork: DOGWALK – CC-BY-SA – studio.blender.org
Huge thanks to everyone involved 🧡
The Blender team. July 15th, 2025

Original source

Blender 4.4 was released on March 18, 2025.

Check out out the final release notes on blender.org.

Animation & Rigging

Compositor

Core

Cycles

EEVEE & Viewport

Geometry Nodes

Grease Pencil

Modeling & UV

Pipeline & I/O

Python API

Sculpt, Paint, Texture

User Interface

Video Sequencer

Compatibility

• Cycles: Increased minimum driver versions for AMD and Intel GPU rendering.
• Alembic and USD: Processing of edge and vertex creases has changed for consistency with OpenSubdiv.
• Python API: Breaking changes for actions, sequencer strips and subclassing Blender types.
• Libraries have been upgraded to match VFX platform 2025, including:
  • MaterialX 1.39
  • OpenColorIO 2.4
  • OpenEXR 3.3
  • OpenShadingLanguage 1.14
  • OpenUSD 25.02
  • OpenVDB 12.0

Bugfixes

• Fixes for issues present in previous versions

Corrective Releases

Original source

Time for Action

Improved animation workflow, better modeling, new sculpt brush, and smoother video editing, plus over 700 issues fixed.

Splash artwork: Flow © Dream Well Studio, Sacrebleu Productions, Take Five Image licensed under CC-BY-SA - https://flow.movie/

What’s New Recap

Round-up of what’s new in Blender 4.4, in detail.

QUALITY BLEND

Blender 4.4 is all about stability. During the 2024–2025 northern hemisphere winter, Blender developers doubled down on quality and stability in a group effort called “Winter of Quality.”

Winter of Quality

In just a few months, developers fixed over 700 reported issues, revisited old bug reports, and addressed unreported problems.

Alongside bug fixes, Winter of Quality also included tackling technical debt and improving documentation.

Issues Addressed per Module:

Animation & Rigging: 37

Asset System: 9

Core: 15

Grease Pencil: 147

Modeling: 45

Nodes & Physics: 80

Pipeline & IO: 22

Platforms, Builds & Tests: 5

Python API: 21

Render & Cycles: 53

Sculpt, Paint & Texture: 45

User Interface: 119

VFX & Video: 51

Viewport & EEVEE: 47

ACTION PACKED

Blender 4.4 introduces Action Slots, revolutionizing animation workflows by letting multiple data-blocks share a single Action.

WHAT ARE ACTION SLOTS?

Before Action Slots, each data-block specific animation—like an object’s position, a camera’s depth of field, or a material’s shader properties—needed its own separate Action. This made it difficult to animate multiple elements together or share animations between objects or even projects.

For example, if you wanted to animate a camera moving while also changing its depth of field, you’d need two separate Actions, which couldn’t be easily linked or reused.

Now you can mix all sorts of animations such as an object’s position, its material properties, even compositing effects—all within a single Action.

MORE ANIMATION

• Constraints: Relationship Lines for constraints are no longer drawn when there is no target.
• Graph Editor: New F-Curve Noise modifer algorithm.
• Rigging: Bone collection membership is now mirrored when symmetrizing an armature; N-panel normalization now supports locking multiple vertex groups; Removing a modifier, constraint, or shape key also deletes its driver.
• Python API: Conceptual changes in the API.
• Pose Library: Major overhaul to Pose Assets to improve the user experience; Documentation: User Manual update.

VSE: Vastly Superior Editing

The Video Sequencer continues to improve with quality-of-life upgrades for text editing, expanded support for codecs including H.265 and 10/12-bit videos, and performance improvements that make editing faster than ever.

EDIT TEXT ON THE SPOT

Introducing: Edit mode for text strips in Preview! Simply press Tab and type away.

FIND YOUR CENTER

Multi-line text strips can now be properly aligned to the left, right, or center.

FASTER EDITING EVERYTHING

• Building proxies for image sequences is faster now.
• Preview playback performance of float/HDR content is faster now.
• Text strip background fill “Box” is several times faster for large fill areas.
• Curves, Hue Correct, White Balance modifiers are 1.5x-2x faster now.
• Many sequencer effects are slightly faster now thanks to more efficient multi-threading.

VIDEO BEYOND

Blender 4.4 adds support for rendering videos using the H.265/HEVC codec.

Videos are now rendered in BT.709 color space now, preventing playback inconsistencies from the previously unspecified color space.

Additionally, video playback YUV->RGB conversion is more accurate now, fixing color shifts and banding in dark regions.

Blender now supports 10 and 12 bit/channel videos!

During rendering, you can set a color depth of 10 or 12 bits for supported codecs (10 bit for H.264, H.265, AV1, 12 bit for H.265, AV1).

When reading 10-bit or 12-bit videos, they are loaded as floating-point images.

EVEN MORE SEQUENCER

• Improved layout for Text strip properties.
• New roundness property for text strips background box.
• Custom font text strips no longer default to other fonts for missing characters.
• Snapping now works with retiming keys.
• Duplicate strip images in Preview area.
• “Add Effect” menu has been improved.
• Video rotation metadata is now respected.
• Copying strips or creating metastrips now includes effect chains automatically, avoiding selection errors.
• Proxies for EXR (or other float/HDR format) image strips now work properly.

EXPAND YOUR BLENDER

The Blender Extensions platform keeps growing, with over 500 free add-ons and themes to customize your workflows.

You can also share your own add-ons and themes!

MODELING

Pole Position

A new option in the Select by Trait operator lets you select by pole count.

Easily find all 3-pole or 5-pole points in your mesh.

Given their impact on topology, the default selects all poles that do not have 4 edges, allowing for easy inspection.

MODELING Influencer

Joining triangles to quads now prioritizes quad-dominant topology, creating a more structured “grid” layout. This helps maintain cleaner geometry and improves mesh flow, especially in models where uniform quads are preferred.

This behavior can be adjusted using a topology influence factor, to better control how triangles are merged.

MODELING Vertex & Edge Dissolve

Dissolving edges may remove additional, unselected edges to ensure the mesh remains valid. Previously, this also dissolved vertices connected to those unselected edges.

The new behavior processes only vertices that belonged to the selected, now dissolved edges.

MORE MODELING

• Up to 15% faster playback when using custom normals or sharp edges.
• N-panel normalization now supports locking multiple vertex groups.
• Added Curves Edit Mode support for “Select Linked Pick” (L, Shift+L).

SCULPT

Plane & Simple

Stay grounded or reach new heights with a new sculpt brush type: Plane.

The Plane brush is a generalization of the existing Flatten, Fill, and Scrape brushes, with new options to control stabilization and range of influence above and below the brush plane.

Key features include adjustable height above the brush plane, depth control for vertices below it, and an option to invert these settings.

Stabilization options for the Normal (brush plane’s orientation) and Plane ‘s position are also available for precise control.

MORE SCULPT

• Grab Random Cloth and Grab Cloth now use Local Simulation Area by default.
• Sample Color operator assigned to Shift+Ctrl+X in Texture Paint.
• Prevent entering Sculpt Mode in invisible objects.
• Rebuild BVH no longer adds an undo entry.
• Frame Selected renamed to Frame Last Stroke.
• New operator property to override position on sculpt and paint modes.
• Cloth brushes now have the Persistent option off by default.

USER INTERFACE

She Comes in Colors

Window decorations now follow the theme colors on Windows 11 and macOS.

Snap Into Place

Editors now softly snap to minimum and maximum sizes, with improved splitting previews and docking feedback.

Scrollbars are hidden for small editors.

Hidden Away

Horizontal scrollbars are now hidden automatically when they don’t fit in the editor.

Node Editor Fade

In Node Editors, inputs that can’t affect output are now grayed out for group nodes, Geometry Nodes modifiers, and node tools.

OTHER EDITOR IMPROVEMENTS

Asset Browser

• New default sorting option: assets now sorted by catalog instead of name.
• New operator to remove asset preview, available in the Asset Browser sidebar.
• Brush names are easier to read with Light theme.

UV/Image Editor

• Image Editor view mode now uses “sample” as default tool.
• UV Editor: Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V shortcuts for copying and pasting UVs.

Status Bar

• Show warning when active object has non-uniform or negative scale.
• Show warning when transform operation has no effect.
• Color Picker Status Help shown for MacOS for picking outside of Blender.
• Improved status bar display for several operators.
• Notification banners are now truncated when very long.
• Show notification when hiding objects.

3D Viewport

• Default front face color for Face Orientation overlay is now transparent.
• Mesh indices overlay setting is now always visible, regardless of Developer Extras.
• “Measure” tool items can now be deleted with gizmos off.
• Animations can now play in Sculpt mode.
• Viewport Render now displays a progress bar.
• Brush/tool falloff curve presets expanded in popovers.
• Knife tool overlay now uses gizmo theme colors.
• More readable mesh indices.
• Object data name show shown in text overlay.
• FPS display in overlay no longer jiggles when starting.

Preferences

• Extensions: Add button to quickly access an add-on’s folder.
• More user preferences now reset to actual defaults.
• Improved Studio Lights Editor interface layout.
• Language translation options are now preserved when changing languages.
• See all Preferences changes.

Properties

• Persistent height and scroll position on tree-views.
• Improved container/codec ordering in FFMPEG video drop-downs.
• UI Lists now be sorted in reversed alphabetical.
• See all Properties editor changes.

macOS Quick Look

On macOS, you can now preview blend file contents in a thumbnail in Finder, App Exposé and Spotlight.

EVERYTHING UI

Files

• Full file name now shown on the recent items tool-tips.
• Default file names now capitalized as “Untitled”.

Fonts

• Improved selection from Fonts folder.
• Improved calculation of text string length for monospaced fonts.
• Interface font, “Inter”, updated to 4.1.

Dialogs

• Centered dialogs can now be moved.
• Popup alerts (e.g. Python script warnings) adjust width based on content.
• Quick Favorites and other menus now support accelerators (underlined letters) for toggles.
• Improved Adjust Last Operation behavior.
• Reset to Defaults in Redo Panel no longer closes it.
• Preview items show a slight background in menus.
• Pie menus now close on loss of window focus.

Cursors

• Increased contrast for transform cursors.
• Larger alternative version of the “frame” cursor for high-DPI displays.

Icons

• Batch Rename now has icons for data type.
• “Material” icon flipped horizontally to better differentiate it from “World.”

General

• Rename masking property to better reflect its usage.
• Eyedropper color picking can now be canceled without losing the original color.
• Preview images load faster and display fewer artifacts at different sizes.
• Show warning when image drag-and-drop fails.
• Preview items show a loading icon while loading or being rendered.

Theme

• Selected outline color for pulldowns is now customizable.
• Light theme icon border now mirrors earlier Blender versions.

Input

• Color picker HSL value can now be adjusted by trackpad scrolling.
• Improvements to 3Dconnexion NDOF support.
• NDOF Orbit direction now inverts when upside down.

Text Objects

• Text Objects with non-default fonts no longer load missing characters from other fonts.
• Text Objects with missing or invalid fonts no longer use characters from the default font.

Tooltips

• Tooltips now appear while animation is playing.
• Status colors are clearer on light backgrounds.
• Colorspace tooltips show more details with expanded acronyms.
• Properly display colors without alpha.
• Improved vertical centering.
• Tooltips now disappear faster with Gizmo interaction.
• No longer redraw with slight mouse movements.

Animation

• Animated values for nodes and inputs now have clearer names.
• Auto keyframe toggle works better with keyboard shortcuts.
• Better feedback during Animation Playback timer test.
• Improved current frame indicator styling in movie clip and image editors.

COMPOSITOR

Speed for Everyone

The CPU compositor was rewritten to pave the way for future development.

The rewrite provides significant improvements in performance in certain configurations of some nodes, caching of static resources like images, and less memory usage on node setups with many nodes that operate on pixels.

Filter nodes are particularly faster now:

• Levels node is up to 10x faster.
• Filter and Kuwahara are twice as fast.
• Blur nodes up to four times faster.
• Glare filter is not only more advanced but also 6x more performant.
• Pixelate node is 9x faster.

Adjusting compositor node trees can be significantly faster and more interactive. That’s because the compositor now avoids computing outputs that aren’t viewed by the user through the backdrop or image editor.

The overall compositing experience should now feel more responsive, whether you’re using the CPU or GPU.

COMPOSITOR Glare Glow Up

The Glare node got a major revamp for better control and usability:

• Linkable Inputs – Most node options are now input sockets you can connect.
• New Outputs – Generated glare and highlights are now exposed as output sockets.
• A new Strength input lets you adjust glare intensity.
• Fog Glow and Bloom sizes are now linear and scale properly.
• More realistic, energy-conserving, and properly scaled Bloom.
• Adjust glare saturation and tint with dedicated inputs.
• Highlight Control – Clamp and smooth highlights with the new Smoothness and Maximum inputs.
• Tidy UI – Inputs are now neatly organized into collapsible panels.

MORE COMPOSITOR

• Added support for integer sockets.
• New Quality option of OpenImageDenoise on the Denoise node.
• Fast Gaussian Blur is now much more accurate.
• Image transformations are no longer destructive until processed.
• Wrapping is now Repeat in the Translate node.
• Notes on compatibility.

INDUSTRY READY

All library versions used in Blender 4.4 are aligned with the VFX Reference Platform 2025, making studio pipeline integration and maintenance easier.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

Geometry Nodes

• New node “Find in String”.
• New input nodes: Collection and Object.
• New “Limit Surface” option available in the Subdivision Surface node.
• Normal input node now outputs proper face corner normals instead of just face normals.
• Join Geometry and Realize Instances nodes now preserve the vertex group status of input attributes.
• The text overlay in the 3D view works for matrix attributes now.
• Performance: Triangulate node is 30x to 100x faster.
• Sort Elements node is 50% faster in common scenarios.
• The Warning node now has a dynamic label depending on the selected type.
• UI: Resizing nodes now support snapping.

Core

• Added support for rendering videos using H.265/HEVC codec.
• BLENDER_SYSTEM_SCRIPTS now supports multiple paths.
• New BLENDER_CUSTOM_SPLASH to replace the splash screen artwork.
• EXR images that use DWAA/DWAB compression codec now have a Quality setting.
• “Render Audio” can now render to AAC (.aac) format.
• Auto-save and quit.blend files are now always saved with compression.

3D Viewport

• Overlays engine rewrite and improvements.
• Expose view Lock Rotation property in the sidebar View panel.

USD

• Animated volumes from Geometry Nodes or volume modifiers are now supported for export.
• Material displacement for UsdPreviewSurface is now supported in import and export.
• Point instancers with animated attributes are now supported on import.
• The experimental “Instancing” option now supports object hierarchies and non-mesh geometry (e.g., curves, point clouds).
• New Python hooks.
• Added “Merge parent Xform” option to control USD prim merging with its Xform parent during import for better hierarchy preservation.
• Added “Apply Unit Conversion Scale” option to scale objects by the USD stage’s meters per unit value.
• Added “Merge parent Xform” option to control whether Blender object transforms are written to their data prim or kept separate on export, reducing USD prim count and preserving hierarchy.
• Added “Units” and “Meters Per Unit” options to set the USD Stage measurement or a custom value.
• USD & Alembic: Edge and vertex crease processing now respects the value range expected by OpenSubdiv.

Vulkan (experimental)

• Huge performance improvements.
• Compatibility and Known Issues.

Grease Pencil

• Several operators and functionality from the old Grease Pencil were restored.
• Properties of locked materials can be edited (similar to properties of locked layers).
• Invisible layers are no longer part of evaluated data.
• UI: The preview icon of locked materials is no longer grayed out.
• “Lock all” and “Unlock all” operators now work on Layer Groups.
• “Hide Others” operator now also considers layer groups.
• Vertex colors and layer tinting render in “Solid” shading mode.

glTF

• Added support for importing Action Slots.
• Add option to not select created objects.
• Add option to import scene extras or not.
• Export: Several (breaking) changes to hooks.
• Export: Always bake scene animation, so driven animated properties can be exported.
• Export: Add interpolation fallback option.
• Export: Several improvements to Collection export.
• Bug fixes.

Python API

• New: bpy.app.module indicates if Blender is running as Python module.
• New property to check if installation is portable.
• New operations for Curves.
• New properties for Nodes.
• Grease Pencil Python API updates.
• VSE: Major API breaking changes and deprecated properties.
• Animation: Slotted Action related additions, deprecated properties and breaking changes.
• Complete list of API breaking changes.

Cycles

• Improved OptiX Denoiser.
• More accurately render sub-pixel bump mapping.
• Baking: Speed up Selected to Active baking.
• OSL: Improved closure compatibility with MaterialX.
• Improved Sample Subset.
• More robust host memory fallback when the GPU runs out of memory.
• NVIDIA: Support GeForce RTX 50×0 series (Blackwell).
• AMD: Support RX 90×0 series (RDNA4).
• AMD: HIP RT library updates and minimum driver version increased.
• Intel: Minimum driver version increased.
• Intel: Improved image texture sampling performance.

Spreadsheet

The selection filter for meshes now gives expected results for non-vertex domains.

Outliner

• Improved vertex group sorting.
• Support Ctrl/Shift for excluding collections.
• Fixed overlapping icons with some display options.
• Can now un-isolate collection when a linked collection is present.
• Non-object active item text now drawn in “text high” color.
• Drag and drop to scene now updates the view.
• Child objects linked to other collections are now faded.

Windows

• Copy and paste OS image paths into Image Editor.
• File system volume names display correctly with high-bit Unicode characters.
• AltGr key is now treated as regular Alt key.

macOS

• Improved color picking outside of Blender windows.
• Keymaps can be searched with native key names.
• Main window title improvements.
• Enhanced NDOF device input handling when using 3DConnexion driver v10.8.7 and later.

Linux

• Fixed text pasting from Blender to certain other applications (such as Firefox) not working under X11.

On April 15th 2025, Blender 4.4.1 was released featuring 108 additional bug fixes.

On April 29th 2025, Blender 4.4.2 and Blender 4.4.3 were released featuring 8 additional bug fixes.

Plus hundreds of bug fixes, code cleanups and refactors.

CREDITS

List of developers that contributed to Blender 4.4

Blender is a community project.

Learn more on how you can contribute to Blender.

Splash artwork: Flow © Dream Well Studio, Sacrebleu Productions, Take Five – Licensed under CC-BY-SA – flow.movie

Huge thanks to everyone involved 🧡

The Blender team. March 18th, 2025

Artistic freedom starts with Blender

The Free and Open Source 3D Creation Suite

Original source

Blender 4.3 was released on November 19, 2024.
Check out out the final release notes on blender.org.

• Animation & Rigging
• Compositor
• Core
• Cycles
• EEVEE & Viewport
• Geometry Nodes
• Grease Pencil
• Modeling & UV
• Pipeline, Assets & I/O
• Python API & Text Editor
• Rendering
• Sculpt, Paint, Texture
• User Interface
• Video Sequencer

Compatibility

Windows on Arm (experimental)

This is a new step towards bringing Blender to new architectures. Test Blender on Windows on Arm by downloading the arm64 build.

Cycles

• On macOS, support for AMD and Intel GPUs through the Metal backend of Cycles has been removed (c8340cf754)
• The minimum driver version requirement for NVIDIA GPUs has been increased to 495.89 as a result of updating to OptiX 7.4 (4f5b6b114d)
• Support for Vega in Cycles AMD HIP backend has been removed (c2f93e0f68)

See all compatibility changes

Bugfixes

• Fixes for issues present in previous versions

Corrective Releases

Original source

A Stroke of Genius

Brush assets, faster sculpting, a revolutionized Grease Pencil, and more. Blender 4.3 got you covered.

Video Recap

Video Recap

Round-up of what’s new, in detail.

EEVEE

It’s (real-)time for LIGHT LINKING

The real-time renderer EEVEE now supports Light Linking and Shadow Linking—features previously available only in Cycles.

More control than eeveer before.

With light linking, lights can be set to affect only specific objects in the scene.

Shadow linking additionally gives control over which objects acts as shadow blockers for a light.

This is now feature parity with Cycles.

SHADERS

METAL TO THE PEDAL

A new Metallic BSDF node has been added to the shader editor.

Metallic BSDF

This new node exposes existing, but hard to access metallic material configurations in a small node.

Metallic BSDF recreating Nickel and Copper materials.

F82 Tint

The F82 Tint approximation is artist friendly, taking colors as inputs. This is currently in use by the Principled BSDF.

Conductor Fresnel

This method is more complex to use, requiring IOR and Extinction coefficients per color channel as inputs. However, it can produce subtly more accurate results for real-world metals, previously achievable only through custom OSL scripts.

EEVEE does not yet support the Conductor Fresnel type, so it internally remaps the IOR and Extinction coefficients to colors and uses them with the F82 Tint approximation.

TEXTURES

Make Some (Gabor) Noise

A new texture node was added that can create procedural Gabor noise for random interleaved bands with controllable direction and width.

COMPOSITOR

YOU SHALL PASS

Forget F12. EEVEE passes are now available for interactive compositing.

MORE COMPOSITOR

• Color Balance: New White Point conversion mode
• File Output: New global Save As Render option
• GPU Compositor: Support for meta-data necessary for exchanging Cryptomatte through EXRs using the File Output node
• Compositor Auto Render has been removed

BLENDER EXTENDED

The Blender Extensions platform continues to grow, offering hundreds of free add-ons and themes that enable endless customization of workflows.

You can also share your own add-ons and themes!

UV EDITING

SLIM UVs

A new method makes unwrapping organic shapes a breeze.

Minimum Stretch, Minimal Effort

A new iterative unwrapping method “Minimum Stretch” has been added which can deliver results with less distortion by iteratively refining the result.

Ideal for organic shapes. This uses the SLIM algorithm (Scalable Local Injective Mappings) internally, see the research publication.

It can be used from the Unwrap menu as well as “Live Unwrap”.

STUDIO FRIENDLY

Thanks to portable installation, new environment variables, custom bundling of extensions, Blender 4.3 is easier than ever to integrate in studio pipelines.

GEOMETRY NODES

SO MUCH IT DOESN’T FIT THIS TITLE

For Each Element Zone. Gizmos. Support for Grease Pencil. Packed Bakes. Custom Warnings. Geometry Names. New Nodes.

Simon Thommes offers a delightful sneak peek into the abundance of Geo Goodies packed into this Blender update!

EFFORTLESS ITERATION WITH FOR EACH ELEMENT

A new type of loop zone is available now! The For Each Element zone will make it easy to iterate over elements of a geometry in parallel, making repetitive processes a breeze to handle.

GET HANDS-ON

You can now add gizmos to node groups! This means you can edit the inputs to a node tree right in the 3D viewport – no need to dive into the node editor or modifier stack. It’s a game-changer for a more intuitive and hands-on experience!

GEOMETRY NAMING MADE EASY

Introducing the Set Geometry Name node, a new node designed to enhance your workflow. This node allows for the easy assignment of names to geometries, with automatic initialization based on object and collection names.

GEO NODES MEETS GREASE PENCIL

Geometry Nodes now work smoothly with Grease Pencil data, breaking it down into layers with curves and custom attributes. Updated nodes can now handle Grease Pencil data seamlessly, processing each layer separately.

NEW UTILITY NODES

• Hash Value: Hashes various types into an integer. Useful to generate stable randomness.
• Integer Math: Provides building block support for integer operations

WARNINGS UI

Introducing the Warning Node, which allows custom warnings to be added to node groups, allowing dynamic messaging directly on the interface.

The display of warnings in the Geometry Nodes modifier has been reorganized. They are now in a panel and ordered by severity and alphabetically.

OTHER GEO GOODIES

PACKED BAKES

Bakes created with the Bake node or Simulation zone can now be packed into the .blend file.

MORE GEOMETRY NODES

• Convert Grease Pencil to Curves
• Convert Curves to Grease Pencil
• Merge Layers node for Grease Pencil layers
• Improved node timings for better accuracy
• Skip checkbox is now hidden in Simulation Zone
• Sculpt mask made accessible in node tools

USER INTERFACE

Dock-on Dock-off

Introducing: Area Docking! Tear an area into its own (now neatly named) window, or dock it back into another area.

Lots to Say

Tooltips now provide much more information than before.

Images display their resolution and color space, movies show their duration, and fonts include previews.

Clarity

A new theme option allows for enhanced highlights around an area when the mouse is over it, for better accessibility.

Non-active areas can also have a custom border color.

MORE UI

• Added support for line separators in built-in nodes.
• Hover on panel headers show their description.
• Node Groups: new default width option.
• String sockets can now use placeholders instead of labels, to allow wider input fields.
• Inserting nodes with link-drag-search is much more convenient now.
• macOS: New “Hand”-style mouse cursors added for dialog and docking interaction.
• New cursors for VSE handles.
• File Browser: Assign mouse buttons 4 and 5 to navigate back/next.
• Support for selecting the viewed geometry from the instance tree.
• Status bar cleared during text input and other modal operations.
• Compact layout thanks to Improved spacing.
• New SVG icons.
• Show screen operation keymaps info.
• Improved Color Picker layout.
• Wider data-block search lists.
• Dialogs: Change the cursor on hover when a dialog can be dragged.
• Timeline (and similar editors) hide the scroll-bars when they are sized very short.
• Maximum UI resolution scale increased to 6x.
• Prevent tooltips from changing size on zoom.
• Viewport color picking in Rendering mode now returns the linear color value, without view transform applied.
• The Auto-Keying button is now colored red when active.
• Windows with a single editor now have descriptive titles.
• Better padding all over the place.
• File Browser thumbnail file type icon moved to corner of item bounds.
• Color sampling performance improvements.
• Hit size for resizing areas increased.
• Recent Files: New option to clear only items not found.
• Recent Files: Items not found are no longer removed automatically.
• “Save Incremental” menu item moved down in its section to reduce accidental selection.
• “Widget Label” Text Style removed.
• Text weights change correctly if selecting a UI font with non-regular weight.

Plus hundreds of bug fixes, code cleanups and refactors.

See the full list of changes.

Corrective releases:

Blender 4.3.1 was released on December 10th 2024 addressing 95 issues. Updating is highly recommended.

Blender 4.3.2 was released on December 17th 2024 addressing 7 issues. Updating is highly recommended.

CREDITS

List of developers that contributed to Blender 4.3

Blender is a community project. Learn more on how you can contribute to Blender.

Splash artwork and Geometry Nodes demo files by Blender Studio.

Features recap video by Jonathan Lampel from CGCookie, Harry Blends, Christopher 3D, and Aidy Burrows from Creative Shrimp.

Huge thanks to everyone involved ❤️

The Blender team. November, 2024

Original source

Blender 4.2 LTS was released on July 16, 2024.

Check out out the final release notes on blender.org.

This release includes long-term support and will be maintained until July 2026, see the LTS page for a list of bugfixes included in the latest version.

Animation & Rigging

Color Management

Compositor

Core

Cycles

EEVEE

Extensions

Geometry Nodes

Import & Export

Modeling & UV

Physics

Python API

Sculpt

User Interface

Video Sequencer

Compatibility

Hardware Requirements

On Windows and Linux a CPU with SSE4.2 is now required. This is supported since AMD Bulldozer (2011) and Intel Nehalem (2008).

See all compatibility changes

Compositor

Due to added support for GPU rendering and CPU optimizations, some nodes have changed behavior, and certain compositing setups will require manual adjustments.

See all breaking changes.

Add-ons

Most add-ons that used to ship with Blender, are now available on the Extensions Platform where you can browse, install, and update them online from within Blender. Read more about Extensions.

Add-ons that haven't been converted to extensions yet, are still supported as legacy add-ons and can be installed from disk as usual.

To ease the distribution and transition to the new system, a bundle of the add-ons that shipped with Blender 4.1 is available for download.

IDProperties

System-defined and library-overridable IDProperties are now statically typed.

Original source

Dive in.

New EEVEE, better Cycles, online extensions, faster everything.

Video Recap

Video Recap

Round-up of what’s new, in detail.

EEVEE

NEXT LEVEL

The next generation of the render engine EEVEE is here. Completely rewritten from scratch to allow global illumination, displacement, better SSS, viewport motion blur, and so much more.

Sunsational Lighting

Sun sational
Lighting

Lighting is a breeze with added support for screen space global illumination.
EEVEE can automatically extract intense lights from the World environment and treat them as Sun lights, improving the lighting quality and casting real shadows.

Read Manual

Raytraced global illumination in real-time. No lights, purely lit and shadows produced by the World environment.

Vector displacement now

Bump up your game

Bump up your game

Real displacement is now supported by EEVEE.
Just like in Cycles, setting your materials to “Displacement and Bump” will combine true displacement and bump mapping for finer details. Vertex position is modified.

Read Manual

SSSuperb Scattering

SSS uperb Scattering

Subsurface Scattering now doesn’t leak between objects and has no energy loss.
The subsurface translucency is now always computed, and the associated option has been removed.

Read More

Turn Up the Volume

Turn Up the Volume

Dithered volumetrics provide a much more stable result while navigating the scene.

Read Manual

Blurry Vision

Blurry Vision

Motion blur is now visible in the 3D Viewport through the camera view and supports a custom
Shutter Curve
, matching Cycles.

Real-time motion blur in the 3D Viewport.

MORE EEVEE

MORE EEVEE

Virtual Shadow Maps
Unlimited BSDFs
New Transparent Shadows option
Unlimited number of Lights
Lights now support ray visibility options
Multithreaded Shader Compilation
Refined User Interface
Shadow Map Raytracing
Lights are now visible through refractive surfaces
Glossy lighting no longer leaks at the back of objects
Better quality Depth of Field
New Backface Culling option for shadows
Materials Dithered render method
Thickness output
Improved Blended materials
Raytraced Transmission now affects all BSDF nodes
Better Image Stability

MIGRATION PLAN

Even though conversion to the new EEVEE happens automatically and most scenes should just work, some adjustments are required for a smooth transition.

Updating to the New EEVEE

See Limitations

Community Videos

Community Videos

I tried Eevee Next... Here's What I Learned
How I Make REALISTIC Renders with EEVEE Next!
Everything you need to know about EEVEE Next

CYCLES

MAGICAL, PRETTIER, SMOOTHER, FASTER

Cycles got a massive upgrade to make your renders not only look better, but also render faster. It’s a kind of magic.

RAY TRAVEL

RAY TRAVEL

The new
Ray Portal BSDF
transports rays to another location in the scene with a specified ray position and normal.
It can be used to render portals for visual effects and other production rendering tricks.
See the documentation for details and example node setups.

Read Manual

Simulating a camera feed using Ray Portals.

Soap bubbles effect (IOR 1.7, 400nm)

THIN FILM INTERFERENCE

THIN FILM INTERFERENCE

The Principled BSDF now supports physically accurate thin film interference effects for specular reflection and transmission.
Initially, this is only applied to dielectric materials, support for metallic thin film effects is planned.

Read More

SOFT VOLUMES

SOFT VOLUMES

Blender 4.2 LTS is your go-to for rendering volumes, with improved volume light sampling that delivers smoother results for spotlights and area lights.
Less noise. Faster.

Before (5.16s)
After (4.42s)

BLUE NOISE

BLUE NOISE

Blue noise dithered sampling to improve the visual quality of renders. This mainly helps when setting the maximum number of samples to a low number, and for interactive viewport renders.
New files use this mode by default, while existing files can be changed in the Sampling → Advanced panel.

MORE CYCLES

MORE CYCLES

Upgraded to OpenImageDenoise 2.3 for improved quality
New World Override option for View Layers
New Roughness input in Subsurface Scattering node
Intel GPU rendering now supports host memory fallback
Motion Blur settings are now shared with EEVEE
GPU accelerated denoising support for AMD GPUs on Windows + Linux
Reduced Blender installation size due to GPU kernels compression
GPU accelerated denoising supported on CPU renders
Principled Hair with the Huang model provides better close-up renders

EXTENSIONS

EXTENSIONS ADD-ON ARE- ON

EXTENSIONS
ADD-ON
ARE- ON

Add-ons and themes have received a big overhaul and are now unified as
Extensions
.
The best part? They can be updated right from within Blender!

EASY INSTALL

EASY INSTALL

Getting extensions has never been this easy:

• Drag & Drop from websites such as
  extensions.blender.org
• Bundle them in production or educational environments.
• Support for “legacy” add-ons.
• Install from disk.

Read Manual

Install via drag and drop from
extensions.blender.org

Update Extensions from within Blender.

STAY UP-TO-DATE

STAY UP-TO-DATE

Extension repositories can check for updates automatically on startup. This can be disabled on a per-repository basis

WORK OFFLINE

WORK OFFLINE

Internet access is fully optional, and off by default.
You can always install extensions manually via
Install from Disk
(or drag and drop the zip file into Blender) or by using
System extensions repositories
.

Read Manual

Allow Online Access or continue happily offline.

EXTENSIONS PLATFORM

EXTENSIONS PLATFORM

An ever-growing hub of community-made, free, and open-source extensions for Blender.

extensions.blender.org

A new community-managed website for sharing and discovering free and open-source Blender extensions.

• Detailed descriptions with images, videos and user ratings.
• Complete history of versions for present and future releases.
• Community review and approval process.
• Easy installation via drag and drop.

Visit extensions.blender.org

Blender Extensions Platform website.

Extensions Manager in Blender.

MANAGE EXTENSIONS

MANAGE EXTENSIONS

Extensions can be managed from the Preferences.

• Search for new extensions.
• Install and uninstall.
• Check for updates.

Read Manual

Drag, drop. Ready to go!
The Extensions Platform connects authors with users, and extensions with Blender.
Installing add-ons and themes is now a breeze.
Discover over 200 Extensions
Create Your Own Extensions

STUDIO FRIENDLY

Thanks to portable installation, new environment variables, custom bundling of extensions, Blender 4.2 LTS is easier than ever to integrate in studio pipelines.

Deploying Blender in Production

Khronos PBR Neutral
Tone Mapper

The recently released tone mapper by Khronos, aimed at displaying true-to-life assets, is now built into Blender.

Khronos PBR Neutral enables faithful reproduction of a product’s base color, hue and saturation when using PBR rendering under grayscale lighting, while eliminating HDR artifacts around highlights.

Read Announcement

DRAW THE LINE

DRAW THE LINE

Polyline joins the family of gestures (lasso, box, and line), allowing for a quick way to create polygonal shapes.

Polyline Trim tool used to create boolean operations that can add or remove geometry.

COMPLETE TOOLSET

COMPLETE TOOL SET

Additionally, the
Line
gesture is now supported for
Trim
,
Face Set
, and
Hide
.
The
Lasso
gesture is now supported for the
Hide
tool too.

See All Tools

PUT IT TO THE TEST

Share and compare your computer’s score with openly accessible benchmarks provided by the Blender community.

Download Blender Benchmark

ENTER THE MATRIX

A whole new socket type for matrices makes it easier than ever to work with transformations using nodes. This lays the ground work for the future of Geometry Nodes with advanced custom geometry operations. The new socket type comes alongside a wide range of new nodes as well as the integration into existing ones.

New Matrix socket used for placing the pizza boxes.

TRY IT YOURSELF

Get the file used in this video to play with the new Matrix socket.

Download Demo File

POINT AND SHOOT

Node Tools are becoming more and more interactive! It is now possible to use information about the viewport and mouse position in the node-tree. Together with the new
Wait for Click
feature this lets you control exactly where the tool will take effect.

Impact Fracture tool created with Geometry Nodes.

TRY IT YOURSELF

Use the Impact Fracture tool created with Geometry Nodes.

Download Demo File

New nodes to ease the making of interactive Node Tools.

MORE GEOMETRY NODES

MORE GEOMETRY NODES

Scale Elements node is now 4-10x faster
Sample UV Surface is now 10-20x faster on large meshes
Multi-threading optimizations

See all Geometry Nodes changes

Donate to Blender

Help keep the project alive.
Less than 0.1% of users donate to Blender. Your contribution will make a difference.
We don’t show advertisements or sell your data. We are completely funded by donations from our community.

Become a member

Become a member

membership badge.
Link on website.
Logo on website.
Name on website.

Donate Monthly

Donate Monthly

Donate, just once

Donate, just once

Donate

Donate

Corporate memberships

SEQUENCER

The Video Sequencer takes another leap in design, tools, and performance.

BEAUTY ALL AROUND

BEAUTY ALL AROUND

Strips are now rendered using a shader with rounded corners, making it easier to see at a glance where a strip ends and the next begins.
Active and selected strips have thicker outlines, and an extra dark edge around to improve contrast.
Rounded corners, thicker outlines, improved contrast. Prettier and functional.

LOOK MUM NO HANDLES

LOOK MUM NO HANDLES

Speed up your editing by clicking the sides of a strip to tweak it. You can also click between two strips to adjust both simultaneously.
Visible handles can be brought back from Preferences ➝ Editing ➝ Video Sequencer.

MISSING IN ACTION

MISSING IN ACTION

Strips that reference missing source files or scenes are now highlighted in red and use iconography, making them easy to spot.
Strips that point to broken source are now hard to miss.

MORE THAN WORDS

MORE THAN WORDS

The Text strip has received a number of improvements for tweaking the
shadow offset, angle, blur size, and a new
Outline
option.

Read Manual

MORE SEQUENCER

MORE SEQUENCER

Several performance improvements
New operator: Frame Scene Range/Preview Range
Preview: Luma Waveform “Separate colors” replaced by “RGB Parade” scope
The Overlays popover has been reorganized for clarity
Support for drag and drop multiple files
Waveforms are now half-size by default
New cache line overlay

INDUSTRY READY

INDUSTRY READY

Python 3.11, OpenEXR 3.2, OpenColorIO 2.3, OpenSubdiv 3.6, and more.
Blender 4.2 LTS is fully aligned with the
VFX Reference Platform 2024
, making it easier to integrate and maintain in studio pipelines.

VFX Platform 2024

See All Library Changes

I/O

Collection Exporters

Collections can now specify their own exporters, making it easier to repeatedly export assets, such as glTF or USD for studio pipelines.
You can export all collections with a single click via the File menu, and each collection can be exported to multiple file formats at once.
Export settings are saved in .blend files for easy sharing and consistent use across Blender sessions.

Read Manual

Blender 4.2 LTS Collection Exporters

Pixar USD

UNIVERSAL SCENE DESCRIPTION

USD ALL

Blender 4.2 LTS adds support for importing and exporting
hair curves
, and for importing
point clouds
.
On import, meshes are now
validated
by default, USD dome light
converted into a World shader
, and a new option lets you
import only defined prims
.
New export options include
filtering export types
, converting the
World shader to a USD dome light
, setting the
stage up axis
, specify
XForm
conventions,
triangulating meshes
,
down-sampling textures
for USDZ, generating
MaterialX
networks from Blender shader nodes, and
renaming the active UV map
to “st” by default, following USD conventions.

MORE I/O

MORE I/O

Alembic: Import/Export support for hair curves
glTF: Several import/export improvements
Alembic: Fixed rendering animated curves
Validating meshes is now 2-3x faster
Import multiple Alembic files at once
COLLADA is now considered legacy
Validate Meshes is now default for USD, OBJ, PLY, and STL importers

TAKE AWAY

TAKE AWAY

Blender has been portable since day one, but Blender 4.2 LTS takes it to another level: you can now
bring your own configuration with you
.
Create a folder named “portable” next to where you run Blender, and it will attempt to load (or create) settings in that folder first.
Taking Blender with you has never been easier.

Read more about Portable Installation

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GET THE ARTWORK

Blender splash artwork source files are available for you to play with, not only for Blender 4.2 LTS but for
previous versions as well.

Download Splash File (300MB)

Blender 4.2 LTS splash by Blender Studio

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

Compositor

• Compositing can now utilize GPU acceleration
• New Timings overlay displaying each node’s execution time
• Glare node: Added Bloom mode
• Translate node: New Interpolation option to choose between Nearest, Bilinear, and Bicubic
• CPU performance optimizations
• Glare node: Fog Glow up to 25x faster
• Hue Correct: Support wrapping to fix discontinuity issues
• Vector Blur node now matches EEVEE’s motion blur
• Viewport Compositor: the compositing space is now always limited to the camera region
• Viewport Compositor: Added support for Fog Glow Glare
• Viewport Compositor: Added support for Legacy Cryptomatte
• Viewport Compositor: Added support for Fast Gaussian Blur
• Breaking changes

3D Viewport

• Overlays: New option to toggle Camera Guides
• Overlays: New option to toggle Camera Passepartout
• Overlays: Improved contrast for text info
• Added “Modifiers” submenu under Object menu
• Reduced dead zone for 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse
• Corrected initial viewport tilt
• Sidebar made a bit wider

Outliner

• Press Ctrl-F to start search. Alt-F to clear
• Orphan Data mode renamed to Unused Data
• Blender File mode now supports managing user counts

User Interface

• Improved dialogs
• “Open File Location” in recent Items context menu
• Color fields now have tooltips
• Support for horizontal and vertical rules in layouts
• Text shader optimizations
• Update interface font
• Several tooltips updated
• Improved user interface scaling
• Improved square color picker
• Asset Browser now supports Maximize Area
• Wavelength node now uses nanometer-scale inputs
• Several improvements to Status Bar keymap display
• Consistent “Select” menus
• “Zoom” menus reorganized
• Linux: Image copy and paste now works in Wayland
• Linux: Support for registering & unregistering file-type associations
• New button to save custom themes
• Improvements to Purge operator
• See all User Interface changes

Properties Editor

• Add, remove, apply, and reorder modifiers of all selected objects by holding alt
• Add eyedropper button to camera focus distance

Node Editor

• Node Groups: Support for custom color tags
• Node Groups: Support for descriptions, to be used as tooltips
• Several improvements to tooltips
• Improved sorting in search when adding nodes
• Invalid (red) links now have additional information
• UX: Dragging a node onto an incompatible link does not remove the link anymore
• Added support for resetting socket values
• Viewers are now connected closer to the node
• Added support for Ctrl+Click to rename (some) sockets
• New overlay to reroute labels that are derived from upstream reroute nodes
• See all Node Editor changes

Text Editor

• Support for GLSL syntax highlighting
• Drop strings and URLs into the Text Editor and Python Console

Performance

• Undo: Up to 5x faster while using less memory

Drivers

• New “Copy Driver to Selected” option in the right-click menu of driven properties

Constraints

• Limit Rotation: Better handle more than 180º
• Limit Rotation: New “Legacy Behavior” option

Armatures

• Per bone wire width for custom bone shapes
• Subdividing a bone names the new bones in sequential order
• Bones can now be active even if they are invisible
• “Stick” drawing mode now uses bone colors

NLA

• Performance improvements
• Clearer text for Make Single User dialog

Dope Sheet

• New key type: Generated
• Shape Key Editor: Edit non-relative shape keys

Graph Editor

• Massive performance improvements and smoother panning
• Enhanced Ease operator with new Sharpness setting

Motion Paths

• Points now use the Vertex theme color
• New custom color for before/after frame

Animation Editors

• “Frame Scene/Preview Range”, to center the view range in Dope Sheet, Timeline, Graph Editor, NLA, and Sequencer

Modeling

• Customizable rotation snap increment added for Transform tool
• ‘Absolute Grid Snap’ option replaced with a new mode: Snap to Grid
• Several new operators for editing (hair) Curves data-block

Modifiers

• New option to pin modifiers to the bottom of the stack
• New operator, Shade Auto Smooth, to quickly add a Smooth by Angle modifier and pin it to the bottom of the stack
• “Normal Edit” and “Weighted Normal” modifiers moved to the Normals menu

UV

• New “Edge” and “Vertex Slide” operators
• “Set Snap Base” [B] now works in the UV Editor

Physics

• Fluid domains now have liquid meshing enabled by default, so that they are visible in renders

Environment Variables

• New BLENDER_SYSTEM_EXTENSIONS environment variable
• Fixed and improved BLENDER_SYSTEM_SCRIPTS

Command Line Interface

• New --online-mode and --offline-mode arguments to force Blender to enable or disable online access, overriding the preferences
• Running in background-mode now disables audio by default

Add-ons

• Copy Global Transform: Relative copy/paste
• Copy Global Transform: New ‘Fix to Camera’ operator

Python API

• Exporter add-ons can add support for the new Collection Exporters
• New method for packaging add-ons
• Added support for Layout Panels
• Modal operators list and new priority option
• New online_access read-only property
• Include info string for render_stats handler
• New Utils Module options
• Breaking changes

Plus hundreds of bug fixes, code cleanups and refactors.

See the full list of changes.

It’s a keeper.

The LTS in Blender 4.2 LTS stands for “long-term support”, meaning it will get fixes for up to two years, until July 2026.

CREDITS

List of developers that contributed to Blender 4.2 LTS
Blender is a community project.
Learn more on how you can contribute to Blender.
Splash artwork and Geometry Nodes demo files by Blender Studio.
Features recap video by Jonathan Lampel from CGCookie.
Geometry Nodes recap video by Harry Blends.
Huge thanks to everyone involved ❤️
The Blender team. July, 2024

Artistic freedom starts with Blender
The Free and Open Source 3D Creation Suite

Original source