Blender Foundation and the online developers community are proud to present Blender 4.3!

Blender 4.3 builds on the feature-packed 4.2 LTS with improvements to existing tools, performance enhancements, and the foundations that will shape the years to come.

Some highlights:

• EEVEE: Light & Shadow Linking
• Rendering: Metallic BSDF, and new Gabor Noise texture.
• Compositor: Support for EEVEE passes, new White Point Color Balance, and more.
• Grease Pencil: Complete rewrite to support Layer Groups, Geometry Nodes, better erase tool, gradients, and much more.
• Geometry Nodes: For Each Zone, Gizmos, Bakes can be packed now, new nodes and UI improvements.
• Sculpt: Major refactor under the hood to improve performance.
• UV: New “Minimum Stretch” (SLIM) unwrapping method.
• Modeling: Bevel modifier can now use custom attributes.
• Brush Assets: All brushes are now assets, to be shared easily between projects.
• USD: Support for exporting Point Clouds.
• glTF: Draco mesh compression for importing, better export of UDIM tiles, quaternions and matrix attributes. Plus loads of bug fixes.
• And so much more!

Watch the video summary on Blender’s YouTube channel.

And many more features and fixes await you—explore the release notes for an in-depth look at what’s new!

This work is made possible thanks to the outstanding contributions of the Blender community, and the support of the over 4800 individuals and 35 organizations contributing to the Blender Development Fund.

Happy Blending! 

The Blender Team
November 19th, 2024

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – The Blender Foundation today announced its latest fundraising campaign. This campaign, themed “Join the 2 percent,” aims to substantially increase the amount of incoming donations – to support the continued development and maintenance of the beloved free and open-source 3D creation software.

Blender is free for everyone. However, developing and maintaining the project is not without cost. These costs are solely covered by donations from thousands of individuals and several corporations. While having a good relationship with corporations is important, individual donations from users are crucial, as they allow Blender to remain an independent community project with development focus on end-user benefits.

Blender is massively popular: 20 million downloads were registered in 2023. Understandably, most people are not in the position to financially support the project, but it’s reasonable to estimate that around 2% of the users have benefited from Blender in one way or another. It’s to these people that the Foundation wishes to reach out: join the 2% of users that donate to Blender and keep it free for everyone!

About the Blender Foundation

The Blender Foundation is a public benefit organization with the mission to provide everyone access to the world’s best 3D CG technology as free/open source tools, by facilitating and supporting the projects at blender.org. Blender is being used by millions of artists, designers, filmmakers, and professionals worldwide. The foundation is committed to ensuring that Blender remains a powerful, free and open-source tool for creative expression and innovation.

Contact: 

Ton Roosendaal, Blender Foundation
foundation@blender.org

Blender Conference 2024 wrapped one week ago, hopefully we all made it past the post-bcon blues!

As usual, you can enjoy all the recorded presentations on Blender’s YouTube channel, and on PeerTube.

Don’t forget to check out the Photo Gallery!

Overall, feedback was positive. Compared to previous years, food and venue rating went up, while overall satisfaction with the event remains very positive. When it comes to the program, satisfaction moved from “extremely high” to “high”, due to the average quality of a few sessions. This is something we will definitely focus on improving for next year!

We will also explore additional ways to encourage attendees to engage with one another, and we aim to make the venue even more welcoming and comfortable.

The event was made possible thanks to the contribution of many people and made memorable thanks to all attendees and speakers. Special thanks to Amerpodia and the Felix Meritis staff, to Faber audiovisuals and especially to the Blender HQ and remote teams for making this an amazing experience.

See you next year!
Francesco

Blender Foundation announces its first user survey, with the goal to learn and understand:

• The user community demographics: age group, geography and professional background, etc.
• Common use cases and workflows
• Most wanted improvements
• How people connect and get involved as contributors
• How the community spends money (donations, marketplaces, training, etc.)
• Future direction of the project

The anonymized results of the survey will be publicly shared in an illustrated and commented format, and also as a raw dataset.

Your input will help shape the future of Blender. 🧡

Thanks!
Francesco

The 2023 Blender Foundation report is now publicly available. Download it at Annual report 2023 (pdf).

Thanks so much for the support we’ve had from you and/or your organizations. Thanks to the Development Fund we could make a real impact; to improve the lives and creative endeavors of many people.

The report is free to share, please do!

Blender Foundation and the online developers community are proud to present Blender 4.2 LTS!

As usual with LTS (long-term support) releases, Blender 4.2 LTS comes packed with features, improvements, and fixes ready to power your projects for the next two years.

Some highlights:

• New render engine: EEVEE got a complete rewrite, bringing global illumination, displacement, better SSS, volumetric lighting and shadows, viewport motion blur, and so much more.
• Cycles: Ray Portals, Thin Film Interference, better volume rendering, blue noise, and more.
• The Compositor: Can now utilize GPU acceleration for offline renders, it’s faster on CPU, and more nodes are supported in the 3D Viewport.
• Extensions: A new way to share, install, and update add-ons and themes online within Blender.
• Portable installation.
• Khronos PBR Neutral Tone Mapper.
• New sculpt tools.
• Video Sequencer: Strips redesign, including highlighting missing media, text strip enhancements, and better performance.
• Collection exporters.
• USD, Alembic, glTF, OBJ, PLY, and STL enhancements.
• Undo up to 5x faster.
• Animation editors and tools upgrades.
• And so much more!

This also marks the launch of the online Extensions Platform – a community website to share free and open source add-ons and themes.

Watch the video summary on Blender’s YouTube channel.

And many more features and fixes await you—explore the release notes for an in-depth look at what’s new!

Blender 4.2 is the fifth LTS release, each covering two years of fixes, once again solidifying the Blender Foundation’s commitment to making Blender a reliable tool for use in production and educational environments.

• Blender 2.83 LTS — 2020 – 2022 (20 releases)
• Blender 2.93 LTS — 2021 – 2023 (18 releases)
• Blender 3.3 LTS — 2022 – 2024 (21 releases so far)
• Blender 3.6 LTS — 2023 – 2025 (14 releases so far)
• Blender 4.2 LTS — 2024 – 2026

This work is made possible thanks to the outstanding contributions of the Blender community, and the support of the over 4400 individuals and 38 organizations contributing to the Blender Development Fund.

Happy Blending! 

The Blender Team
July 16th, 2024

Let’s recap yet another successful Annecy experience for the Blender team. This year we had a corner booth at the film market, a short film selected in the festival, and a studio meet-up event in the city center.

The film market went well. At this point everyone is well aware of Blender’s existence, and there is a growing amount of professional users successfully tackling more and more complex challenges with the software.

I had informal conversations with several high-budget film directors and story artists using and praising Blender for the story development process. Adoption into the production pipeline is still slow for large organization, while in smaller, younger and more agile studio, using Blender at the core is simply the norm. From those studios, there is an active interest in the Blender Studio Tools a set of scripts, add-ons and documentation aimed at facilitating collaborative work in a Blender-centric environment.

There has been a growing trend in the past few years, where individuals and teams come by to share the work in progress on their production, or to let us know that the production was successfully completed. This year, several production were selected and screened at the festival – also winning awards. Congratulations to FLOW (feature film, 4 Awards), The car that came back from the sea (short film, 2 awards), Pictoplasma “opener 2023” (1 award), and The Worlds Divide (feature film).

The Blender for Breakfast event was a great opportunity to create connections between professionals and get a glimpse of the growing Blender-based studio landscape. Will definitely repeat next year.

Finally, special thanks to Dell for supporting us with a demo workstation during the event, so we could present high quality demos of the brushstroke technology from the Gold project, and more.

Blender is truly making it possible for filmmakers to create and share excellent work. See you next time!

As it is now tradition, the Blender team will attend the Annecy festival and be visible with a booth and live demos at the MIFA (film market) on 11-14 June.

Some artists from the Blender Studio (plus special guest Daniel M. Lara) will be attending the festival, make sure you connect, drop by stand A.33 at the exhibition area and get a seat to watch our open movie Wing It! in theaters!

Following the success of last year, and in addition to the booth, Blender is going to host a “studios” breakfast session (Birds of a Feather-style), focused on connecting producers, developers, TDs and artists working in studios where Blender is part of the pipeline. The goal is to share ongoing Blender development, Blender Studio pipeline insights, and give visibility to teams who wish to share their experience using Blender in production. All while being treated some delicious croissant and coffee!

The event will take place on Thursday, 13 June at 10:00 at SAPAUDIA, 12 Fbg Sainte-Claire, 74000 Annecy. Limited spots are available, make sure you RSVP if you are interested. See you there!

Blender Foundation and the online developers community are proud to present Blender 4.1!

After the massive leap that was 4.0, Blender 4.1 is a solid upgrade to those looking for performance, stability, and quality of life improvements all across the board.

To highlight a few:

• OpenImageDenoise now runs on GPU on supported hardware.
• Cycles rendering on Linux is 5% faster.
• All nodes in the Compositor now work in the Viewport (except Render Layer passes)
• Compositor precision and improvements to Kuwahara and Pixelate nodes.
• Bone Collections are now hierarchical.
• New animation keying workflow.
• Several improvements to Graph Editor and NLA including baking channels.
• Video Sequencer drawing, rendering, effects, and scopes are much faster.
• USD export of armatures and shape keys as USD skeletons and blend shapes.
• Several user interface improvements.
• Python upgraded to version 3.11
• Blender 4.1 is aligned with the VFX Reference Platform 2024.
• A new Bake node in Geometry Nodes.

Watch the video summary at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmIbMx_RM6k

Plus so many more features and fixes, explore the release notes for an in-depth look at what’s new!

This work is made possible thanks to the outstanding contributions of the Blender community, and the support of the over 4800 individuals and 36 organizations contributing to the Blender Development Fund.

Happy Blending! 

The Blender Team
March 26th, 2024