One of the long-standing traditions of the Blender project is to start the year announcing what to be expected in the coming period. It gets artists excited (and developers anxious) to think of everything that will be soon possible.

Are we going to see new features, or a focus on stability? Improvement in long-standing areas, or investment in new tech?

Last year the focus was on finishing up long-standing projects, and that was a success! All the projects announced for Q1-2024 are now available in the latest release.

2025 started with the Winter of Quality project, aiming at stability and documentation of all areas of Blender. We can now shift focus to start (and finish!) brand-new projects.

Some of them are regular module work, and projects previously agreed on. While others are development targets for the Blender Studio upcoming open projects, which helps with direction (and testing) in the traditional Blender fashion.

The proposed projects for this year are organized into the following areas:

• Node Systems
• Production Tools
• Sculpting
• Performance
• Story Tools
• On-going projects

Integrate the node-systems across different workflows.

Better integration across node trees will allow node groups to be shared between different types of node systems, like shading and the compositor.

Hair dynamics represents a major milestone: Geometry Nodes is set to reach feature parity with the legacy particle hair system. This will be the first step towards replacing the existing high-level simulation systems.

Make productions more accessible for small and medium-sized studios.

Project Setup, meaning project-wide variables and environments, will provide a unified way to share settings and properties across multiple .blend files within a single production. This will make asset management and shot creation more efficient and ensure consistency throughout the pipeline.

Online Remote Assets will allow artists to access resources directly from online libraries such as third-party, community-curated content and various stores. This feature will also help remote productions that need their own asset libraries. This is the next step for the Extension Platform.

Overrides will be simplified and re-iterated upon to provide an intuitive way to define properties dynamically for specific contexts, such as files, scenes, or collections. These improvements will reduce the need for external tools to handle override conflicts, making production pipelines smoother and more reliable.

Bring more responsiveness into asset creation.

While improving performance is an on-going effort, there are two areas in particular that currently are blocking for some productions requirements.

EEVEE material shader compilation is currently a blocking operation for certain production requirements, especially during look development with heavy assets. The focus will be on enabling parallel compilation, investigating issues with the shader cache, and optimizing material compilation in complex production scenes.

Shape Keys are another area requiring attention, particularly for character pipelines that rely on multiple shape keys for finer details and adjustment layers. The current storage system significantly impacts scalability. The plan is to modernize their storage, transitioning it to a more generic attribute system—similar to the approach used for UVs—and implement sparse storage, ensuring that only the parts of a shape key that differ are stored.

Non-destructive sculpting with layers, and better keyboard-less workflow.

Multires propagation spikes remain a critical issue. These occur when changes to lower subdivision levels are not properly reflected in higher levels, leading to infamous artifacts. Fixing this problem is a priority to ensure the multires modifier works reliably in production.

Sculpting Layers are a natural next step now that sculpting mode can handle more data, thanks to last year’s performance improvements. Adding support for mixing multiple layers will enable higher levels of detail and deforming layers essential for animation workflows, giving artists greater control and flexibility.

Tablet pen support is important for workflows like sculpting, painting, and 2D animation. While the mouse can often be replaced by a pen, Blender’s heavy reliance on keyboard input makes it cumbersome to use. Even more so for display tablets and, in the future, portable devices. The initial focus will be on supporting touch inputs, with basic gestures for navigation, undo, and redo.

Storyboarding and basic camera editing from the VSE (video sequence editor).

• Sequence data-block.
• Quick access to Grease Pencil drawing for the active scene strip.
• Edit/animate scene strip camera from VSE.
• Storyboarding tools (e.g., easy of use to create new scene strips).

Editorial and Storyboarding are key to film production. Inspired by the Storypencil add-on, and with Grease Pencil 3.0 complete, some of the team is now shifting the focus to editorial tools. The goal is to create a seamless workflow for storyboarding, combining sketching, timing, and editing to help artists bring their stories to life efficiently.

There is on-going maintenance and development in the modules. Here are a few of the areas being worked on.

• Rendering (Cycles, NPR, …).
• Vulkan (including a presentation at Vulkanised 2025).
• UV syncing and other improvements.
• HDR support in all the editors.
• Layered Animation and other animation improvements.
• USD and game interoperability via glTF.
• Blender 5.0 backward incompatible changes.
• Other module work.

While projects don’t target specific releases, Blender Foundation follows the cadence of 3 releases a year. The planned releases for 2025 and their initial dates are:

• Blender 4.4 (March) will be focused on stability and polishing.
• Blender 4.5 LTS (July) to wrap up the Blender 4 series.
• Blender 5.0 (November), to kickstart a new development cycle.

On top of this, LTS release updates are expected throughout the year:

• Blender 3.6 LTS – until June 2025.
• Blender 4.2 LTS – until July 2026.
• Blender 4.5 LTS – until July 2027.

In 2024 there were 24 LTS releases among Blender 3.3 LTS, 3.6 LTS and 4.2 LTS.

In other news, the date for the traditional Blender Conference in Amsterdam moved to September this year. Learn more.

All of this progress is made possible thanks to the donations and ongoing community involvement and contributions.

The ambitious plans for 2025 reflect the growing scope of Blender, but they are also limited by the current resources available. While Blender is a community-driven project, much of the work is carried out by developers employed by Blender Institute or working with development grants.

Further, some of the targets outlined here may need to be delayed or put on hold if the development team gets too busy managing ongoing maintenance or dealing with unforeseen delays.

The same applies to certain development goals that have been proposed over the years, such as Blender Apps and Layered Textures, which are not feasible with the current team size.

To follow new developments keep an eye on the Blender Developers Blog.
On behalf of everyone, I hope we have a great 2025, and … happy Blending!

Dalai Felinto
Head of Product, Blender

2023 was a remarkable year. We started new projects, continued others, finalized several, and postponed some. There is a pattern over the years that surfaced once again: there are too many projects.

As everyone would admit, having too many concurrent projects is difficult. That leads to energy and attention getting spread too thin. Many projects and small teams add the risk of projects dragging for too long when any emergency arises. It leads to frustration and the feeling that we could have done better.

The modules will continue to work, and the blender.org community will continue to help lift the quality bar for the core functionality. And on top of that, we will start 2024 finishing projects!

For the first quarter the goal will be finishing the following projects:

• Extensions Platform
• GPU-based Compositor
• EEVEE Next
• Grease Pencil 3.0
• Brush Assets

Projects like Geometry Nodes and Vulkan will be put on hold for the time being. High priority issues and community patches for these and other modules will still be handled once a week.
The Character Animation project will still be the sole priority of the Animation & Rigging module during this year.

Blender Foundation will launch an official community-moderated website for sharing, discovering and downloading add-ons, themes, and asset libraries.

This project consists of two parts: an online platform and the Blender integration. The next steps will be to support the new schema, design discussions about the Blender integration and a break-dow of the next tasks.

This project adds a new compositor backend, taking advantage of GPU acceleration to be performant enough for real-time interaction.

The initial version was added in the 3D viewport in Blender 3.5. Nearly all nodes are supported now. The remaining work is to make it production ready for final compositing, adding render passes and other missing features to unify the behavior across CPU and GPU compositing.

Blender’s realtime rendering engine EEVEE has been evolving constantly since its introduction in Blender 2.80. The current goal is to make EEVEE ready for the latest hardware innovations, and new techniques.

This is a massive refactor which has been going on for a few years. Although the original target was to stick to feature-parity, a few new features were added already, like screen space global illumination and displacement support. At the moment it is available in the daily builds, but it still lacks some features and it has performance problems with integrated GPUs which makes it unclear which Blender it will be ready for.

Grease Pencil is undergoing a full rewrite, aiming to lay a solid foundation for the next 10+ years. It will lead to increased performance and memory usage and pave the way to new features (e.g., Geometry Nodes).

The new iteration of Grease Pencil is available as an experimental feature in Blender. There are still many features that need to be ported. While Geometry Nodes support was planned for after feature parity, it is already in Blender.

The asset system and browser will fully support brushes for painting and sculpting. This makes it easy to use, make and share bundles of brushes with others.
The initial targets are already in Blender since its 4.0 version (the “All” asset library and yet to be polished asset shelf). The main part of the project (brush assets themselves) got a redesign recently which will allow for direct creation of assets without the need of the originally proposed draft system.

Finishing a project will be followed by a buffer to look back at the different modules and catch up on the issues and patches.

Then shortly afterwards, at different moments during the second quarter, we have interesting projects lined up:

• Pipeline & Assets
• Sculpting & Painting
• Physics & Simulation
• Tablet Input Mapping
• GPU Projects

Most of these projects need to have their design fleshed out in order to pinpoint their scope and planning. This will happen during the first quarter, or ultimately before the project officially kicks off.

• There are three releases planned for 2024: 4.1, 4.2 LTS and 4.3.
• In April the first North American Blender Conference will take place in Los Angeles.
• Cycles, USD and other modules will still continue their usual development.
• There are ideas already for the 3rd and 4th quarter, but they will be announced closer to the date, to keep the planning more realistic.

• Blender Apps (unknown yet, we lack resources for it).
• Layered texturing (with a bit of luck it starts 2nd half 2024).
• Move to Vulkan (might be 2nd half 2024, depends on GPU Projects).

To follow new developments keep an eye on the Blender Code Blog.
On behalf of everyone, I hope we have a great 2024, and … happy Blending!

Dalai Felinto, Product Manager at Blender.

While the year runs on its last legs, it’s time to celebrate another fantastic Blender year – made possible by the community of contributors at blender.org.

Below is the list of top committers to the Blender project in 2023. The number of commits obviously doesn’t mean much, but it’s a neutral metric to put a limelight on people who made Blender possible last year.

Out of these 30 developers, 25 contributed while being employed by Blender Institute (BI), or being supported with a Blender Foundation (BF) Development Fund grant.

Dalai Felinto (62, Brazil, BI employee)

Dalai worked on overall planning, prioritization and communication, specifically for the team in the Amsterdam HQ. He is also the product manager for the Geometry Nodes project.

Aras Pranckevicius (76, Lithuania, volunteer)

Aras loves to improve performance and is always up for a good code challenge. This year he optimized parts of the video sequence editor and continued contributions to file I/O such as PLY and STL formats.

Joseph Eagar (83, USA, dev grant)

Joseph worked on sculpting features and dynamic topology.

Lukas Stockner (88, Germany, dev grant)

Lukas worked on a new iteration of the Principled BSDF for Cycles and EEVEE, making it faster and more realistic.

Lukas Tönne (95, Germany, BI employee)

Lukas is part of the Nodes & Physics module and worked on node panels and simulations, among other things.

Pratik Borhade (96, India, dev grant)

Pratik is part of the triaging team, making sure bug reports get triaged and fixed as quickly as possible. He also contributed to the Grease Pencil V3 project this year.

Ray Molenkamp (107, Canada, volunteer)

Ray leads the platform module and is the go-to person in the Blender chat channels. Ask him anything, he knows! He also keeps a close eye on the windows platform, ensuring it works smooth as butter!

Richard Antalík (110, Czech Republic, dev grant)

Richard is part of the triaging team and contributes code to the video sequencer. This year he contributed a new system for interactively retiming strips.

Omar Emara (112, Egypt, dev grant)

Omar implemented the new realtime compositor system and ported almost all existing nodes to it, making it easier and more fun for artists to add post effects.

Weizhen Huang (123, Germany, BI employee)

Weizhen contributed to the Cycles renderer and helped with many lights sampling and also implemented her own paper to the Principled Hair BSDF, adding a new “Huang” model to it.

Damien Picard (125, France, volunteer)

Damien helped with bug fixing and the translation of Blender’s UI into other languages.

Jason Fielder (126, UK)

Jason contributed to Blender’s Metal Backend, making Blender ready for the future on macOS. Thanks to him and his colleagues at Apple for their contribution!

Chris Blackbourn (136, New Zealand, dev grant)

Chris improved Blender’s UV tools and made packing considerably faster and smarter.

Iliya Katushenock(141, Russia, volunteer)

Iliya is a contributor to the geometry nodes project and helped with fixes, performance improvements, and new features.

Sybren A. Stüvel (173, Netherlands, BI employee)

Sybren is leading the Animation module and the efforts for the Animation 2025 project. He also works on the Flamenco render farm manager.

Philipp Oeser (174, Germany, BI employee)

Philipp is the lead of the triaging team. He is also responsible for the LTS updates, bringing more stability to Blender users every month!

Christoph Lendenfeld (184, Spain, dev grant)

Christoph is part of the animation module. Among other things, this year Christoph made the dope sheet and graph editor rendering much faster.

Miguel Pozo (194, Spain, dev grant)

Miguel is part of the EEVEE & Viewport module and has been an important part of the EEVEE Next development project.

Falk David (220, Germany, BI employee)

Falk’s main project for the year has been leading the Grease Pencil V3 rewrite project.

Harley Acheson (263, Canada, dev grant)

Harley has an eye for details. He improved and fixed areas in Blenders UI this year, giving users a more polished and focused experience. He also contributed to a better UI font system again, with a new default font and support for more languages.

Sergey Sharybin (283, Russia, BI employee)

Sergey contributed to motion tracking, Cycles rendering, and sculpting. In particular, light and shadow linking was a feature many people have been waiting for!

Julian Eisel (298, Germany, BI employee)

Working on Blender’s user interface, this year Julian focused on the asset system and the new asset shelf. He also contributed significantly to a new developer documentation platform.

Germano Cavalcante (315, Brazil, dev grant)

Germano is part of the triaging team and also helps with bug fixing. He also made significant improvements to the transform system, including the base point snapping feature.

Brecht Van Lommel (316, Belgium, BI employee)

Among many other areas, Brecht worked on Cycles this year and contributed significantly to the developer website backend.

Clément Foucault (331, France, BI employee)

Clément worked on a major rewrite of the EEVEE realtime renderer to take advantage of modern GPU features and to add new features like screen space global illumination and displacement.

Bastien Montagne (402, France, BI employee)

Bastien is an owner of the core module, his main concern is to keep Blender files and overrides working.

Jeroen Bakker (429, Netherlands, BI employee)

Jeroen is part of the rendering team, the go-to person for everything viewport and GPU related. He worked on Vulkan support this year.

Jacques Lucke (489, Germany, BI employee)

This year, Jacques worked on geometry nodes features including baking, simulations, and the repeat zone. He also improved menu search, and moved most of Blender’s C code to C++.

Hans Goudey (1383, USA, dev grant)

Besides contributing various geometry nodes features like node tools and asset integration, Hans enjoys refactoring Blender to improve performance and modernize code. This year he finished a large change to Blender’s mesh storage.

Campbell Barton (2017, Australia, dev grant)

Campbell contributes to nearly every core module in Blender. This year he worked on Wayland support and the extentions platform project.

I wish all of the people above and everyone who contributed to Blender a healthy and happy 2024!

Thomas Dinges

Blender Development Coordinator

The upcoming year is going to be interesting for Blender. Aside from the blender.org community effort to keep core functionality stable and up to date, several high profile projects have started already that – fingers crossed – might get realized this year.

OpenGL currently powers the user interface, 3D viewports and EEVEE. However it is expected to be deprecated by the industry in the coming years. Blender developers already work for many years to prepare a move away from OpenGL.

Vulkan is the cross-platform successor to OpenGL, with many opportunities to improve performance and new features like ray-tracing. Blender Foundation will invest developer time to finish a migration to the Vulkan graphics API in 2023.

In parallel – and using – this development, Apple engineers have been working on making Blender fully compatible with the Metal graphics API on macOS. This project is also expected to wrap up in 2023.

This project adds a new compositor backend, taking advantage of GPU acceleration to be performant enough for realtime interaction.

As a first step, this backend powers the new viewport compositor, which applies the result of the compositing nodes directly in the 3D viewport. Artists do not have to wait for a full render to start compositing, for faster and more interactive iterations.

The initial version of this feature will be available in Blender 3.5. The next steps are to support more nodes and features, and in the long term bring GPU acceleration to the existing compositor.

• https://code.blender.org/2022/07/real-time-compositor/

The asset system and browser will fully support brushes for painting and sculpting. This makes it easy to use, make and share bundles of brushes with others.

• https://code.blender.org/2022/11/brush-and-draft-assets/
• https://code.blender.org/2022/12/brush-assets-workflow/

Thanks to Blender’s very high level of customization using Python scripting, it’s possible to build up Blender from scratch with your own UIs and editor layouts. This combined with bundling .blend files (assets, data) you can create it to make custom tools or complete experiences.

• https://code.blender.org/2022/11/blender-apps/

Blender Foundation will launch an official community-moderated website for sharing, discovering and downloading add-ons, themes, and asset libraries.

The extensions site will only offer GNU GPL compliant software, or CC-BY–SA compatible content. No commercialization will happen on the platform. It aims to be attractive for artists and add-on developers to freely share their work on blender.org, even if they choose to be using third-party services to generate revenues with the same or similar extensions.

• https://code.blender.org/2022/10/blender-extensions-platform/

Blender’s realtime rendering engine EEVEE has been evolving constantly since its introduction in Blender 2.80. The goal was to make it viable both for asset creation and final rendering, and to support a wide range of workflows. However, thanks to the latest hardware innovations, many new techniques have become viable, and EEVEE can take advantage of them.

Expect new features such as screen-space global illumination, more efficient shading and lighting, improved volume rendering and panoramic cameras.

• https://code.blender.org/2021/06/eevees-future/

With geometry nodes getting hair support last year, this year the focus will be on simulation for physics and beyond. The system will be designed for interactivity and experimentation, with simulations running in the viewport at their own clock while editing objects and nodes.

• https://code.blender.org/2022/11/geometry-nodes-workshop-2022/

Blender developers currently use Phabricator for project management, code review and issue tracking. Unfortunately that software was discontinued, so we looked at a good replacement. The choice was to use Gitea, which is a fully free/open source software project with functionality similar to GitHub.

The main job was to migrate the full 20 years of development history of Blender to this new (Git based) software management system.

• https://code.blender.org/2022/08/gitea-diaries-part-2/

Animation and rigging is going to get a full makeover in the coming years, including making the core design future proof and many ideas to improve the experience for animators.

A large group of developers and expert animators are involved with it. Kick-off was at the last Blender Conference, you can read the report below.

• https://code.blender.org/2022/11/the-future-of-character-animation-rigging/

The grease pencil team will come with ambitious plans, there’s an exciting texture painting and sculpting speedup coming, and Hydra render delegates and other USD improvements are under development. The procedural texturing project – while not having a concrete roadmap and resources yet – is still a goal.

Most of this you will read by following the Blender Code Blog.

On behalf of everyone, best wishes for a great 2023!

Ton Roosendaal, Chairman Blender Foundation.

Below is the list of top committers to the Blender project in 2022. The number of commits obviously doesn’t mean much, but it’s a neutral metric to put a limelight on people who made Blender possible last year.

Out of these 27 names, 22 developers were employed by Blender Institute (BI) or work with a Blender Foundation Development Fund grant.

Lukas Stockner (39)
Germany, developer, part-time development grant. Lukas is a member of the Cycles module. He worked on an updated principled shader and helped with bug fixes and code review.

Damien Picard (47)
France, developer, volunteer. Damien helped with bug fixing and translation.

YimingWu (57)
China, developer, part-time development grant. Yiming is both an artist and a developer and he improved performance for line art rendering and added shadow support to it.

Thomas Dinges (57)
Germany, developer community coordinator, BI employee. Thomas is the release manager and also responsible for onboarding, moderation, coordinating Google Summer of code and always there to help out developers online.

Omar Emara (68)
Egypt, developer, full-time development grant. Omar develops the viewport compositor and helped with bug triaging.

Dalai Felinto (71)
Brazil, development coordinator, BI employee. Dalai leads the BI developer team and is product manager for the Geometry Nodes project.

Sybren A. Stüvel (76)
Netherlands, senior developer, BI employee. Sybren released a major new version of the Flamenco render manager this year and he is the head of the Animation and Rigging module in Blender.

Harley Acheson (87)
Canada, developer, volunteer. Harley is an active member of the User Interface module.

Ray Molenkamp (92)
Canada, developer, volunteer. Ray leads the platform module and is the go-to person in the Blender chat channels, ask him anything, he knows!

Aras Pranckevicius (95)
Lithuania, developer, volunteer. Aras significantly improved performance for file I/O and other core areas and also fixed bugs in the OBJ importer and exporter.

Aaron Carlisle (107)
USA, developer/writer, half-time grant. Aaron keeps the user manual on docs.blender.org working. He’s increasingly turning into an all-round developer.

Philipp Oeser (112)
Germany, developer, BI employee. Phillipp leads the triaging, bug fixing and patch reviewing efforts on blender.org. 

Richard Antalík (112)
Czech Republic, full time grant. Richard works as a triager and is the key contributor to video editing in Blender.

Kévin Dietrich (113)
France, developer, full-time grant. Kévin worked as a core team member of the Cycles module, working on production features and performance such as GPU subdivision support.

Chris Blackbourn (127)
New Zealand, developer, part-time grant. Chris worked on better UV unwrapping.

Antonio Vazquez (166)
Spain, senior developer, volunteer. Antonio is the lead developer of the Grease Pencil module in Blender. Grease Pencil is a key reason for bigger studios to get into Blender. It all starts with concept artists and storyboarders!

Joseph Eagar (191)
USA, developer, development grant. Joe is working on the Sculpt/Paint/Texture module and implements new features and also improves performance and stability of it.

Germano Cavalcante (198)
Brazil, developer, full time grant. Germano’s main task is triaging and bug fixing, but he is increasingly active in the modeling and rendering modules.

Jeroen Bakker (251)
Netherlands, senior developer, BI employee. Jeroen is part of the rendering team, the go-to person for everything viewport and GPU related.

Julian Eisel (273)
Germany, developer, BI employee. Julian is a core member of the User Interface module. He further improved the asset system this year and also worked on library overrides and the outliner.

Sergey Sharybin (294)
Russia, principal developer, BI employee. Sergey worked on his favourite part of Blender again, motion tracking and also helped with Cycles rendering and bugfixes.

Bastien Montagne (400)
France, senior developer, BI employee. Bastien is an owner of the core module, his main concern is to keep Blender files and overrides working.

Jacques Lucke (463)
Germany, senior developer, BI employee. Jacques is the lead engineer of the Geometry Nodes project.

Brecht Van Lommel (475)
Belgium, principal developer, BI employee, rendering architect. Brecht continued to improve the Cycles renderer this year and worked on the layered texture design.

Clément Foucault (491)
France, principal developer, BI employee. Clément is the lead designer of EEVEE and GPU rendering in Blender. He works on EEVEE 2.0 and viewport compositing.

Hans Goudey (1164)
USA, developer, full time grant. Hans is a highly valued member of the Geometry Nodes project.

Campbell Barton (1596)
Australia, principal developer, full time grant. Campbell is indispensable, he contributes to nearly every core module in Blender.

I wish all of the people above, and everyone who contributed to Blender a healthy and happy 2023!

Thomas Dinges
28-12-2022

Below is the list of top committers to the Blender project in 2021. The amount of commits obviously doesn’t mean much, but it’s a neutral metric to put limelight on people who made Blender possible last year. 

An interesting trend is that out of these 30 names, 24 developers were employed by Blender Institute (BI) or work with a Blender Foundation Development Fund grant. I am very happy that we can support so many people now. 

Another interesting trend for 2021, which does not show in the statistics yet, is that we get increasing development attention (patches and commits) from larger corporations. In alphabetical order I wanted to thank the developers from AMD (GPU support for Cycles), Meta (Cycles performance), Intel (Cycles, rendering and CPU optimization) and Nvidia (GPU and ray-tracing support for Cycles, USD).

Alexander Gavrilov (43)
Russia, developer, independent. Alexander is an active member of the Animation and Rigging module.

Howard Trickey (44)
USA, developer, independent. Howard is owner of the Modeling module and an enthusiast mentor of new developers.

Charlie Jolly (49)
UK, developer, Independent. Charlie is an all-round developer contributing patches in many areas of Blender, including GPencil and Geometry Nodes.

Pablo Vazquez (50)
Argentina, Blender evangelist and part time developer, BI employee. Aside from his work on blender.org communication and video streams, Pablo is a member of the UI module, contributing to the 3.0 looks.

Pablo Dobarro (51)
Spain, principal developer, full-time grant (but now on a break). Pablo is the main contributor to sculpting and painting tools in Blender.

Ankit Meel (56)
India, developer, full-time grant. Ankit works on the trackers for triaging and bug fixing.

Falk David (60)
Germany, developer, part-time grant. Falk started as triager and developed interest in the GPencil module. He is now employed by a renowned Spanish animation studio to work on Blender.

Johnny Matthews (62)
USA, developer, independent. Johnny is back! As a regular contributor in the 2000s he still knows the Blender codebase very well. Johnny is a member of the Nodes and Physics module.

Ray Molenkamp (68)
Canada, developer, independent. Ray leads the platform module and is the go-to person in the Blender chat channels, ask him anything, he knows!

Sebastian Parborg (75)
Sweden, developer, Blender Studio employee. Sebastian is the main Studio connection with the developers, assisting the artists during production with bug and feature fixes. He is also coordinating the NPR rendering team.

Kévin Dietrich (92)
France, developer, full-time grant. Kévin works as a core team member of the Cycles module, working on production features and performance.

YimingWu (93)
China, developer, part-time development grant. Yiming is both an artist and a developer with special interest in line rendering.

Harley Acheson (95)
Canada, developer, independent. Harley is an active member of the UI module.

Dalai Felinto (99)
Brazil, development coordinator, BI employee. Dalai leads the BI developer team and is product designer for the Nodes project.

Manuel Castilla (103)
Spain, developer, half-time grant. Manual is a new member of the Compositor module in Blender, working alongside Jeroen.

Clément Foucault (142)
France, principal developer, BI employee. Clement is the lead designer of Eevee and GPU rendering in Blender. He works on Eevee 2.0 and viewport compositing, but his main accomplishment is the (ongoing) migration of OpenGL to Vulkan in Blender. This is expected to wrap in 2022.

Aaron Carlisle (162)
USA, developer/writer, half-time grant. Aaron keeps the user manual on docs.blender.org working. He’s increasingly turning into an all-round developer.

Sergey Sharybin (210)
Russia, principal developer, BI employee. Sergey made a splash in 2021 by teaming up with Brecht redesigning and implementing the Cycles X rendering engine.

Richard Antalik (214)
Czech Republic, full time grant. Richard works as a triager and is the key contributor to video editing in Blender.

Antonio Vazquez (217)
Spain, senior developer, independent. Antonio is the lead developer of the Grease Pencil module in Blender. GPencil is a key reason for bigger studios to get into Blender. It all starts with concept artists and storyboarders!

Sybren A. Stüvel (266)
Netherlands, senior developer, BI employee. Sybren turned the animation module in Blender into one of the most active groups. He also leads USD efforts for Blender and heads up the Asset project.

Philipp Oeser (281)
Germany, developer, BI employee. Phillipp leads the triaging, bug fixing and patch reviewing efforts on blender.org. 

Julian Eisel (362)
Germany, developer, BI employee. Julian is a core member of the UI module. Most of 2021 he worked on making the Asset browser in Blender work.

Germano Cavalcante (372)
Brazil, developer, full time grant. Germano’s main task is triaging and bug fixing, but is increasingly active in the modeling and rendering modules.

Jeroen Bakker (423)
Netherlands, senior developer, BI employee. Jeroen is part of the rendering team, the goto person for everything viewport and GPU related.

Brecht Van Lommel (424)
Belgium, principal developer, BI employee, rendering architect. Brecht made 2021 memorable with a highly sophisticated redesign of Cycles, embraced by all leading CPU/GPU manufacturers in the world.

Bastien Montagne (506)
France, developer, BI employee. Bastien is an owner of the core module, his main concern is to keep Blender files and overrides work.

Jacques Lucke (700)
Germany, senior developer, BI employee. Jacques is the lead engineer of the Geometry Nodes project.

Hans Goudey (854)
USA, developer, full time grant. Hans is a highly valued member of the Geometry Nodes project.

Campbell Barton (1873)
Australia, principal developer, full time grant. Campbell is indispensable, he contributes to nearly every core module in Blender.

I wish all of the people above, and everyone who contributed to Blender a healthy and happy 2022!

Ton Roosendaal
Amsterdam, 31-12-2021

For many of us, 2020 has proven disruptive. At the start of the year, the Blender organization was ready to run a series of workshops for core Blender contributors, a conference in LA, and many other activities. All of these were cancelled or put on hold.  

Luckily, Blender is still a virtual organization managed publicly and online. As such, we’re able to look back at a productive year full of highlights. In this list, we celebrate the developers who helped Blender development continue beyond expectation, resulting in four releases over 2020, including one Long Term Support release. 

Here we present Blender’s top 20 developers, ranked according to number of commits. Full disclosure: this metric, like all metrics, is debatable. And debate we did. But in the end, counting commits seemed the fairest way to salute the efforts being made by Blender’s far-flung team.   

Naturally, every project below represents a vast collaborative effort: while the talent here has contributed huge amounts of brainpower, they’re also working alongside a world-class lineup. That includes developers at Blender Headquarters in Amsterdam, volunteers, and those working remotely all over the globe, via a grant or a contract.     

Together, they’re helping people everywhere make amazing things with Blender.

So let’s get to it: the twenty developers logging the most commits in 2020, arranged from low to high.  

Dalai coordinates development at Blender from Amsterdam. He also blogs about all things technical at the Blender Development Blog. As anyone who’s read his blog or watched his appearances on Blender Today Live knows, Dalai is a true Blender linchpin.  

The young and very talented Nathan Craddock is still only a student, currently busy with a Computer Science degree at Brigham Young University. For Blender, he’s been making the Outliner even better, a project he’s been committed to for a number of years, including as part of Google’s Summer of Code in 2019.  

Richard has been busy with the Video Sequence Editor. Thanks in part to his hard work, the VSE has experienced rapid improvements–in fact, it’s hitting new heights as an alternative to paid tools. And in 2021, those refinements will just keep coming: VSE is one of Blender’s priorities.  

Ray, aka LazyDodo, has been occupied as a Platform Maintainer, and involved in Blender’s libraries. He’s been a part of Blender since 2016, and if you spend time on Blender’s chat channels, you’ll be familiar with his willingness to help solve a mind-boggling range of issues…interspersed with witty banter. 

Aaron is a master of the Blender manual, clarifying Blender’s many subtleties for those aiming at true expertise. He’s been communicating Blender’s finer points for almost a year, including everything from helping users decide which version of Blender is right for them, to improving the bug reporting process. 

Back in 2016, Philipp featured in a similar Blender end of year list with 83 commits. Fast forward four years, and he’s logged close to three times as many. Philipp is a bug triaging machine, providing an invaluable contribution to this vital aspect of Blender development. 

Amsterdam-based Senior Software Engineer Jeroen has been busy with Viewport improvements for Blender. Amongst Jeroen’s greatest hits for 2020 was a well-received patch that meant a big performance boost for the UV/Image editor. 

Sebastián is a Physics Developer working from Amsterdam. His big focus this year was Mantaflow. With Mantaflow integrated into Blender, artists can construct all the fires, explosions and liquid simulations their imaginations demand. Sebastián works tirelessly to update Blender’s Mantaflow capabilities: as recently as 2.92 (alpha), he introduced a new simulation method called APIC.  

Julian is a software developer at the Blender Institute. There, he’s both the VR development lead and UI module owner. In part, Julian helps make everything in Blender easier to grasp, thus improving workflow. That includes a myriad of tweaks from better split support for checkboxes, to revamping node input buttons for clarity. If your eye magically knows where to look when it’s staring at Blender’s multifarious options, there’s an excellent chance Julian has been involved.     

Known to some as “mano-wii,” the very productive Germano has been getting passionate about snap tools (amongst many other things). With everything from implementing the Snap Gizmo to full snapping Vert Slide, you can be sure that Germano’s had a hand creating more precision for modellers.  

As Blender Twitter aficionados will know, this multi-talented artist and dev has been giving Blender’s sculpt mode a boost. With innovations like the cloth brush and the fully supported multires modifier allowing sculpting at all subdiv levels, Pablo’s on the forefront of turning Blender’s sculpting workspace and toolset into a premier division sculpting system.

It’s amazing to think how Grease Pencil has matured from a simple annotation tool to what it is today: a fully-fledged 2D Animation workspace within Blender, with 3D capabilities to boot. A short while ago, Grease Pencil even added the capacity to use lighting on Grease Pencil materials. As Grease Pencil’s lead developer and team coordinator, Antonio has had a big part in these transformations, helping to usher in a new way to make illustration and animation.  

Sergey is yet another Blender development superstar. Working from Amsterdam as a Principal Software Engineer, Sergey’s contributions have been wide-ranging as always. This year, he’s been involved with bringing Blender’s long-running Depsgraph up to speed, core development (i.e. Blender’s kernel, file IO, DNA/RNA system, undo) and reviewing work on the sculpting tools as well as the VSE. On top of all that, he’s been pushing Motion Tracking to new heights. 

Sybren is well-known amongst those who follow Blender even a little. This year, he helped kick Animation and I/O up a notch. Within I/O, he was specifically busy with refining Alembic functionality and developing USD. If that wasn’t enough, Sybren became Linux Platform Maintainer, taking over the role from Sergey Sharybin. As a side note, Sybren also has an in-depth Scripting For Artists course available over on Blender Cloud.  

Amongst his many fascinations, Hans was involved with Property Search, the new Modifiers layout, and helping push Nodes forward. That includes work on Geometry Nodes, the first part of the epic upcoming Everything Nodes project.

Brecht has gone down in the annals of Blender history thanks to his work on Cycles. This year, he pressed on with Cycles, and also worked on Volume Objects, all from Blender’s headquarters in Amsterdam. Last but absolutely not least, Brecht was appointed to be lead architect for the 2.8 project, and in that role he has reviewed and directed nearly every developer-driven project this year. Respect to Brecht.  

Bastien originally discovered Blender in a magazine. Fast-forward a few years, and he’s actually building it as a member of the Amsterdam team. In 2020, he put in a mammoth effort delivering Library Overrides and updating Blender’s undo system. With Bastien’s input, even tricky areas like materials, modifiers, and constraints can be overridden–thus reducing stress levels in Blender users everywhere. 

Clément was heavily involved in refining EEVEE, including its extremely popular motion blur capabilities. EEVEE also went through a ton of other upgrades, including hair transparency, render passes for compositing, plus improvements on shadows, transparency, and the addition of Sky Texture. Clément started working on porting our viewport drawing (including EEVEE) to Vulkan. This is the future industry standard, bringing real-time ray tracing to the viewport, and–with a bit of luck–support for MacOS. 

Jacques’ been working on Geometry nodes, as part of one of Blender’s biggest drives: the Everything Nodes project. As the name suggests, Everything Nodes seeks to make every aspect of Blender controllable through nodes, opening up a ton of flexibility and new creative possibilities. And Jacques is right at the heart of this. Not forgetting: he’s also been developing volume object modifiers. So all those new clouds and fire effects you’ve been working on? Those are made with the help of Jacques’ great dedication.   

With a godlike number of commits, we present: Campbell Barton. Campbell has been involved with Blender since… forever. Over the years (and decades), Campbell has contributed to pretty much everything in Blender. And 2020 was no exception, with his biggest effort directed at core development (i.e. Blender’s kernel, file IO, DNA/RNA system, undo). It’s safe to say that Blender’s DNA is part Campbell Barton.

Check out all four major releases in 2020!

Blender 2.82

Blender 2.83 LTS

Blender 2.90

Blender 2.91

The year 2019 has been pivotal for Blender’s growth. This article collects a selection of metrics, facts and figures about Blender with the goal of highlighting trends about the project. This data was originally presented during the “Blender by the Numbers” talk by Francesco Siddi at Blender Conference 2019. The data has been expanded until the end of 2019 for this article.

The blender.org website is the main platform of the Blender project, and by far the most popular website of the entire Blender community. One way to measure a website’s popularity is the Alexa rank,where the website number 1 is the most popular, and where blender.org ranks at 3000. This value is significantly better than for most other DCC softwares.

With over 300 simultaneous users visiting the site at all times, blender.org has seen over 90M unique visitors and over 500M page views since 2007.

The most viewed pages on the blender.org are its homepage, the download page, features and the recent Blender 2.8 page (over 2.5M views).

It’s hard to provide a precise number of Blender downloads for all platforms, especially since on Linux there are dedicated distribution systems. We keep track of downloads on blender.org (the main source of traffic), Steam and the Microsoft store.

Since 2005, the download count has tripled and is approaching an average of 1M downloads per month. It’s safe to say that during 2019 Blender was downloaded well over 10M times.

The Steam platform provides some unique insights regarding the amount of simultaneous users using Blender at any given moment, as well as the average usage time of Blender.

On Steam, users “play” with Blender for an average of 25 hours in total, with an average download rate of 100K/month. Blender has 55K followers on Steam.

The Microsoft Store has seen a 4x growth in terms of download rate, but its download volume is still 20x smaller than blender.org.

Demographic data such as age and gender are quite personal, and Blender does not attempt to collect it from users. However, the data is available through some platforms (e.g. Microsoft Store, YouTube analytics). The largest group in Blender’s audience is 18 to 24 year old males.

This data has been compared against samples from other platforms (social media channels, YouTube analytics) and the metrics are very similar.

Blender has a large social media following, with over 500K YouTube subscribers. The amount of subscribers has drastically increased in the past few years due to a combination of free training videos, live shows and a handful of unexpected viral videos. Blender’s YouTube channel is highly popular in the US, Brazil, Germany and India.

Further, Blender has 80K Facebook followers and 60K Twitter followers. Blender has a growing official presence also on Instagram and LinkedIn.

One of the driving values of the Blender project is independence. For this reason, through over 15 years of existence as Free Software project, Blender has operated a number of self-hosted web platforms to serve its community.

Exposing data about some of these websites helps us to paint a picture of the Blender community and spot past and ongoing trends.

Devtalk is a platform dedicated to development-focused discussion. During the first development cycle of Blender 2.80, it was also used to collect user feedback on usability topics. Dev Talk has nearly 4000 users, 25 moderators and varying levels of engagement when it comes to published and consumed content.

The relevant figure is the over 456 hours spent by site administrators (most of the Blender development team) only reading content on the platform. This is equivalent to 4 hours per day, for half a year, for one person.

Blender ID is a unified login system that gives access to a large number of online services around Blender (Blender Cloud, Conference, Dev Fund, Open Data, Dev Talk, etc). In October 2019 it counted over 185K users.

The very definition of data sharing is embodied by this platform. Launched with the goal of providing and collecting hardware performance through a benchmark in a transparent way, as of January 2020 the Open Data platform hosts over 40K benchmark results, along with a very comprehensive list of hardware configurations.

The Blender Development Fund has experienced a dramatic growth since its 2.0 relaunch at the end of 2018. It counted over 3200 members at the end of 2019.

The majority (60%) of subscribers are choosing the Bronze membership, which counts for 15% of the funding. However, the largest chunk of funding (over 70%) is currently provided by corporate sponsors.

The Blender development portal, a self-hosted instance of Phabricator running at developer.blender.org is the place where Blender is made. The source code of every official Blender project is hosted there, along with design tasks, todos and bug reports. While the platform was adopted only in 2016, all Blender development history has been migrated to it, making it a treasure trove of information about the development process. The portal has over 40K user accounts (9K users signed up just during 2019) and hundreds of thousands of logged transactions.

Countless metrics can be extracted from this platform, but for now we want to focus on the ones that help to answer the question “How quickly do users get an issue fixed?”.

The following chart displays in red how long it took for a developer to resolve an issue since it was originally reported. For example: of the total 4234 issues reported in 2019, 51 (1%) were resolved within 15 minutes.

In a similar manner, the chart also displays the time it took for a Blender team member to provide a first reply.

With over 68% of reports receiving an answer within 24h and close to 50% or reports being fixed within a week, the Blender community can be proud of such efficiency.

Given the amount of downloads and Blender releases we can estimate between 1 to 3 million Blender users out there. But how big is the contributors community? Quite small in comparison, with a little over 30 full time Blender employees, hundreds of volunteers and people involved on a daily basis with the project (through community support, bug reporting and triaging, documentation, etc). Next to that, there are thousands of people who financially support Blender through the Blender Development Fund, donations, and through a Blender Cloud subscription.

The growth that Blender has experienced during 2019 is remarkable, almost doubled compared to 2018 in any metric. Such growth brings countless challenges, but is also a great achievement for the Blender community.

Special thanks to Sergey Sharybin and Sem Mulder for helping with the data collection and presentation.

The year 2018 has been a good one for Blender. A lot has happened! Below I present my personal top list of memorable Blender events of the year. And one I look forward to in 2019. Listed in chronological order.

The year started with the announcement that the biggest Blender user website blenderartists.org will be under new management, adopted by Blendernation’s Bart Veldhuizen. The illustre “BA” site has a long history – starting as elysiun.com 18 years ago it was the website where we campaigned “Free Blender” in 2002. In the past years the site’s popularity was dwindling though, partially because of an increasing toxic atmosphere. A good remedy for that is upgrading forums to Discourse, more strict house rules (Bart’s a boss!) and a lot more positive attention to making and sharing art.

On February 9 we posted “this Monday something big will happen” – not realising everyone would expect Blender 2.8 to be magically finished! Instead it was the start of one of the best working fund raisers in Blender’s history – the Code Quest and the Rocket token.

Target was to collect funding to get the core Blender developer team to work together in one place on solving all the nasty technical issues that would keep Blender 2.8 from getting ready. Within a few weeks the target (2500 rockets) was met, and invitations to developers went out to come to Amsterdam to work on Blender in April/May/June.
These three months were one of the best periods in my Blender life ever – so much fun and so incredibly inspiring to have everyone together. The months went over way too fast… now if we could keep all of them on board full time for a longer time…

I was already eying the building in summer of 2017. It was quite ugly (well, not 17th century Amsterdam), already empty for 5+ years (‘North’ is considered the back corner of the city) but with 5 times more space to work on Blender and film projects – unlimited possibilities!
Three things came together that made us decide to move over – the announcement that the new North-South metro line would finally be delivered in 2018, the office owner finding a company to share rent with, and of course the prospect to be able to host a Code Quest.

With the metal Blender logo being added in summer 2018 it finally became “my place” and “our place”. Every other day we get visitors to get the famous 5-minute tour. It’s sometimes a burden, but I feel obliged to it. If you’re in Amsterdam, drop by!

We do “Content Driven Development” – that’s what I usually say on presentations. It’s what makes Blender so special. It gets us a lot of support from artists, and especially it’s something that keeps me going! Supporting a group of artists to challenge Blender to the max is an inspiring (+fun+frustrating :) and quite efficient way to get software production ready. This why Blender Cloud exists.
The “Hero” short film was the first Blender Cloud project supporting an external team; aligned with improving the Grease Pencil tools and to make it work for 2.80. The short is a real creative milestone for Blender. A lot of studios are eying us for this reason. Great job, Daniel and team!

Tree Creature by Daniel Bystedt

One of the best features of working in open source is that you can directly work with your users. The interaction of outstanding artists with Blender developers has been especially clear in the area of Blender’s “real-time photorealistic rendering in the viewport” project, aka the “EEVEE” drawing engine. The frequency of stunning demos was awesome. Quite often you saw several amazing new EEVEE works on your social media timeline scrolling by.

My (current) personal favourite; the creature breakdown by Daniel Bystedt. I was watching this video with the feeling of “something very alien arrived from the future”. And I don’t mean the creature.

I’ve met with Tangent Animation’s owners Jeff Bell and Ken Zorniak a couple of times. Just out of the blue they boldly decided to move their entire studio from Autodesk to Blender. Just like that. No complaints to Blender Foundation, no avalanche of bug reports, but instead taking control over their pipeline by hiring great people and supporting Blender developers. It was already amazing they then pulled off the Ozzy animation movie – but that film suffered low budget symptoms a bit. And then their studio released Next Gen. I don’t think anything else could have made me more proud than this last summer. Especially while going around at SIGGRAPH accepting a completely different stance from the industry. What a milestone!

It always struck me that there was no good and relevant open benchmark for 3D production software. Well, if anyone should come up with that it’s Blender of course. So we started a benchmark project last summer. The best thing is that it’s not just a benchmark you can download and run, it’s being combined with a website where you can submit the test results anonymously – thus contributing to a real public community-driven and independent resource for comparing hardware performance.

Check it out on opendata.blender.org, the front end (searching, displaying graphs) is still being worked on but it will go out of beta in January 2019. Kudos to the BI team for this project: Francesco, Sybren, Brecht, Sergey and Pablo.

It’s 2018, baby! People don’t read anymore, they watch vids!

I started the Code Quest with asking Pablo Vazquez if he would be willing to share a video every day. OK, every other day then. And with a reluctant start he took off. And man did it work :) you don’t want to know how many people who visited us in our new HQ said “I watched all your studio tours!”.

Just go here to watch the whole collection. Over 60 videos produced since March this year.

Let’s not forget the efforts Pablo has put in blender.today. Live streams about Blender every week.

Quietly, as side projects by Francesco Siddi and Pablo Vazquez, a whole new range of Blender websites emerged.
Check on their work: blender.community.  Here you can chat, watch news, discuss features, or start your own community.

Curious to see where this goes to in the next year. Good job guys.

I knew Grease Pencil was big. Starting as an annotation tool in Blender’s UI, it became a tool for storyboarding as well. Oh, why not do complete animatics while we’re on it? Wait, can we do a 2D animation production in it? Check, here’s Hero!

The jaw-dropping video above shows yet another use case I would never dared to dream of. Thanks Jama.

It has been awesome to be surrounded by such great people here. (The collection above is the code quest crew.) I’m super happy that a couple of them decided to accept a job to work full time here on Blender. New in 2018 are Brecht Van Lommel (pic 7, of Cycles fame) and Jacques Lucke (pic 13, of animation nodes fame). Starting early next year is Jeroen Bakker (pic 16,  compositor & workbench engine fame). More people to follow!

Blender Conferences are always awesome. Every year I’m glowing with satisfaction, feeling like I’ve experienced the best family gathering a person can wish. But this year… even now I’m still sortof emotional when I think of it. Everything worked out beyond expectations. The organisation, the venue, the catering, the online coverage, the streams, the videos, the speakers, the dinner/party, the audience.

Best. Conference. Ever. Watch the videos here.

And there it was. A bit later – in november – but not less awesome. Blender 2.80-beta. Did 2018 not have enough milestones already? :)
For a quick overview, get updated about this important release here.

Last but not least. There’s a whole team of artists here at work on a new open movie – Spring. Working in the 2.80 branch already since last May, they’re key in ensuring we have a production-ready Blender release in Q1/Q2 2019.

Directed and written by Andy Goralczyk, this epic short is about the rite of Spring – set in a poetic fantasy universe based on Andy’s childhood memories.

Spring is targeted to be ready in March. You can follow progress of (and support) this short in Blender Cloud. The film is in a race with Blender 2.80-stable. Which will come first? Find out in 2019!

Wish all of you a happy, prosperous and creative new year,

Ton Roosendaal
Chairman Blender Foundation