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.