Visitors who walked in around the offices at the Blender Headquarters, would have noticed a large variation of collectible figurines everywhere. These figurines are mostly characters from well known movies and games. Made of durable PVC, the figurines have a stunning quality and detail level that’s not possible to do with 3D printing – and certainly not as affordable. Wouldn’t it be just amazing to have a collectible series with the beloved open movie characters?

A year ago Ton Roosendaal contacted a renowned factory of designer toys, Demeng Toys in China. Working with them the Blender team learned a lot of how the production process goes for high quality characters.

It then was decided to go for a test batch of two Sprite Fright characters, 1500 copies each. If sales work out as expected, these characters then will be the first of a 30+ series of figurines, ranging all the way from Elephants Dream to the latest Blender open movie.

Last week, the container ship with the boxes arrived in the harbor of Rotterdam. Currently the goods are waiting to be declared for customs. When they arrive in the office, the figures will be sent out right away.

Standard figurine box price is 49 euro (or 49 usd). Blender Studio subscribers get 25% off on all figurine orders.

As for all products we sell on store.blender.org, the proceeds will go to fund Blender projects.

Ton Roosendaal
CEO Blender Foundation

Today the Blender Foundation releases the first episode of Blenderheads, a series about the people behind the Blender project. The editor and director –documentary maker Maaike Kleverlaan– works embedded in the Blender headquarters to cover the activities and conduct interviews. The first episode is set during September-December 2022, with new episodes being published on a quarterly basis.

Blenderheads follows the journey of people involved in the Blender project, documenting the process of creating the best free and open source 3D content creation software. This goes beyond software design and development, and focuses on life as part of the Blender community.

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.

2022 is a big year for Blender, celebrating 20 years of being Open Source and the return to big events to connect with the community and the industry.

13-18th June – Annecy, France

The first large event of the year with Blender presence will be the Annecy Festival. Just like in 2018, Blender will have its own booth at MIFA (14-17th June).

Part of the Blender Studio team will be present as this will be the first time an Open Movie project (Sprite Fright) gets nominated for the Annecy International Animation Film Festival (FIFA)! 

Moreover, students of the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional created an alternate score of the open movie Spring. Interpreted by an orchestra during the festival on the 16th (Thursday), at 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. at Cine Concert, Annecy Castle Museum.

Annecy is a great opportunity to connect with studios and individual artists. In 2018, a large crowd gathered to see the Grease Pencil demos by Daniel Martinez Lara, way before the improvements in 2.80. This year Daniel will join the team once again to demo the Storyboarding workflow. A meetup with Blender professionals will be organized, stay tuned for more info on social media.

We can’t wait to see what people are creating with Blender nowadays! 

Learn more about the Annecy Festival on their website.

8-11th August – Vancouver, Canada

The largest conference for computer graphics is back, and Blender will once again be part of it as it has since 1999.

This will be the first SIGGRAPH since the iconic release of Blender 2.80, and the team is preparing a bigger booth for the community and industry to come, network, or simply hangout. Find us at booth #833.

Learn more about SIGGRAPH on their website. Get a special discount when you register by using the code SBF22.

27-29th October – Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Closing the year with a bang, the Blender event is back and bigger than ever.

Taking place at the beautiful 18th century neo-classical Felix Meritis in the heart of Amsterdam, BCON22 will host the largest amount of visitors ever.

Tickets sale will start at the end of June, as well as a call for talks, and Suzanne Awards Festival submissions.

Follow @BlenderConf for the latest updates.

Along with the 3 December release of Blender 3.0, Blender Foundation wishes to publish a video similar to last year’s 2-minute “Together Apart” format.

The theme for this year is to celebrate the wonderful diversity of Blender’s ecosystem. Blender is so much more than just a 3D tool! Everyone is welcome to submit a two minute edit about what makes Blender special for them, related to realized or upcoming work with Blender. Anything goes: scripting add-ons, teaching, scientific research, film and VFX, animation, XR installations, games, cinematics, virtual sets, architecture, industrial design, live graphics for tv shows, archeology, biology, C++ coding, consultancy, name it… In short: real-life use cases of how Blender makes a difference.

Guidelines:

• Max 120 seconds.
• Start with saying something like “Blender is…”
• Strive for broadcast quality video and sound (check the BCON20, Together Apart video).
• Don’t only show CG or screencasts, also include people, yourself and your work, or your workplace.
• Avoid making it look like an advertisement, we will add title cards with name and optional company name.
• Submission deadline is 25 November 2021. 

Before you spend a lot of time on a video, please submit the idea here for a quick check. The reviewers (Francesco Siddi, Dalai Felinto, Pablo Vazquez, Ton Roosendaal) aim at keeping the video high quality and under 80 minutes.

Thanks!

Ton Roosendaal
Blender Foundation

Welcome to the yearly recap of Blender’s numbers. Some of the figures in this article were presented as part of the Blender Annual Report 2020, and some are brand new. Overall, the growing trend for the Blender project continues

More popular than ever, the blender.org website and several of its subdomains have received a combined 23M unique visitors. That is a 35% increase from last year, approaching 2M visitors per month.

The most viewed pages on blender.org are the download page followed by the “Thank You” page, displayed after a download started, the homepage and the features page. Buildbot (available on builder.blender.org) is also very popular.

Half of the website traffic comes from 8 countries: USA, India, UK, Germany, Russia, Brazil, Japan, China (up 71%).

The Blender Development Fund has grown, with more donations across most individual memberships. On the Corporate side, the growth was significant, especially thanks to 3 new Patron level memberships. 

When looking at individual memberships, it’s worth to point out that while traffic on blender.org and downloads have increased over 30%, Development Fund donations are up 10%.

On the software side, Blender has seen an unprecedented number of 108 new contributors. This is a testament to how welcoming the Blender project is and also of how challenging 2020 was in terms of growth.

The response and resolution time chart presented in the previous report turned some heads in the industry and was very well received.

The public and freely accessible developer.blender.org portal shows one of the most impressive aspects of the Blender community. In 2020, with a significantly increased amount of downloads and traffic, did the Blender triaging and development team manage to keep the same response time? It seems so. The number of issues reported is comparable to 2019, as well as the response and resolution timings.

Portals such as Blender ID, Open Data and DevTalk have not seen significant technical updates during 2020, but nevertheless each of them has seen a steady growth in traffic and user count. In order to better expose these numbers, as well as all the other figures presented in this report, the idea of creating a dedicated metrics portal is being explored. 

Overall this was another outstanding year for Blender. The project and its community are growing strong and healthy.

Special thanks to Michael Newbon and Dalai Felinto for helping with the charts design and data collection and analysis.

Francesco Siddi
Amsterdam, 2021

Blender 2.93 LTS marks the end of a series more than twenty years in the making. It also marks the start of a new era: 3.0 arrives very soon indeed. 

For now, 2.93 intends to go out with a bang, featuring a huge number of enhancements.   

The EEVEE depth of field rendering was rewritten for increased accuracy, allowing it to better handle fall off and close-ups. Ambient occlusion and volumetrics were also improved.

Geometry Nodes was expanded to build on the attribute system — texture sampling, support volume data, and usability were all upgraded. A multitude of new nodes were added, including proximity, sample texture, remove, convert, clamp and more. Amongst the large number of improvements to Geometry Nodes was the Spreadsheet Editor, and several usability tweaks. Additionally, it’s now possible to add a range of primitives without leaving Geometry Nodes. And Geometry Nodes received its own default workspace. 

In Grease Pencil, the line art modifier was added to create stylized lines. The fill tool was updated to make it faster, and other tweaks like multi-frame filling were included. Also, it’s now possible to export SVG and PDF for further editing in other programs. 

Modelling updates included new taper modes, leading to enhanced control. Subdivision surface options introduced more UV smoothing possibilities.   

VSE now automatically generates proxies, while Cycles has again become faster — plus other developments, like less blurry normals. Lighting now includes the option to add a honeycomb or grid in front of an area light. Sculpting, animation and rigging also received updates.  

Of course, there were many more improvements and bug fixes, all of which can be further explored in the release notes.

As always, enormous thanks to the community, and the over 2500 individuals and organizations contributing to the Development Fund.                 

Happy Blending! 

The Blender Team

June 2nd 2021

We’re happy to present the 32-page report of the activities Blender Foundation could do thanks to donations and Development Fund membership support.

https://download.blender.org/institute/blender-annual-report-2020-v1.pdf

This year’s edition has an extensive section on the long term mission and vision of the Blender organization.

Amsterdam, May 2021
Ton Roosendaal

2.92 is Blender’s first major release of 2021! It was made possible with a massive amount of community involvement, including assistance from developers and contributors worldwide.  

This release introduces a brand new, major feature: Geometry Nodes. Geometry Nodes is a custom modifier that allows to manipulate geometry through a node interface. Currently focused on point and asset scattering workflows, the functionality will expand with upcoming releases. 

Other updates include performance and UI improvements to the new Add Primitive Tool, which allows users to create primitives interactively in a couple of clicks. 

Blender’s sculpting workspace introduces a new grab silhouette option, the Multires Displacement Smear tool, and more besides. 

For 2D animators, Grease Pencil continues its journey to becoming a fully-fledged 2D animation package within Blender as a whole. This means lots of new possibilities, including the option to edit strokes as though they were Bézier curves. 

Blender’s video editing capacity has been enriched, paving the way for VSE as a legitimate open source alternative for professional editors. 

To see the full list of changes implemented in 2.92, check out the release page. Blender 2.92 splash by Joanna Kobierska.

Finally: major thanks to the Blender community, and the over 5000 individuals and organizations contributing to the Development Fund.