Following the success of last year, the Blender team will attend the Annecy festival, and as usual, will be visible with a booth and live demos at the MIFA (film market) on 13-16 June.

Most artists from the Blender Studio (plus special guest Daniel M. Lara) will be attending the festival, make sure you connect, drop by stand A.40 at the exhibition area and get a sneak peek of the ongoing open movie Pet Projects.

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, 15 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 3.5!

Blender 3.5 is feature packed, touching almost every corner to make Blender better in every way:

• GPU accelerated viewport compositor
• Support for sculpting with Vector Displacement Maps (VDM) textures
• 26 built-in node groups assets for Hair grooming
• Faster rendering of scenes with many lights in Cycles
• Import and export USDZ

Plus: EEVEE renders much faster on Apple Silicon devices, Cycles supports non-uniform spot lights and less noisy area lights, new animation curves tools, new UV and modeling tools, faster OBJ export, as always hundreds of bug fixes, performance, memory improvements, cleanups, refactors, and so much more.

Explore the release notes for an in-depth look at what’s new.

Another exciting milestone achieved thanks to the Blender community and the over 3000 individuals and organizations contributing to the Blender Development Fund.

Happy Blending! 

The Blender Team
March 29th, 2023

Finally, the 2021 (!) Blender Foundation report has been finished. Yes it’s in the eleventh hour, my apologies for that. Fortunately it was cool to look back so far, we’ve achieved a lot that year. Check it out:

Annual report 2021 (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.

All the best,

Ton Roosendaal
Chairman Blender Foundation

Blender Foundation and the online developers community are proud to present Blender 3.4!

A highlight in this release is the integration of Intel’s Open Path Guiding Library, adding support for path guiding in CPU in Cycles.

The auto-masking tools in Sculpt/Paint mode are now accessible from the 3D Viewport, and support cavity, view, and area-based auto-masking. The UV editor received several updates to existing tools as well as new operators to align UV rotation, randomize islands, support for non-uniform grid, and more.

Geometry Nodes now shows an overlay in the 3D Viewport, making it easy to debug and test parts of your node tree. Many new nodes have been added to retrieve mesh and curve data, sample UV surface, Node Group assets now show in the Add menu, and so much more.

Other improvements include a new Grease Pencil outline modifier and better Fill tool, support for PBR extensions in .mtl files, animation editors improvements, major performance speed-ups and much more.

Explore the release notes for an in-depth look at what’s new.

The latest long-term support release also received an update today, Blender 3.3.2 LTS. Learn more and download.

Another exciting milestone achieved thanks to the Blender community and the over 3000 individuals and organizations contributing to the Blender Development Fund.

Happy Blending! 

The Blender Team
December 7th, 2022

Blender Foundation is delighted to announce Volkswagen Group as the latest Patron Member of the Foundation’s Development Fund. A public statement is available on LinkedIn.

The VW Group is delighted to support the Blender Foundation as the 1st major Automotive OEM.

We as the VW Group would like to reward the fantastic work of the Blender Community by joining the foundation as a Patron member.

Ali Varol – Business Partner Manager – Group IT at Volkswagen AG

Welcome Volkswagen AG! There has been an ever-growing adoption of Blender in the industrial design space, and seeing such public support for the Blender mission is highly appreciated.

Blender Foundation, October 2022

Blender Foundation and the online developers community are proud to present the first long-term release of the 3.x series, Blender 3.3 LTS!

A highlight in this release is the introduction of a completely new system for hair grooming, using a new Curves object type that supports Sculpt mode and the flexibility of Geometry Nodes. The particle-based system is still available and hair can be converted between systems.

Geometry Nodes has been expanded to support procedural UV Unwrapping, shortest-path nodes, and a number of new primitives and utility nodes.

Grease Pencil Line Art is more performant, and can calculate light and shadow contour lines, specify object priority, and received improvements to silhouette detection. Grease Pencil keyframes are now displayed in the general Dopesheet Editor view, making it convenient to animate regular objects and properties together with Grease Pencil keyframes.

Other improvements include better Library Overrides management, new features in Video Sequencer, modeling, UV, faster sculpting in EEVEE, updates in user interface, Cycles support for AMD Vega graphics cards and the new Intel® Arc™ GPUs, and so much more.

Explore the release notes for an in-depth look at what’s new.

Blender 3.3 LTS is a long-term support release, receiving fixes until September 2024.

Another exciting milestone achieved thanks to the Blender community and the over 2900 individuals and organizations contributing to the Blender Development Fund.

Happy Blending! 

The Blender Team
September 7th, 2022

Blender Foundation and the online developers community are proud to present Blender 3.2!

New features and improvements include:

1. Cycles: Light Groups
2. Cycles: Shadow Caustics
3. Cycles: Volume Motion Blur
4. Support for Collections in the Asset Browser
5. New Curve Pen Tool
6. New Paint Tool in Sculpt Mode
7. Vertex Colors refactored into generic Color Attributes
8. New Duplicate Elements node in Geometry Nodes
9. New Envelope Modifier in Grease Pencil
10. Enhanced Channels in Video Sequencer Editor
11. Animation & Rigging improvements

EEVEE shaders improvements, support for WebP image format, new experimental OBJ importer, VR, user interface and usability improvements, better multi-threading, node tree evaluation and reduced memory usage in Geometry Nodes, better performance and as always hundreds of bug fixes all across the board.

Explore the release notes for an in-depth look at what’s new.

Another great milestone achieved thanks to the Blender community and the over 2900 individuals and organizations contributing to the Blender Development Fund.

Happy Blending! 

The Blender Team
June 8th, 2022

On behalf of everyone in the blender.org organization I hereby fully and loudly condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

This illegal and murderous act in the heart of Europe threatens the peace of everyone in the world. The devastating consequences for the lives of millions of Ukrainians break our hearts. President Putin and his clique have to be stopped. We can only hope that a large majority of good willing Russians themselves find a peaceful way out of this crisis.

In the past few days we have received messages that we should block access to blender.org from Russia, or add a message in the Blender splash. This, however, is not the best thing I believe we should do. I wish to hold the principles of our mission high – to contribute to Free Software for everyone and to defend the freedom of artists and developers. I believe that our work contributes to a better world, and that we should keep doing this with more effort and conviction than ever. Blender is for everyone.

We all at Blender, jointly and individually, intend to do something to help out. For example, to aid refugees coming to the Netherlands. These actions will be done using the appropriate channels, such as the Dutch Council for Refugees. We consider that normal acts for responsible citizens and good European neighbors.

I wish everyone who has been affected by this horrible situation a lot of strength. I sincerely hope it will be over soon.

Ton Roosendaal
Chairman Blender Foundation

Blender Foundation and the online developers community are proud to present Blender 3.1, a solid update to an already outstanding release.

Blender 3.1 takes a major leap in performance:

• Metal GPU backend support contributed by Apple for computers with M1 processors and AMD graphics cards
• GPU acceleration for Subdivision modifier
• Faster mesh editing
• Asset Browser indexing
• Image Editor support for large images
• Improved speed of .obj and .fbx export
• Better multi-threading, node tree evaluation and reduced memory usage in Geometry Nodes

Plus many more performance improvements all over the board. New animation tools in the Graph Editor, new nodes for procedural modeling in Geometry Nodes, user interface improvements, Video Sequencer editor, Grease Pencil, hundreds of bug fixes and so much more.

Explore the release notes for an in-depth look at what’s new.

Blender wouldn’t be possible without its amazing community, and thanks to the over 2900 individuals and organizations contributing to the Blender Development Fund.

Happy Blending! 

The Blender Team
March 9th, 2022