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

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

The report is free to share, please do!

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

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

Some highlights:

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

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

Watch the video summary on Blender’s YouTube channel.

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

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

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

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

Happy Blending! 

The Blender Team
July 16th, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To highlight a few:

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

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

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

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

Happy Blending! 

The Blender Team
March 26th, 2024

A small delegation of the Blender team (Dalai Felinto and Francesco Siddi) is going to attend the Game Developers Conference – GDC in San Francisco on 18-22 March, with the main goal to connect with individuals and teams using Blender to create interactive content.

This year we are also organizing a Blender for Breakfast event (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 coffee and pastries!

The event will take place on Tuesday, 19 March at 9:00AM at Sightglass Coffee, 270 7th St, San Francisco. Limited spots are available, make sure you RSVP if you are interested. See you there!

Last weekend, I attended two open-source focused events in Brussels: OFE (Open Forum Europe) and FOSDEM, with the goal of establishing and fostering Blender’s connection with the free and open source community. Here is a recap of the experience.

Attending OFE was an opportunity to witness some of the dynamics that define European regulations and policies with regard to free and open source software.

Most of the focus was on open source as a means to aid economic development and maximize the value of public investment in technology. Another widely discussed topic was the CRA (Cyber Resilience Act), and the implications on open source projects.

Several well-known free software organizations were present (Apache Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, Linux Foundation, NLnet Foundation, etc) next to figures from various European governance organizations, as well as and handful of free software contributors and developers.

It was useful to connect with new with people and listen to new voices. Despite the complexities that come with long-term planning and European politics, the future for open source looks bright!

Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at FOSDEM. It’s like an open source festival! Attending FOSDEM allowed reconnecting in real life with project like Godot, Matrix, Thunderbird, Kdenlive, Freecad and many more. 

The connection that Blender has with the open source community must be fostered and the Blender project should look into being more visible in this event in the coming years.

This was a great start of the year, with many events such as GDC, BCONLA and Annecy to look forward to. See you soon! 

Francesco

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – The Blender Foundation today announced an ambitious community-wide fundraiser to triple its donations before the end of the year in celebration of its 30th anniversary. This campaign, themed “A gift for Blender,” aims to secure at least 10,000 donations to support the continued development and maintenance of the beloved free and open-source 3D creation software.

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

To encourage participation, supporters of the December donation drive will receive a special “30 Years” badge in their Blender ID and have their name permanently recorded in the donation logs. 

The Blender Foundation invites individuals and organizations to join the 30th anniversary fundraiser and make a gift to Blender. Every donation, no matter the size, contributes to the continued success of development projects at blender.org and Blender’s ability to empower creative expression around the world.

About the Blender Foundation

The Blender Foundation is a public benefit organization that supports the development of Blender, a free and open-source 3D creation suite used by millions of artists, designers, filmmakers, and professionals worldwide. The foundation is committed to ensuring that Blender remains a powerful, free and open-source tool for creative expression and innovation.

Contact: 

Ton Roosendaal, Blender Foundation
foundation@blender.org

After serving the Blender project for over twenty years, it’s time to acknowledge that running our own internet store has become too impractical and expensive. Moreover, our financial manager Anja Vugts Verstappen, who handled the store since the early days, wishes to wind down her tasks to focus more on finances and get ready for retirement in the coming years. 

For that reason we decided to close the store by the end of the year. Obviously, all 2023 orders will be shipped and serviced in the new year as expected.

In Q1 2024, we will work on re-establishing our shirts and swag business based on using a high quality outsourcing business – as most other open source foundations currently do.

Excess stock of current products will be sold on events, like Blender Conference Amsterdam next year.

On behalf of everyone, I wish to thank Anja for her tireless work on keeping the store alive for two decades. Nobody would have been doing such a great job, you have my complete admiration for that!

Ton Roosendaal
Chairman Blender Foundation