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

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

Blender Foundation and the online developers community are proud to present Blender 3.6 LTS!

Blender 3.6 LTS is the last release before the major jump into the 4.x series, with focus on stability to make sure this a great release to hold on to for the next couple of years.

Nonetheless, this release brings a huge range of new features and performance improvements:

• Simulation Nodes, the next leap in Geometry Nodes
• A new UV packing engine
• Animation improvements
• Faster FBX I/O
• Several USD improvements including Curves/hair export
• Cycles speed-up on AMD, Intel® Arc™, and Apple Silicon GPUs
• Mesh editing and Geometry Nodes performance improvements
• Major updates to Library Overrides resyncing
• User Interface improvements
• VDM Brush Baker add-on included
• and so, so much more

A new Human Base Meshes asset bundle has been added to the demo files section on blender.org.

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

With the end-of-life of Blender 2.93 LTS, a new long-term support release takes place. Blender 3.6 LTS will receive fixes and support until June 2025.

For ongoing projects Blender 3.3 LTS is still actively supported until September 2024.

Another exciting milestone achieved thanks to the Blender community and the 3250 individuals and 33 organizations contributing to the Blender Development Fund.

Happy Blending! 

The Blender Team
June 27th, 2023

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

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 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

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.

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