The 2022 Blender Foundation report has been finished – already! It was great to look back on all the projects that happened during this very busy year. Plus, as Blender hit its 20th anniversary as an Open Source software, we added a special section to gather points of view on our project.

Enjoy:

Annual report 2022 (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!

We’re back in Los Angeles! SIGGRAPH is the absolute highlight of the year for the CG community, for scientists, developers and artists alike.

The conference will take the place at Los Angeles Convention Center, from Sunday 6th until Thursday 10th of August.

You can find Blender at the following places during the conference.

Use the code guest code BLE1161 for free tradeshow-only passes when registering on their website.
Note: the discount code has to be filled in on the top of the page where you provide address information.

More info about the conference at siggraph.org

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

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