Blender

Blender is an open source software for 3D modeling, rendering, animation, post-production, interactive creation and playback. Available for Windows, Linux, Irix, Sun Solaris, FreeBSD or macOS.

Modeling

• A range of 3D object types including polygon meshes, NURBS surfaces, Bezier and B-spline curves, metaballs, vector fonts (TrueType, PostScript, OpenType)
• ‘Smooth proxy’ style catmull-clark subdivision surfaces
• Boolean mesh functions
• Editing functions such as extrude, bevel, cut, spin, screw, warp, subdivide, noise, smooth Soft selection editing tools for organic modeling
• Python scripting access for custom tools

Animation

• Armature (skeleton) deformation with forward/inverse kinematics, auto skinning and interactive 3D paint for vertex weighting
• Non-linear animation mixer with automated walk cycles along paths
• Constraint system
• Vertex key framing for morphing, with controlling sliders
• Character animation pose editor
• Animatable lattice deformation
• ‘Ipo’ system integrates both motion curve and traditional key-frame editing
• Audio playback, mixing and editing support for sound synchronization
• Python scripting access for custom and procedural animation effects

Realtime 3D/game creation

• Graphical editor for defining interactive behavior without programming
• Collision detection and dynamics simulation
• Python scripting API for sophisticated control and AI, fully defined advanced game logic
• Supports all OpenGL™ lighting modes, including transparencies, Animated and reflection-mapped textures
• Playback of games and interactive 3D content without compiling or preprocessing
• Audio, using the fmod toolkit
• Multi-layering of Scenes for overlay interfaces

Rendering

• Very fast inbuilt raytracer
• Integral support for the famous Yafray render engine
• Oversampling, motion blur, post-production effects, fields, non-square pixels
• Environment maps, halos, lens flares, fog
• Various surface shaders such as Lambert, Phong, Oren-nayar, Blinn, Toon
• Edge rendering for toon shading
• Procedural Textures
• Ambient Occlusion
• Radiosity solver
• Export scripts available for external renderers such as Renderman (RIB), Povray, Virtualight
• UV texture editor with various mesh unwrap modes

Interface

• Flexible user configurable window layout
• Powerful object-oriented data system
• Anti-aliased fonts with international translation support
• Windows for animation curves/keys, schematic scene diagram, non-linear video sequence editing, character animation action editor, non-linear animation mixer, image/UV editing, file/image selection and file management
• Inbuilt text editor for annotations and editing Python scripts
• Consistent interface across multiple platforms

Files

• Save all scene data in a single .blend file
• .blend format supports compression, digital signatures, encryption, forwards/backwards compatibility and can be used as a library to link to from other .blend files
• Read / Write TGA, JPG, PNG, Iris, SGI Movie, IFF, AVI and Quicktime GIF, TIFF, PSD, MOV (Windows and Mac OS X)
• Native import and export for DXF, Inventor and VRML files, with python scripts available for many other 3D formats
• Create stand-alone executables containing interactive 3D content or play back with the 3d web browser plugin

Fire and Smoke

Fire simulation was added to the Smoke Simulator. The domain received major updates to improve performance and usability. Smoke can be emitted from mesh surfaces, without the need for a particle system. A smoke flow force field was added to improve interaction with other simulations. Colored smoke simulation and mixing is possible and the interaction of smoke with collision objects has been improved.

Mesh Modeling

The bevel tool now includes rounding and was otherwise much improved, preserving the requested bevel width more evenly and generating better topology. A new symmetrize tool was added to make mesh topology and data symmetric.

More Features

New features include: a tool transfer vertex weights from one mesh to another, antialiased viewport drawing, connected proportional editing in UV editor, improved DPX file read and write, more control over curve taper, collision masks in the game engine and improved camera title safe drawing.

Cycles Render

Support for writing custom shaders in the Open Shading Language is now available. Motion blur rendering was also added, to make moving objects and cameras appear blurry. There is also an anisotropic shading node, and BSDF nodes can now have different normals, which can be set using the new bump and normal map nodes.

Modifiers

The decimator was rewritten, and now preserves UV’s and vertex colors, has an un-subdivide and a mode to dissolve vertices to create planar n-gons. A new laplacian smooth modifier can reduce noise or smooth the mesh while preserving edges and volume. A triangulate modifier was also added, which can be useful for creating game assets with baked normal maps.

Modeling

Improved bridge tool to bridge multiple loops at once, subdivision, surface blending and bridging face regions. New grid-fill tool filling a grid from edge loops, X mirror and projected proportional editing, snap to symmetry, face split option for dissolve, vertex connect cut across faces.

Cycles Rendering

Rendering performance has been improved on CPU and GPU and support for new GPUs was added. A new Mist render pass is available, Ray visibility is now supported for all light sources, and new Nodes have been added. Hair rendering on the GPU has been enabled as well.

Motion Tracker

Some new features and smaller improvements to existing ones were done for motion tracking. Main features are markers’ position refining, which allows you to refine marker position after it was occluded by an object, and automatic keyframe selection, which tries to automatically find a best keyframe for the reconstruction.

Physics

Smoke has improved rendering quality avoid blockiness, and subframe simulation support to handle fast moving emitters. Particles can now be emitted from faces generated by modifiers that were not in the original mesh.

Usability

Improved weight painting tools, mask modifier for sequencer strips, 2D image paint more consistent with 3D painting, better key shortcuts display, quick enabling and disabling of multiple layers or visibility, auto indent for multi-line Python statements, and more.

Python Security

Auto-running Python scripts can now be controlled more securely.

Much awaited new features for Cycles renderer include deformation motion blur, fire/smoke and volume rendering and a baking API. User interface now allows for draggable popups and resizable preview widgets. Animation has new interpolation types with “easing equations” presets. Modeling now allows to “split normals” and Sculpting/Painting has new HSL color wheel and constant detail in dyntopo. Game development now allows deactivating logic bricks, multi-threaded animations, cast only materials and “unlimited” action layers. Freestyle NPR rendering has a new textured strokes feature, along with line sorting options.

What’s New

Blender Foundation and the online developers community proudly present Blender 3.5! Featuring a viewport compositor, vector displacement sculpting, built-in hair assets, many lights sampling for Cycles, and so much more.

Path to Success

Three new Geometry Nodes have landed for path-finding across mesh edges. Create impossible mazes, lightning, growing vegetation, and so much more.

Light and Shadow Contour

The Line Art modifier is now able to calculate accurate cast shadow and light/shadow separation line given a light source reference object.

Intersection Priority

Specify different intersection priority levels for different objects, then intersection lines would be automatically selected with the object who has the higher intersection priority.

Great Silhouette

Draw silhouette around selected collection, or around individual objects in that collection. LineArt is also able to identify intersecting and overlapping silhouette geometries.

Grease Pencil Everywhere

The Dopesheet and Timeline editors now show Grease Pencil keyframes alongside other objects and properties.

Previous Release Notes:

Complete release notes for Blender 3.3 can be found here.

Visibility of all object types can be adjusted with filters. The Grease Pencil sub-mode is still available for a more focused experience.

Previous release notes

Blender Foundation and the online developers community are proud to present Blender 3.2. Unleash your creativity with new rendering features, painting tools, performance improvements and much more.

Light Groups

A new type of Cycles render pass that contains only the lighting from a subset of light sources. Light Groups can be used in order to e.g. modify the color and/or intensity of light sources in the compositor without re-rendering.

Shadow Caustics

Cycles now supports selective rendering of caustics in shadows of refractive objects. This is based on “Manifold Next Event Estimation”, a method developed for production rendering.

Paint it Black

Paint is now available in Sculpt mode! Taking advantage of the performance improvements you can now paint on millions of polygons.
Check out the file used on the video below.

Remesh

Now when using the voxel remesher all color attributes will be preserved. This is perfect to color your sculpts as you still experiment and block out the general shapes.

• VSE: Flush audio encode after finishing video export. [rB85c08c9717b]
• FFMPEG: Fix building with older versions that need FFMPEG_USE_DURATION_WORKAROUND. [rB7ec351c0d53]
• VSE: Fix “off by one” error when encoding audio. [rB9511009438d]
• VSE: Fix memory leak when adding bad image/movie strips. [rB54a821e8fd7]
• VSE: Fix video strip duration calculation. [rBd486d248687]
• VSE: Fix seeking issues. [rB00dd68405d8]
• VSE: Fix audaspace not reading ffmpeg files with start offset correctly. [rB489df7ac88c]
• VSE: Use lines to draw waveform. [rBc634d859b21]
• M2T video seeking is broken. [T87967]
• Add sanity NULL checks when loading sound sequences. [rB1a4122d4415]
• wrong address to get boost libraries in /build_files/build_environment/install_deps.sh. [T90719]
• Effect Strip added to a nested Metastrip gets duplicate name (thus inherits fcurves from other Strips). [T90737]
• Memorie spike shrink-wrap and geometry nodes. [T89429]
• Fix: DNA struct alignment on 32 bit. [rB9fb9bf59967]
• Makesdna: Fix detecting 32 bit padding issues. [rB70df9119f46]
• Fix FTBFS on mips64el architecture. [rB9d94b358ca1]
• Fix memory leak with building springs in the cloth simulator. [rB20f04ce62af]
• Knife project leaks memory each time a text, curve, or surface object is used for cutting. [T90791]
• Grease Pencil layer transformations ignored by select tool. [T90690]
• Fix memory leak in edit-mesh dissolve degenerate. [rBe1e2abd4bf0]
• Scale to Fit overflows into a second line. [T89241]
• Memory leak after importing a model/ toggling shading workspace. [T88033]
• ASAN: Trying to Undo a knife-project operation causes heap-use-after-free failure. [T90493]
• blender 2.93.1 fails to build with python 3.10.0b4 (upcoming python 3.10). [T89931]
• Incorrect result of Vector Projection (Geometry Nodes -> Attribute Vector Math). [T90567]
• Grease Pencil Reproject Strokes on surfaces from a camera’s point of view is incorrectly placing the strokes on the Back Faces when canvas is intersecting the object. [T89101]
• Something in Blender can generate invalid (Nan) values in UVMaps. [T79775]
• Blender Crashing when opening file. [T89805]
• bpy.types.Object.parent_bone not reset when clearing a bone parent. [T88498]
• UI bugs in NLA Editor and Action Editor. [T87681]
• Animation channels widgets (graph, action, NLA, *dopesheet*) block input for the search channel, and invert search toggle. [T90364]