Blender Developers Blog

Looks like that really is the Blender 4.0 release. But there's still absolutely no mention of it on the official blog: https://code.blender.org Nor of the RC1 being available at some point before. WTF? :( :( :(

I don't think it's in this release, but the Blender thing I'm most excited about is the new realtime compositor[0]. The lack of a decent Free compositor is one of the things that pushed me towards using proprietary software for video stuff, so it'll be great to see that gap plugged. [0] https://code.blender.org/2022/07/real-time-compositor/

The developer blog is pretty good. https://code.blender.org/

This is a great example, I wasn't aware of Blender's funding model. Thanks for sharing! For those interested, blender is crowdfunded and supports six full-time developers, and three part-time developers[1]. There's more interesting details on their funding page[2]. [1]: https://code.blender.org/2018/12/blender-development-fund-projects-for… [2]: https://fund.blender.org

It seems like no one commenting here knows anything, so I'll just leave these here: https://code.blender.org/2015/07/blender-2-8-the-workflow-release/ https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.8/ Right now, the main focus is in the (already fantastic IMHO) UI.

Actually no, what he was proposing was to reskin the interface to make certain things more obvious and consistent. However, it's not as easy to peel a UI off an existing program as non-technical people might imagine. It was an excellent initiative and the effort is ongoing. http://code.blender.org/index.php/2013/10/redefining-blender/ and https://developer.blender.org/project/view/12/

This is a relatively tame update, but the roadmap for the near future is really exciting, with stuff like Simulation Nodes (which already has a usable experimental branch) and Blender Apps (https://code.blender.org/2022/11/blender-apps) I'm not a programmer so I struggled with the fundamental concepts a bit when learning Geometry Nodes, but it's been the best new addition to my life in a long time. I think I haven't watched any TV show in a year or two because I prefer to spend my time fiddling with GN and answering people's questions about it on Blender Stack Exchange (found out that it's a fantastic way to learn—they're like little prompts leading you to discover areas you hadn't even realized existed). Blender community is so big, creative, enthusiastic, and helpful—you go on Blender-Twitter and it's people making playful/interesting stuff all day and sharing how they did it. I can't stop gushing about it to anyone who'd listen.

Blender is shaping up to be the best open source project I've seen in my 20 years of tech, and I'm comparing this with many other large ones I've used, like Linux kernel or various distros, FreeBSD, Kubernetes and so on. They do everything so well, even the releases, I think it beats the paid competition now or will soon do in feature parity and ease of use. As of Blender 2.8 the UI is fantastic. This update comes with many geometry node improvements which continue the trend of making Blender the premium non-destructive modelling solution. I'm in particular interested in seeing how 6900 XT and regular M1 (in Mac mini form) will perform under Metal with 3.1 and macOs 12.3. I was a long time Radeon VII user on Mac but before 3.0 the stability and performance was just not there so I've moved my Blender experiments to Windows and Nvidia which works spectacularly but I'm not fussed about booting win just for Blender. Sadly I don't think AMD is bringing HIP for their older, pre-6000 GPUs https://code.blender.org/2021/11/next-level-support-for-amd-gpus/

I too would love to have a Blender game engine. But removing it was the right (though painful) decision. It caused a code maintenance nightmare by duplicating and reimplementing a lot of other code, and removing it makes adding new things to Blender much easier (like Interactive Mode). Back when I was using 3D Studio Max, I wished it had a fast sleek efficient minimal game engine runtime called "3D Studio Min", but that never panned out either. https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/106972/what-will-happen-wi… >As for the reasons for removal we can conclude it was an old and aging component, it was largely unmaintained, suffered from several bugs and limitations, and the Blender Foundation probably lacked the energy, motivation and manpower to maintain it properly. >"Adding new things to Blender gets much easier that way. The Blender Internal code started in early 90s. Over 25 years old! Functionally, EEVEE can (and will) completely replace it." -Ton Roosendaal >It was also very architecturally outdated, lagged severely behind the current industry standards and modern technologies in many ways, it would be very hard to bring it up to date. Modernizing it or introducing new features would end up being more work than a full rewrite from scratch. [...] >What About Forking It? >UPBGE is a third party fork, whose objective is updating and modernizing the BGE with better technologies and features, with the end goal of eventually merging it back…

Does anyone know about good books that discuss the various design decisions behind the "kernel graph"? (https://code.blender.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/cycles_x_kernel_gr… I mean, I recognize that its the "graphics pipeline", but there's all sorts of performance discussion points. You want the data to be in a particular form as it traverses the graph. The various bits of the graph want to be "pipelinable", and parallelized if possible (possibly executing on a 'Remote' GPU). The data may-or-may not be local to a certain location. (Ex: data in DDR4 will need to be transferred to GPU, and back. Or if you're in a render-farm situation, you may need to TCP-send the data to the remote computer before that computer can move forward with its rendering). And of course: all of those need to be balanced out with the featureset of the underlying program. Anyone can make a fast "sphere-only" renderer/raytracer, but Blender supports many different types of meshes, NURBS, and other features, which is probably the bulk of the complexity. ----------- The depreciation of the OpenCL kernels is a bit sad, but understandable to anyone who has actually worked with OpenCL vs CUDA vs ROCm. The OpenCL kernels in Blender are particularly weirdly coded, so throwing them away might be the best option.

> A massive subset of Firefox devs are Linux users. No, they are not. A massive subset of Firefox devs are Apple users. For Linux, the occasional Redhat or SuSE dev does the most-needed fixing. > Those features are missing largely because they are hard to implement reliably on Linux and customers (who are largely not Linux users) won't feel the impact. Neither of these are true. It does make easier rationalizing Linux mistreatment, though. If there was no impact, the equivalent functionality would not be needed to be implemented under other OS-es either. You have bugzilla full of feedback, that it does have an impact. It also makes Linux itself look worse, compared to other systems. > There are often flags you can set to try and use them on Linux, YMMV. I know, that you can force OMTC, for example. I've been doing that for years, with zero bugs. Why can't Mozilla do that by default? They haven't reviewed the situation for years, that's how much they care. Also, for example, the EGL situation (needed for Wayland, obviously Wayland apps cannot use GLX without X11) was purely Firefox problem, not the driver stack one. (Worked on by Redhat dev). > If you try doing much hardware graphics (let alone game development) for Linux end-users you'll understand why features like OMTP or OMTC are late to ship on that platform, if ever. Mesa is one of best of breed drivers, especially compared to some drivers you can find on other platforms. See here:…

Blender started working on this about a year ago (https://code.blender.org/2025/07/beyond-mouse-keyboard/) but it appears to be on hold for now (https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/142346?__cf_chl_f_…

Google has been supporting Blender for over 20 years, initially through Summer of Code [1, 2], and later through corporate sponsorship once Blender started offering it. And I'm pretty sure I've seen most of the big names in tech on the sponsors page [3] for many years now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code [2] https://code.blender.org/2011/04/google-summer-of-code-2011-blender-su… [3] https://fund.blender.org/

To rotate the view in SolveSpace, you need any one of these: * a keyboard's shift key and a right mouse button, or * a middle mouse button, or * a 3D mouse. I've done some work in SolveSpace with a Wacom tablet, by binding the stylus's buttons to the middle and right mouse buttons. SolveSpace is a pretty simple program, so you don't need to dig deep through the UI to get to all the functions. Lost of the often-used functions have keyboard shortcuts, but I don't think there is anything that is only accessible through the keyboard. Depending on what you aim to do, you might be interested in keeping up with Blender's currently-in-development tablet mode: https://code.blender.org/2025/07/beyond-mouse-keyboard/

The SDF geometry nodes open up a wild amount of new options. That and node closures solve so many difficult problems, especially in complex scattering. If you haven't checked them out, here is a bit on them and volume grids: https://code.blender.org/2025/10/volume-grids-in-geometry-nodes/

Most of Blender's icons are actually made in Penpot which is also what the Blender foundation uses for UI prototyping. The brush icons are made in Blender though! https://penpot.app/penpothub/libraries-templates/blender-cons-set https://code.blender.org/2024/11/new-brush-thumbnails/

> So the practical outcome is that the App Store and the GPL are incompatible until proven otherwise, and it's probably never going to be proven otherwise. Apple certainly thinks so, or it wouldn't have removed VLC (and other Open Source apps like GNU Go) from the App Store. It's going to be really interesting to watch Blender target iPads, between their GPL license (complicated), addons (banned) and being able to program throughout it with Python (banned) it may be in for a very bumpy ride. https://code.blender.org/2025/07/beyond-mouse-keyboard/

The video is just the author commenting https://code.blender.org/2025/07/beyond-mouse-keyboard/ (with a bit of context)

The OP link could be changed to source: https://code.blender.org/2025/08/blender-for-windows-on-arm/

I hope the idea of blender apps is still alive. https://code.blender.org/2022/11/blender-apps/ could be really powerful in conjunction with blender being supported on iPad (and possibly iphone).

You're probably referring to Cycles X [1], which if I'm not mistaken has already been released. It will never be on-par with Eevee's performance though as they are fundamentally different approaches to rendering: Cycles is a physically-based path-tracing engine, while Eevee uses rasterization through OpenGL. 1: https://code.blender.org/2021/04/cycles-x/

You're right. I think I confused it with the Eevee Next project released last year. https://code.blender.org/2024/07/eevee-next-generation-in-blender-4-2-…

Apple joined the Blender development fund and contributed a metal backend to the offline Cycles renderer in Blender 3.1 https://code.blender.org/2021/11/cycles-x-project-update/ https://www.blender.org/press/apple-joins-blender-development-fund/ And in Blender 3.5 a Metal background was added to the viewport https://code.blender.org/2023/01/introducing-the-blender-metal-viewpor…

So that Blender release contains an alpha release of OSX Metal: https://code.blender.org/2023/01/introducing-the-blender-metal-viewpor… Would be good to at least see it stabilise and optimised a bit before jumping to conclusions. And yes Apple could make a better GPU by building a 450W discrete card but given that they make the most sales from lower end devices probably not a sensible strategy.

And this blog post describes their adventure: https://code.blender.org/2022/07/gitea-diaries-part-1/ Which includes the famous start of the gitea shitstorm: "And, quite significantly, we’re in the finishing stages of having a support agreement with the Gitea project to have them support us in our migration by funding work on missing features, code and bugfixes that will be available 100% to Gitea users under Gitea’s MIT license."

Yup, that's right. Non-repo data (releases, avatars, packages, etc..) can all be hosted in s3-compat storage. If you are interested in some benchmarks that Blender did you can find them here: https://code.blender.org/2023/02/gitea-test-drive/ Disclaimer: I'm one of the members of the technical oversight committee of the Gitea project, and am employed to work on Gitea.

Could this be combined with Blender Apps as a way to make apps for Symbian I wonder? https://code.blender.org/2022/11/blender-apps/

If the author of this blogpost is reading this and wondering why the link in the post didn't render properly: > (their move to using Gitea)[https://code.blender.org/2022/07/gitea-diaries-part-1/] it's because you switched up which braces go where for a markdown link. should be [text](link)

really into this, but I wonder what the relationship is between this new M1 cycles version and the also-in-development cycles X (https://code.blender.org/2021/04/cycles-x/)?

For anyone not familiar, "Cycles X" is the new offline (not realtime) renderer, replacing Cycles: https://code.blender.org/2021/04/cycles-x/ The realtime renderer is EEVEE, slated for big upgrades in 3.x: https://code.blender.org/2021/06/eevees-future/