Blender Foundation announces its annual user survey, which aims to better understand:

• The user community demographics: age group, geography and professional background
• Common use cases and workflows
• Users’ top priorities for further improvements
• How people connect with the Blender project and get involved as contributors
• How the community spends money (Blender Development Fund donations, marketplaces, training, etc.)
• The future direction of the Blender project

The anonymized results will be shared publicly, both as an illustrated report with commentary and as a raw dataset. Log in with your Blender ID below to participate:

Take the
Blender Survey
2026

Thank you for participating! Your input will help shape the future of Blender.

Francesco

The 2025 Blender Foundation report is now publicly available. Download it at Annual report 2025 (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.

Feel free to share this report with everyone.

A donation to the Blender Development Fund has always been a non-targeted form of support that the Blender project further distributes as it sees fit. This will stay the same: the established process brings balance to development activities, ensuring that high-demand features go hand in hand with the necessary but sometimes invisible maintenance and quality-of-life improvements.

However, from an individual donor point of view, the act of supporting a specific activity carries more weight and comes with a sense of purpose. It is also important for the Blender project to know which features have the most impact for supporters of the Blender Development Fund.

To address this, we recently added a “Show your support” feature to the donations page and the Blender Roadmap. Now, a donation can start from a project on the Roadmap page. Once the transaction is complete, it’s added to that project’s supporter count, shown as ‘likes’. This way, donations stay non-targeted, but still help increase a project’s visibility and highlight demand for it.

Update: Show your support with your Blender Development Fund subscription+

In October, the “Show your support” feature was added to the Membership settings of the Blender Development Fund subscription. Supporters with an active membership can now pick their favourite project in the Dev Fund settings and change their choice once every 30 days.

Explore the Blender Roadmap and show your support for your favorite projects! We are excited to see what projects will be highlighted by you the most.

Natalie Rozvezeva
Project Manager and Development Manager, Blender

Keeping track of Blender development has just become more accessible. We are happy to introduce the Blender Roadmap – a central, up-to-date overview of major ongoing projects and recently completed features.

Whether you are an artist curious about what is coming next, a studio planning pipelines, or a contributor wondering where to plug in, the roadmap offers a clearer picture of where Blender is heading on featured work and how you can get involved.

Move from a high-level overview to technical details in one click. Each project card links directly to the relevant project page, issue, pull request, or development blog post.

The Roadmap provides a curated view on featured projects and doesn’t cover everything happening in Blender. Development also involves triaging, maintenance, bug fixes, documentation, and day-to-day module work. That side of Blender development is equally essential: contributors are always welcome to join and help move the project forward.

Let’s go on this journey together.

Explore the roadmap: https://code.blender.org/roadmap/

Get involved: https://developer.blender.org/

Natalie Rozvezeva

Project Manager and Development Manager, Blender

Recently, we announced that Anthropic was joining the Blender Development Fund as a Corporate Patron member. Since then, we’ve heard concerns from the community around how we engage with any AI company. We should have opened up more conversation and perspectives from contributors before making this decision, and for that we are sorry.

After an in-depth discussion with the team and several community contributors, we have decided to receive the funds as a singular donation instead of a Development Fund membership, similar to how other open source organizations have handled such contributions. Anthropic has been informed and supports this decision. 

Like all Blender donations, it will be spent on core activities for the Blender project, supporting human-driven development, art, and creativity.

Moving forward, Blender Foundation is strengthening the processes when it comes to accepting donations, aligned with the existing Funding Policy. Progress will be communicated through the upcoming board meeting logs on blender.org.

Most importantly, we need to urgently tackle the topic and clearly define how Blender is positioned in regards to generative AI technologies when it comes to the product, software development, documentation, and other activities. Discussions will happen in the public blender.org channels, based on drafts by the Blender team.

Blender is a tool for artists and creators, it’s made by humans for humans. No generative AI functionality is currently available or planned to be integrated in Blender.

I want to thank everyone for their understanding and helpful feedback, as we deal with this topic, and keep improving the Blender project together.

For feedback and enquiries, you can reach out to foundation (at) blender (dot) org.

Francesco Siddi
Chairman Blender Foundation
Amsterdam, May 1, 2026

Since its announcement last year, Blender Lab has started pursuing several activities, with the goal of exploring and prototyping new tools and technologies within Blender. Here is a recap of the current projects and their status.

The community-led Clay Pencil project was brought in to be further developed as one of the Lab’s activities.

The Clay Pencil team received a development grant to work on a spooky short animation to test and demo a complete rewrite of the tool. The goal is to achieve greater scalability and performance across different mesh geometry types.

The project made some progress and is currently on hold, to be resumed once more Geometry Nodes experts become available.

A demo of the Location Scouting project was shown during the Blender Conference 2025. It has been further developed and it is now ready for testing and feedback.

During its development, other improvements for XR were added to Blender releases, such as:

• Arc teleportation navigation overhaul
• Proper DPI support
• Decoupling XR from main window handlers
• XR controller models extension
• View scale property
• Binding deadzone thresholds
• OpenXR support on macOS
• XR-specific Blender context
• OpenXR modernization

During Siggraph 2025 the Blender booth featured a fully working demo of Blender running on iPad, which gathered lots of attention and positive reactions.

This was followed by a workshop at Blender HQ to map out possible milestones and design targets.

The project was put on hold in late 2025, but it’s now back on the schedule, targeting different platforms and form factors such as Android tablets. This will still take several months and still needs funding/resources.

The Blender project keeps a firm artist-centric policy when it comes to AI. With this in mind, some exploration of LLM powered tools has started, with an implementation of an MCP connector for Blender.

The project page includes sample prompts and files, as well as instructions for setting up a local environment using open-source tools and models with open weights.

The MCP Server offers a natural language interface with Blender’s Python API, improving access to documentation, and allowing users to explore and understand complex setups.

The Lab activities are one part of Blender development. Most of the work is happening as part of the development roadmap.

It is that time of year again. You may be enjoying a scorching hot summer, the serenity of snow, or something in between. For those of you staying inside, buckle up. There is a lot to look forward to!

Before we start with the fresh new targets, let’s take a moment and admire what was put out into the world last year. With no surprises, the release schedule went as planned with three annual major releases.

Blender 4.4

March 18th, 2025

• Animation slots.
• Compositor CPU rewrite.
• Grease Pencil v3 feature parity.
• Video Sequencer text editing improvements.
• Over 700 issues addressed.

Blender 4.5 LTS

July 15th, 2025

• Full Vulkan support.
• Faster startup and EEVEE shader compilation.
• Grease Pencil compositor pass.
• Enhancements to the animation timeline.
• Importing multiple formats in Geometry Nodes.
• UV visibility in all modes.
• Faster Video Sequencer with HDR support.
• Compositor procedural nodes.
• Nearly 400 bugs fixed.

Blender 5.0

November 18th, 2025

• ACES pipeline.
• Improved HDR capabilities.
• UV Sync.
• New volumes and SDF nodes in Geometry Nodes.
• Storyboarding template and workflow (scene sync).
• New modifiers, such as Array and Scatter on Surface.
• Compositor creative effects assets.
• Animation and rigging improvements.
• VR scene inspection, vignetting, and snap turns.
• Nearly 600 bugs fixed.

The result was a combination of new features, stability, performance enhancements, planned project and long-standing issues.

In addition, 2025 saw 20 LTS releases across Blender 3.6 LTS, 4.2 LTS, and 4.5 LTS.

If you compare what was released with last year’s projects announcements, you may notice that some features weren’t even announced.

On the one hand, this is good news. It reflects the dynamic nature of Blender development, with modules working closely with community developers and artists who can steer the project in unexpected ways. These contributions often lead to the discovery of new talent who could eventually become full-time developers. So, the more, the merrier.

On the other hand, not all of the announced projects were completed and released. The reasons are plenty: overly optimistic (and ambitious) targets, over-scoping, unclear designs or scope, missed deadlines, limited resources, shifting priorities, my-dog-ate-my-homework, you name it. There is no sugarcoating it. There is room for improvement, and we aim to do even better this year.

That said, it is in the spirit of the Blender project to propose targets that serve as a beacon, helping focus the community’s efforts toward common goals. So, without further ado, let’s unveil what the team has planned, aim for the stars, and see where we land.

The proposed projects for this year are organized into the following areas:

• Storytelling
• World Building and Asset Creation
• Animation
• Lighting, Rendering and Compositing
• Collaboration
• Interactivity
• Platforms
• Blender Lab

As a follow-up to Story Tools and Compositor node-modifiers, expect more video sequencer improvements – GPU support, sequencer effects, media bins, ripple and three points editing.

Improved texture workflow with 3D brush, and the beginning of layered textures.

The latter is not straightforward. Its original design dates back to 2022, and it was held back until it could receive proper attention. While it won’t land in Blender this year, features like a revamped baking workflow are on the horizon.

On the rendering side, this is the year NPR will shine brighter. Non-Photorealistic Rendering was prototyped and iterated over in 2024-2025, and it is now ready for development.

After a hiatus, animation layers are back on the menu. The initial goal is to expose this functionality in the Action Editor, building on existing features. The design is being finalized and work is expected to start during Q2.

The Cycles texture cache is in its final stages of development, and will make rendering with many high resolution textures much more efficient. This has been a long requested feature. This will be followed by new principled features and a new OpenPBR node.

Also worth mentioning is a new approach for Scene Layered Compositing. Imagine a stack of effects similar to the new Compositor modifier in the Video Sequencer Editor. It’s so similar, in fact, that an effect designed for the sequencer will also work for the scene.

There are still nodes under the hood, but artists shouldn’t need to deal with them (only if they want to). This is similar to how the new Geometry Nodes Array modifier lets artists focus on the big picture of the intended “effect”, while others can dive into the nodes for extra flexibility and power. To each their own – and to everyone, Blender! :)

Online assets will arrive in Blender in the first half of the year. Opening the door to natively extending Blender with materials, collections, and more from the internet. The Blender Foundation will host a small library of assets on the extensions platform, and third-party platforms can adopt a similar solution.

Project Setup reached its initial milestone in 2025 with variables and path templates. Next up is a dedicated project editor and shared project settings, like assets, add-ons, and project-specific variables.

Finally, overrides will be revisited based on the late-2024 design. A new system, nicknamed dynamic override, will allow for more flexible runtime-defined tweaks. This may also better accommodate simpler single-character rigs, providing an experience similar to the old (pre-2.80 old!) proxy system.

Location scouting began last year but was put on hold to focus on wrapping up VR locomotion improvements. The latter will arrive in Blender 5.1 and are already familiar to all brave early-adopters.

Location scouting itself was demoed as a prototype at the Blender Conference 2025 and is expected in the first half of this year.

Meanwhile, Vulkan and OpenXR interoperability will start in parallel, bringing the XR experience up to par with Blender’s other graphics improvements.

Hair dynamics development continues to make progress, building on the work already highlighted as a target last year. While Closures and Bundles may only be experienced firsthand by technical artists, asset integration features like packing and improvements to the modifier UI enabled the new built-in modifiers in Blender 5.0.

There’s still a long way to go before replacing the legacy particle system, but a new hair solver with a user-friendly interface will be a important step in that direction.

Speaking of nodes, Modal Node Tools will expand the Node-Based Tools to support modal operations. With an evolving design over the years (2023, 2024, 2025), it’s now ready to move from prototype into development. This will also lay groundwork for an interactive mode for Geometry Nodes simulations.

The initial port to Android devices, including touch support, will start. This is but the first mobile platform that is targetted for release. Others should follow in the future.

The initial focus is on tablets, but the same technology will allow Blender to run natively on XR devices. Overall, usability improvements should benefit both on-the-go artists and those already using regular display (or even non-display) tablets.

To launch the Blender Lab initiative, the development team will explore natural language input in Blender. The experiment aims to develop an MCP server for Blender, with communication handled via the existing Python API.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open-source standard that enables LLMs to connect with external data, tools, and systems.

There is always maintenance and ongoing development in the modules. Here are a few areas being worked on:

EEVEE feature parity (with pre-EEVEE-next releases) such as better planar reflection. As well as raytracing pipeline improvements and shader compilation optimizations.

After recent Grease Pencil developments to improve curve types support and adding more rendering options, the focus now is on updating the workflow for creating fills and adding support for holes.

After the initial Cycles projects have been completed, the plan is to work on either improved light transport or handling of complex scenes. Improvements to the external render engine API are also being investigated.

And more:

• Multiresolution spike fixes.
• Collection import.
• Flamenco and BAT (Blender Asset Tracer) improvements.
• Exploring editor tabs and docked editors.
• Other module work.

The planned releases for 2026 and their initial dates are:

• Blender 5.1 (March) 
• Blender 5.2 LTS (July) 
• Blender 5.3 (November)

On top of this, LTS release updates are expected throughout the year:

• Blender 4.2 LTS – until July 2026
• Blender 4.5 LTS – until July 2027
• Blender 5.2 LTS – until July 2028

All of this progress is made possible thanks to the donations and the ongoing involvement and contributions of the community.

To follow new developments, keep an eye on the Developers Blog and join the discussions on the DevTalk Forum.

On behalf of the team, I hope everyone has a great 2026. Happy Blending!

Dalai Felinto
Head of Product, Blender

As announced in September 2025 during the Blender Conference, the Blender Foundation board is welcoming three new members this year: Dalai Felinto (Head of Product), Fiona Cohen (COO), and Sergey Sharybin (Head of Development). They will join Francesco Siddi (CEO), while Ton Roosendaal transitions to the newly established supervisory board.

As mentioned in the original announcement, preparations for this transition have been extensive. As the Blender project continues to grow, some evolution is natural, but our core values and commitment to the mission remain unchanged: putting the best 3D technology in the hands of artists as free and open source software. 

We are excited to embark on this journey together, and we wish everyone in the Blender community a great 2026!

Francesco Siddi
Fiona Cohen
Dalai Felinto
Sergey Sharybin

Last week, the very sad news reached us that Blender developer Germano Cavalcante de Sousa passed away on 24 November 2025.

Germano had been dealing with leukemia for over a year. He was quite open about it and shared updates in his weekly reports. During this period, Germano kept being involved with Blender when possible. Everyone was impressed by his spirit and passion for his work on Blender. 

Germano started as a triager and mesh editing team member in early 2017. Because of his architecture background, he wished to work on improving precise modeling tools for designers, which was the main topic worked on for many years.

I can’t express how saddened I am by this news. We will severely miss him and we will cherish our memories of Germano. Our hearts go out to his family and friends in Brazil.

Ton Roosendaal, and the entire Blender Team
Amsterdam, 8 December 2025.