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.
Clay Pencil
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.
eXtended Reality (XR + VR)
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
Tablet Support
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.
MCP Server
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.
Follow the roadmap
The Lab activities are one part of Blender development. Most of the work is happening as part of the development roadmap.
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