It’s a wrap! Yet another edition of the main Blender event of the year happened in the heart of Amsterdam, catching the very latest warm days of September. As is now tradition, BCON26 brought together artists, developers and contributors from the worldwide Blender community.

Over three days, 700+ attendees from more than 50 countries gathered at the iconic Felix Meritis venue to share their passion for creating with Blender, connect and learn from each other. A total of 126 speakers presented across the four stages of BCON26. This year, the knowledge-packed marathon ran for more than 100 hours!

Overall, feedback was positive. Satisfaction with the program remains “extremely high,” and it rose slightly compared to last year. Attendees appreciated the variety, quality and educational level of the talks. Some found the schedule dense, which made it hard to catch every session they wanted to see live. We hope the quick uploads of recordings to the BCON26 playlists on PeerTube and YouTube helped fill the gaps.

Nowadays, over 60% of respondents are coming to Blender Conference as part of their job. Overall, 79% of respondents plan to come back next year!

As this year Blender celebrates two decades of open filmmaking, we organized a number of events to put all seventeen titles into the spotlight. First, the Blender HQ team handcrafted an art installation that showed each Open Movie as a massive pillar holding the entire film, frame by frame, from the opening shot to the end credits.

In the spirit of sharing and openness, visitors could take a frame home with them. If you got one, scan its QR code to jump to that exact second of the film.

The celebration continued with 20 Years of Open Movies screening at de Balie, with some of the film directors and artists working on the titles present in the audience.

The event was made possible thanks to the contribution of many people and made memorable thanks to all attendees and speakers. See BCON26 credits page for the names of everyone who made this edition an incredible experience.

See you next year!
Francesco

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

This year we are celebrating 20 years of making Open Movies. 17 titles, all different and beautiful in their own way. We want to thank you for being a part of this journey – without the community support, all of these projects would not be possible!

To celebrate the 20 years of Open Movies in a special way during the Blender Conference 2026, we have created an installation that represents the projects frame by frame. And in the spirit of sharing and being open, visitors of the exhibition can take a frame with them.

Thank you for doing your part. Let’s see what the next decade of open filmmaking will bring!

SIGGRAPH (the premier conference & exhibition on computer graphics and interactive techniques) will take place in Los Angeles, California at the Los Angeles Convention Center (LACC), from Sunday, July 19 until Thursday, July 23.

The Blender team will be present at the event as usual, with several appearances planned on the agenda:

If you are at SIGGRAPH and want to connect, feel free to reach out directly via mail (francesco at blender org) or on social media!

It’s been almost a week since the International Animation Film Festival and Market of Annecy wrapped up. Like last year, the Blender delegation was small: Fiona and Francesco representing Blender at various events, plus a couple of Blender Studio team members immersing themselves in the world of animated filmmaking.

The number of Blender-powered short and feature film projects keeps growing, as does the appreciation for Blender as a tool that truly belongs to creative teams.

While not as prominently as at other events, the topic of AI came up a few times, mostly in the context of “assistive” tools. Several conversations took place as part of MIFA AI, a new initiative established by the festival organizers to foster discourse around AI adoption. The initiative gathered people from very diverse backgrounds, and was mostly the start of something that will further develop in the coming years.

Once again, Blender hosted a well-attended community gathering (almost 200 people) at the MIFA campus, where attendees could network and learn about the latest Blender project activities.

Annecy Festival is always a highlight in Blender’s calendar. We will be back!

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

Notice: The membership has been shifted to a singular donation towards the project. More details in the related blogpost.

“Il Baracchino” is an adult animated series written and directed by Nicolò Cuccì and Salvo Di Paola, with the animation studio Megadrago based in Palermo, Italy.

The series is set in the gritty yet vibrant world of stand-up comedy. The story follows Claudia, an idealistic aspiring art director, in her desperate attempt to save a crumbling, yet legendary comedy club. To revive the venue, she recruits an improbable lineup of tragicomic performers including a chain-smoking pigeon with caustic humor, a “boomer” reincarnation of Leonardo Da Vinci, even the Grim Reaper himself. You can watch the first episode here.

The series, an Amazon Prime Original in Italy produced by Lucky Red and Megadrago, features a stellar cast made up of some of the major Italian stand-up comedians and actors and uniquely blends various animation techniques, from 3D to stop-motion and traditional 2D, creating a surreal and unforgettable visual language.

This article is based on the presentation by Nicolò Cuccì and Andrea Cigognetti from Blender Conference 2025 in Amsterdam.

Nicolò: This wasn’t going to be a traditional 3D animated series. We wanted a mixed-media show that blended 3D animation, stop-motion puppetry, and various artistic styles while maintaining a consistent feel throughout. The noir aesthetic was central to our vision: a dark, stylized world where comedy and drama could coexist.

The challenge was: how do you create visual consistency across multiple animation techniques? Our answer was to ground everything in the animation itself. No matter what technique we used (3D, stop motion, or mixed media), the animation principles would remain the same, giving the show a unified visual language.

When Andrea (head of CG) joined as technical supervisor, he immediately focused on two topics: character rigging, and previz setup. Character rigging required a diversified approach due to the different character designs, while the previz setup was urgently needed as the team basically skipped the traditional storyboarding phase and started working immediately in 2.5D space.

Andrea: When it comes to rigging, one of our breakthroughs was the UV Warp modifier. This became the foundation for multiple characters, allowing us to create paper cutout-style animations in 3D space. The most elaborate use was for our Leonardo da Vinci character. We essentially created a 2.5D character using five texture tiles mapped onto simple box geometry. It looked ugly as a raw model, but once everything came together with the UV Warp modifiers and careful driver calibration, the effect was magical.

We spent considerable time with character designer Bart D’angelo testing different poses to achieve that paper cutout feeling. Did we need to make the user interface renaissance-themed for Leonardo’s rig? Absolutely not. But we did it anyway because it was fun, and that joy in the work translated to the screen.

For Leonardo’s mouth, we used a curve connected to bones, with the gradient achieved procedurally through geometry nodes. The mouth itself was created entirely through shaders. We even applied the UV Warp method to Leonardo’s props, extending the technique beyond just character animation. This procedural approach saved us countless hours and gave animators intuitive controls.

Most of the R&D budget went into Claudia, our protagonist. Her design is part Olive Oyl from Popeye, part classic animation, with an artistic touch that made her feel like a 2D stop-motion character brought to life in 3D.

We built Claudia’s rig on top of Rigify, using bendy bones for her rubber-hose arms. But the real innovation came with her facial animation system. Thanks to Inês Almeida, we developed a shape key selector inspired by previous work by Vertex Arcade. Animators could pose Claudia’s face intuitively, mixing and matching expressions from the storyboard reference, while still having the ability to tweak individual controls for unique poses.

The result was a hybrid system: shape keys for quick, expressive poses combined with traditional rigging for fine control. This gave our animators the freedom to push Claudia into exaggerated poses that would have been difficult or impossible with either system alone.

Nicolò: One of our most interesting challenges was Claudia’s anger management transformation. The original concept couldn’t be achieved with our standard rig, so we explored alternatives. We initially tried clay motion in Blender, but I wasn’t satisfied with the results. Eventually, Andrea found a solution by mapping the 2D concept art directly onto a mesh.

The rig was surprisingly simple (just two chains) but it gave our animators exactly what they needed. We had to create many anger management moments throughout the series, and this approach made it possible.

One of the most transformative aspects of our production was switching to a Blender-based storyboard workflow. In the early stages of pre-production, we used to create storyboards on paper, randomly on post-its and printer sheets, but everything changed when we adopted Grease Pencil for previz.

Working with Alessia Lenoci, our story supervisor, we used a system where we could create 3D previews with 2D animated characters drawn in Grease Pencil. This enabled us to do camera movements on 3D sets with 2D drawn characters, and the layout we created was almost identical to the final renders, several months later.

This approach changed how we thought about scriptwriting. The gap between having an idea and seeing it on camera became so small that writing became a much more collaborative experience. The creators, scriptwriters, and artists could all be in touch with the filmmaking process simultaneously.

Our layout process was integral to making our mixed-media approach work. Because we were combining 3D animation with stop-motion puppetry and various other techniques, we needed a robust previz system that could accommodate all these elements in a unified space.

The layout stage was where we established the foundation for each shot. We worked out camera positioning, blocking, and most importantly, lighting intent. This was especially critical for shots that included stop-motion elements like Luca the pigeon. By establishing lighting during layout, we ensured that when the stop-motion animation came in, it would integrate naturally with the 3D characters and environments.

Because everything existed in 3D space within Blender, including our 2D-style card characters and Grease Pencil storyboards, the layout stage gave us an accurate preview of the final result. This meant fewer iterations and more confidence in our creative decisions before committing to final animation and rendering.

Nicolò: We wanted the animation to be the unifying element across all our varied visual styles. We developed a consistent animation language that worked whether you were animating in stop motion, 2D, or 3D in Blender.

Our approach was rooted in 2D animation principles. We focused on strong poses that were grounded and appealing. Everything was staged to face the camera and look good from the intended viewing angle. This 2D-inspired approach worked beautifully in 3D space, especially with Andrea’s character rigs.

The production schedule was intense. At the peak, we were asking animators to deliver 40 seconds per week (sometimes as low as 20, but often at that upper limit). To make this possible, we made a crucial decision: no spline animation. Everything was done in stepped mode with holds, and we gave animators complete agency to choose their timing: twos, threes, fours, whatever worked best for each shot.

Andrea and I knew from the start we’d use EEVEE for rendering. The decision wasn’t just about speed (though rendering a 4K, six-episode series at 24fps certainly required efficiency). EEVEE excelled at NPR, which was perfect for our mixed-media aesthetic.

We locked ourselves to Blender 3.6 LTS and benefitted from the continuous improvements provided by the Blender development team during our production window.

Andrea: One of our boldest decisions was to eliminate the post-production department entirely. We didn’t have a compositor on staff, and coming from the VFX industry, I was tired of juggling endless layers. Instead, we used “real-time comp”: a workflow where everything, including cards for 2D-style characters, existed in 3D space and rendered together.

This approach had multiple advantages. Characters on cards could be lit consistently with the rest of the scene. We could see our final shots in near-real-time. Luca the pigeon, who was stop-motion animated, could integrate seamlessly with 3D characters because his lighting was established during the layout process.

We developed several shader tricks to achieve our noir atmosphere. For “studio lighting” effects, we used animated shaders on geometry: simple but effective. By over-scanning the camera, we created glare effects that suggested theatrical top lighting.

We extensively used vignette to emphasize elements, create fake depth, and suggest volumetric lighting. In one shot, we faked a mirror reflection by duplicating the animation output and making it reflective through a projected map in the shader. An empty controlled the projection, giving us convincing reflections without the render cost of actual mirrors.

Some of our most complex shots combined stop-motion, 3D characters, effects, and crowd simulations all in a single frame. We optimized heavily, rendering multiple characters on the same tile whenever possible.

The series was primarily black and white, which helped maintain our noir aesthetic while also being practical for our pipeline. But we did have one episode in color, achieved through texture and shader work that allowed us to maintain our established workflow while expanding the visual palette.

When we first started, we had animated only 9 minutes of content in our entire lives. Now we were facing 100 minutes of production. With limited experience and time to build a studio pipeline from scratch, we decided to emulate the Blender Studio pipeline one-to-one. Everything the Blender Studio team had documented on studio.blender.org became the blueprint for our production management process. 

Some of the fundamental tools and processes adopted where:

• Kitsu (and the Blender Kitsu add-on) to keep track of all production tasks, from early story reels to final renders.
• Shot builder add-on, used to construct all shots based on info stored on Kitsu.
• Flamenco, for render management of long sequences, and also the final export of the episodes. Making use of our in-house render farm enabled us to re-export entire episodes within a few minutes.
• Subversion (SVN), for version control. While at times challenging for artists from a usability standpoint, this gave us the ability to track changes, collaborate with minimal conflicts, and maintain a stable production environment.
• Watchtower, for intuitively visualizing the advancement of the production. 
• Next to that, many other aspects of the Blender Studio Tools where followed, such as the naming conventions, the Blender launcher system, etc.

Our pipeline revolved around editorial in a constant feedback loop. Everything started with a storyboard, then moved through a back-and-forth with editorial. Same for asset creation and character rigging, which fed into layout and then to editorial.

Effects, lighting, everything operated in this circular pattern, constantly ping-ponging with editorial to maintain the overall vision. We edited the series using primarily Blender’s Video Sequence Editor. This tight integration meant we weren’t exporting and importing between different software packages; everything stayed within the Blender ecosystem.

Nicolò: While creating “Il Baracchino” we also ended up building Megadrago, our studio. Our team was small (about 20 people) but every single person contributed ideas that shaped the final show. The team’s collaborative spirit was the best part of this journey. “Il Baracchino” proved that a small Italian studio using open-source tools could create a high-quality animated series for a major streaming platform. We didn’t just make a show; we built a studio, a pipeline, and a team capable of tackling ambitious projects.

We’re incredibly grateful to everyone who worked on “Il Baracchino”, to the Blender Studio team, the Blender developers and to the Blender community that made our production possible. If you’d like to discuss the production in more detail or have questions about our pipeline, find us at megadrago.it.

“Il Baracchino” is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video. The series was produced by Megadrago Studio using Blender 3.6 LTS.

Blender Foundation is thrilled to announce that Netflix Animation Studios is joining the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron.

This support will be dedicated towards general Blender core development, to continuously improve content creation tools for individuals and teams working in media and entertainment-related workflows.

This membership is a significant acknowledgement of Blender becoming more embedded in high-end animation studios’ workflows. I deeply appreciate this strategic initiative from Netflix Animation Studios as an investment in a diverse, public, and open-source friendly ecosystem of creative tools that will benefit the global community of content creators.

Francesco Siddi, CEO at Blender

Netflix Animation Studios’ corporate membership with Blender reflects our ongoing support for open-source software in the animation community. We are proud to be the first major animation studio to support Blender’s continued development and growing adoption by current and future generations of animation professionals.

Darin Grant, SVP Global Technology at Netflix Animation Studios

Netflix is one of the world’s leading entertainment services, with over 300 million paid memberships in over 190 countries enjoying TV series, films and games across a wide variety of genres and languages. Members can play, pause and resume watching as much as they want, anytime, anywhere, and can change their plans at any time. Discover more about Netflix Animation Studios at https://www.netflixanimation.com/

Blender, the world’s most popular free and open-source 3D creation software, offers a comprehensive solution for modelling, animation, VFX, and more. Maintained by the Blender Foundation, it’s the tool of choice for a vast global community of professional artists and enthusiasts, committed to open collaboration and 3D technology innovation.