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

Blender Foundation and the online community proudly present Blender 5.2 LTS!

Blender 5.2 LTS brings a great balance of new features and stability improvements. With 2 years of support (until July 2028), it is the perfect choice for long-term productions.

The Geometry Nodes department stands out most as Blender 5.2 LTS welcomes an experimental procedural approach to physics for hair and cloth simulations, a variety of new Geometry Nodes, and string nodes support in the Compositor. Asset Libraries now support remote hosting, enabling users to access the Blender Online Essentials library on demand as well as host their own.

Texture cache in Cycles and Principled BSDF Thin Wall mode are major highlights in rendering, while EEVEE contributes to the LTS release by resolving a number of long-standing usability issues. Grease Pencil changes the game with a new fill algorithm, introduces new settings for line materials, and expands the brush toolset with new online assets.

Sculpting expands with the new Scene Project brush and Add Primitive operator, and the voxel remesher now preserves vertex colors and other attributes. Animation, the Video Sequencer, and the UI receive polish, optimization, and quality-of-life improvements that matter for everyday workflows. And last but not least: VR location scouting!

To get the full picture, explore the release notes to see everything new!

Watch the video summary on Blender’s YouTube channel.

Releases are made possible thanks to the contributions of the Blender community, and the support of over 7200 individuals and 47 organizations contributing to the Blender Development Fund 🧡

The Blender Team
July 14th, 2026

The world of animation will soon gather in Annecy, and Blender is coming along. Just like in previous years, a small part of the Blender team will attend the Annecy International Animation Film Festival (June 21–27, 2026) to host a community meet-up.

Blender Breakfast

View the event in the festival program

Following the success of the past three editions, Blender is once again organizing a Blender Breakfast. This Birds-of-a-Feather-style session is focused on connecting producers, developers, TDs, and artists working in Blender pipelines.

What to expect

• A snapshot of ongoing Blender development
• Pipeline insights from the Blender Studio 
• An environment for teams who want to share how they use Blender in production
• Coffee and croissants

Save your seat at Blender Breakfast

Blender Breakfast 2026 takes place on Tuesday, June 23 at 9:00 a.m. at Le Campus MIFA, Salle 1. Seating is limited: please register in advance to secure your spot. Confirmations will be sent closer to the event.

See you by the lake!

Official 2026 Annecy International Animation Film Festival poster by Randall Finnerty

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

Blender Foundation and the online developer community proudly present Blender 5.0!

Blender 5.0 is good news across the board. For many, the biggest change is probably the full support for ACES pipelines, improved color management, and HDR capabilities. For others, it might be the new Volumes and SDF nodes in Geometry Nodes. Storytellers will appreciate the new Storyboarding template, if you’re further along in your project perhaps all the new Array or Scatter on Surface modifiers for modeling, the reworked UV Sync, or you may enjoy all the animation and rigging improvements. One thing is certain, everyone will benefit from the 588 bugs fixed.

Explore the release notes for an in-depth look at what’s new!

Watch the video summary on Blender’s YouTube channel.

This work is made possible thanks to the outstanding contributions of the Blender community, and the support of the over 7900 individuals and 41 organizations contributing to the Blender Development Fund.

Happy Blending! 

The Blender Team
November 18th, 2025