Blender (software)

This article is about the 3D graphics software. For the kitchen and laboratory appliance, see Blender.

Blender

The logo designed by Ton Roosendaal
Blender version 3.5.0 (2023)
Original author(s)	Ton Roosendaal
Developer(s)	Blender Foundation, community
Initial release	January 2, 1994 (1994-01-02)
Stable release	4.2.0  / 16 July 2024 (16 July 2024)
Preview release	4.2.0 / February 7, 2024 (2024-02-07)
Repository	projects.blender.org/blender/blender.git
Written in	C++, Python
Operating system	Linux, macOS, Windows, BSD, Haiku
Size	256–430 MiB (varies by operating system)
Available in	36 languages
List of languages Abkhaz, Arabic, Basque, Brazilian Portuguese, Castilian Spanish, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, English (official), Esperanto, French, German, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kyrgyz, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese
Type	3D computer graphics software
License	GPL-2.0 or later
Website	www.blender.org

Blender 3.6.0 LTS splash screen

Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software tool set that runs on Windows, MacOS, BSD, Haiku, and Linux. It is used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D-printed models, motion graphics, interactive 3D applications, virtual reality, and, formerly, video games. Blender's features include 3D modelling, UV mapping, texturing, digital drawing, raster graphics editing, rigging and skinning, fluid and smoke simulation, particle simulation, soft body simulation, sculpting, animation, match moving, rendering, motion graphics, video editing, Python scripting, and compositing.

History

A Cube in Blender (version 3.6.2)

Blender was initially developed as an in-house application by the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo (no relation to the video game brand), and was officially launched on January 2, 1994. Version 1.00 was released in January 1995, with the primary author being the company co-owner and software developer Ton Roosendaal. The name Blender was inspired by a song by the Swiss electronic band Yello, from the album Baby, which NeoGeo used in its showreel. Some design choices and experiences for Blender were carried over from an earlier software application, called Traces, that Roosendaal developed for NeoGeo on the Commodore Amiga platform during the 1987–1991 period.

On January 1, 1998, Blender was released publicly online as SGI freeware. NeoGeo was later dissolved, and its client contracts were taken over by another company. After NeoGeo's dissolution, Ton Roosendaal founded Not a Number Technologies (NaN) in June 1998 to further develop Blender, initially distributing it as shareware until NaN went bankrupt in 2002. This also resulted in the discontinuation of Blender's development.

In May 2002, Roosendaal started the non-profit Blender Foundation, with the first goal to find a way to continue developing and promoting Blender as a community-based open-source project. On July 18, 2002, Roosendaal started the "Free Blender" campaign, a crowdfunding precursor. The campaign aimed at open-sourcing Blender for a one-time payment of €100,000 (US$100,670 at the time), with the money being collected from the community. On September 7, 2002, it was announced that they had collected enough funds and would release the Blender source code. Today, Blender is free and open-source software, largely developed by its community as well as 26 full-time employees and 12 freelancers employed by the Blender Institute.

The Blender Foundation initially reserved the right to use dual licensing so that, in addition to GPL 2.0-or-later, Blender would have been available also under the "Blender License", which did not require disclosing source code but required payments to the Blender Foundation. However, this option was never exercised and was suspended indefinitely in 2005. Blender is solely available under "GNU GPLv2 or any later" and was not updated to the GPLv3, as "no evident benefits" were seen. The binary releases of Blender are under GNU GPLv3 or later because of the incorporated Apache libraries.

In 2019, with the release of version 2.80, the integrated game engine for making and prototyping video games was removed; Blender's developers recommended that users migrate to more powerful open source game engines such as Godot instead.

Suzanne

Preset Low poly 3D mesh

In February 2002, the fate of the Blender software company, NaN, became evident as it faced imminent closure in March. Nevertheless, one more release was pushed out, Blender 2.25. As a sort of Easter egg and last personal tag, the artists and developers decided to add a 3D model of a chimpanzee head (called a "monkey" in the software). It was created by Willem-Paul van Overbruggen (SLiD3), who named it Suzanne the monkey after the orangutan in the Kevin Smith film Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

Suzanne is Blender's alternative to more common test models such as the Utah Teapot and the Stanford Bunny. A low-polygon model with only 500 faces, Suzanne is included in Blender and often used as a quick and easy way to test materials, animations, rigs, textures, and lighting setups. It is as easily added to a scene as primitives such as a cube or plane.

The largest Blender contest gives out an award called the Suzanne Award underscoring the significance of this unique 3D model in the Blender community.

Release history

The following table lists notable developments during Blender's release history: green indicates the current version, yellow indicates currently supported versions, and red indicates versions that are no longer supported (though many later versions can still be used on modern systems).

Version	Release date	Notes and key changes
Old version, no longer maintained: 1.00	January 1994	Blender in development.
Old version, no longer maintained: 1.23	January 1998	SGI version released, IrisGL.
Old version, no longer maintained: 1.30	April 1998	Linux and FreeBSD version, port to OpenGL and X11.
Old version, no longer maintained: 1.4x	September 1998	Sun and Linux Alpha version released.
Old version, no longer maintained: 1.50	November 1998	First Manual published.
Old version, no longer maintained: 1.60	April 1999	New features behind a $95 lock. Windows version released.
Old version, no longer maintained: 1.6x	June 1999	BeOS and PPC version released.
Old version, no longer maintained: 1.80	June 2000	Blender freeware again.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.00	August 2000	Interactive 3D and real-time engine.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.03	2000	Handbook The official Blender 2.0 guide.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.10	December 2000	New engine, physics, and Python.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.20	August 2001	Character animation system.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.21	October 2001	Blender Publisher launch.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.2x	December 2001	Apple macOS version.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.25	October 13, 2002	Blender Publisher freely available.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.26	February 2003	The first truly open source Blender release.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.30	November 22, 2003	New GUI; edits are now reversible.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.32	February 3, 2004	Ray tracing in internal renderer; support for YafaRay.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.34	August 5, 2004	LSCM-UV-Unwrapping, object-particle interaction.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.37	May 31, 2005	Simulation of elastic surfaces; improved subdivision surface.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.40	December 22, 2005	Greatly improved system and character animations (with a non-linear editing tool), and added a fluid and hair simulator. New functionality was based on Google Summer of Code 2005.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.41	January 25, 2006	Improvements of the game engine (programmable vertex and pixel shaders, using Blender materials, split-screen mode, improvements to the physics engine), improved UV mapping, recording of the Python scripts for sculpture or sculpture works with the help of grid or mesh (mesh sculpting) and set-chaining models.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.42	July 14, 2006	The film Elephants Dream resulted in high development as a necessity. In particular, the Node-System (Material- and Compositor) has been implemented.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.43	February 16, 2007	Sculpt-Modeling as a result of Google Summer of Code 2006.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.46	May 19, 2008	With the production of Big Buck Bunny, Blender gained the ability to produce grass quickly and efficiently.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.48	October 14, 2008	Due to development of Yo Frankie!, the game engine was improved substantially.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.49	June 13, 2009	New window and file manager, new interface, new Python API, and new animation system.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.57	April 13, 2011	First official stable release of 2.5 branch: new interface, new window manager and rewritten event — and tool — file processing system, new animation system (each setting can be animated now), and new Python API.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.58	June 22, 2011	New features, such as the addition of the warp modifier and render baking. Improvements in sculpting.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.58a	July 4, 2011	Some bug fixes, along with small extensions in GUI and Python interface.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.59	August 13, 2011	3D mouse support.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.60	October 19, 2011	Developer branches integrated into the main developer branch: among other things, B-mesh, a new rendering/shading system, NURBS, to name a few, directly from Google Summer of Code.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.61	December 14, 2011	New Render Engine, Cycles, added alongside Blender Internal (as a "preview release"). Motion Tracking, Dynamic Paint, and Ocean Simulator.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.62	February 16, 2012	Motion tracking improvement, further expansion of UV tools, and remesh modifier. Cycles render engine updates to make it more production-ready.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.63	April 27, 2012	Bug fixes, B-mesh project: completely new mesh system with n-corners, plus new tools: dissolve, inset, bridge, vertex slide, vertex connect, and bevel.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.64	October 3, 2012	Green screen keying, node-based compositing.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.65	December 10, 2012	Over 200 bug fixes, support for the Open Shading Language, and fire simulation.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.66	February 21, 2013	Rigid body simulation available outside of the game engine, dynamic topology sculpting, hair rendering now supported in Cycles.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.67	May 7–30, 2013	Freestyle rendering mode for non-photographic rendering, subsurface scattering support added the motion tracking solver is made more accurate and faster, and an add-on for 3D printing now comes bundled.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.68	July 18, 2013	Rendering performance is improved for CPUs and GPUs, support for Nvidia Tesla K20, GTX Titan and GTX 780 GPUs. Smoke rendering improved to reduce blockiness.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.69	October 31, 2013	Motion tracking now supports plane tracking, and hair rendering has been improved.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.70	March 19, 2014	Initial support for volume rendering and small improvements to the user interface.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.71	June 26, 2014	Support for baking in Cycles and volume rendering branched path tracing now renders faster.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.72	October 4, 2014	Volume rendering for GPUs, more features for sculpting and painting.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.73	January 8, 2015	New fullscreen mode, improved Pie Menus, 3D View can now display the world background.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.74	March 31, 2015	Cycles got several precision, noise, speed, memory improvements, and a new Pointiness attribute.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.75a	July 1, 2015	Blender now supports a fully integrated Multi-View and Stereo 3D pipeline, Cycles has much-awaited initial support for AMD GPUs, and a new Light Portals feature.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.76b	November 3, 2015	Cycles volume density render, Pixar OpenSubdiv mesh subdivision library, node inserting, and video editing tools.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.77a	April 6, 2016	Improvements to Cycles, new features for the Grease Pencil, more support for OpenVDB, updated Python library and support for Windows XP has been removed.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.78c	February 28, 2017	Spherical stereo rendering for virtual reality, Grease Pencil improvements for 2D animations, Freehand curves drawing over surfaces, Bendy Bones, Micropolygon displacements, and Adaptive Subdivision. Cycles performance improvements.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.79b	September 11, 2017	Cycles denoiser, improved OpenCL rendering support, Shadow Catcher, Principled BSDF Shader, Filmic color management, improved UI and Grease Pencil functionality, improvements in Alembic import and export, surface deformities modifier, better animation keyframing, simplified video encoding, Python additions and new add-ons.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.80	July 30, 2019	Revamped UI, added a dark theme, EEVEE realtime rendering engine on OpenGL, Principled shader, Workbench viewport, Grease Pencil 2D animation tool, multi-object editing, collections, GPU+CPU rendering, Rigify.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.81a	November 21, 2019	OpenVDB voxel remesh, QuadriFlow remesh, transparent BSDF, brush curves preset in sculpting, WebM support.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.82	February 14, 2020	Improved fluid and smoke simulation (using Mantaflow), UDIM support, USD export and 2 new sculpting tools.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.83 LTS	June 3, 2020	Introduction of the Long Term Support (LTS) program, VDB files support, VR scene inspection, new cloth sculpt brush and viewport denoising.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.90	August 31, 2020	Physically based Nishita Sky Texture, improved EEVEE motion blur, sculpting improvements including a new multiresolution modifier and modelling improvements.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.91	November 25, 2020	Cloth Brush improvements, new sculpting Trim tool, new mesh boolean solver, volume to mesh and mesh to volume modifiers and customisable curve bevels.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.92	February 25, 2021	New Geometry Nodes procedural modelling system, New interactive Add Primitive Tool, sculpting improvements and Grease Pencil improvements.
Old version, no longer maintained: 2.93 LTS	June 2, 2021	Expansion of Geometry Nodes with mesh primitives and a new spreadsheet editor, sculpting improvements, new grease pencil line art modifier and EEVEE rendering improvements.
Old version, no longer maintained: 3.0	December 3, 2021	Major Cycles update with rewritten GPU kernels and rewritten shadow catchers and other rendering improvements. Overhaul to Geometry nodes with new 'Fields' system. A new UI visual refresh as well as other features and improvements.
Old version, no longer maintained: 3.1	March 9, 2022	Point cloud objects, Cycles Metal Backend and new geometry nodes.
Old version, no longer maintained: 3.2	June 8, 2022	Cycles light groups, shadow caustics rendering, sculpt mode painting and collection support in the asset browser.
Older version, yet still maintained: 3.3 LTS	September 7, 2022	New procedural hair system with geometry nodes, support for Intel Arc GPUs and new geometry nodes.
Old version, no longer maintained: 3.4	December 7, 2022	Path Guiding in Cycles, auto masking in sculpt mode, new UV relax tool and new geometry nodes.
Old version, no longer maintained: 3.5	March 29, 2023	New hair system with Geometry nodes and asset browser, real-time viewport compositor, vector displacement maps for sculpting, viewport performance improvements with Apple Metal.
Older version, yet still maintained: 3.6 LTS	June 27, 2023	Simulation Nodes, rendering performance improvements on AMD Hardware and better UV packing.
Old version, no longer maintained: 4.0	November 14, 2023	Cycles light linking, improved Principled BSDF shader, better Color management with the AgX tone mapper, and Geometry Nodes improvements.
Old version, no longer maintained: 4.1	March 26, 2024	Geometry nodes baking, OpenImageDenoise performance improvements and viewport compositor improvements.
Current stable version: 4.2 LTS	July 16, 2024	Rewrite of the EEVEE render engine to be closer to cycles, addition of Ray Portal BSDF in Cycles, addition of Khronos PBR Neutral tone mapping, and GPU acceleration for the compositor
Legend: Old version Older version, still maintained Latest version Latest preview version Future release

As of 2021, official releases of Blender for Microsoft Windows, macOS and Linux, as well as a port for FreeBSD, are available in 64-bit versions. Blender is available for Windows 8.1 and above, and Mac OS X 10.13 and above.

Blender 2.76b was the last supported release for Windows XP and version 2.63 was the last supported release for PowerPC. Blender 2.83 LTS and 2.92 were the last supported versions for Windows 7. In 2013, Blender was released on Android as a demo, but has not been updated since.

Features

Modeling

Forensic facial reconstruction of a mummy by Cícero Moraes

Blender has support for a variety of geometric primitives, including polygon meshes, Bézier curves, NURBS surfaces, metaballs, icospheres, text, and an n-gon modeling system called B-mesh. There is also an advanced polygonal modelling system which can be accessed through an edit mode. It supports features such as extrusion, bevelling, and subdividing.

Modifiers

Modifiers apply non-destructive effects which can be applied upon rendering or exporting, such as subdivision surfaces.

Sculpting

Blender has multi-resolution digital sculpting, which includes dynamic topology, "baking", remeshing, re-symmetrization, and decimation. The latter is used to simplify models for exporting purposes (an example being game assets).

Geometry nodes

Geometry Nodes Editor in Blender 3.2

Blender has a node graph system for procedurally and non-destructively creating and manipulating geometry. It was first added to Blender 2.92, which focuses on object scattering and instancing. It takes the form of a modifier, so it can be stacked over other different modifiers. The system uses object attributes, which can be modified and overridden with string inputs. Attributes can include positions, normals and UV maps. All attributes can be viewed in an attribute spreadsheet editor. The Geometry Nodes utility also has the capability of creating primitive meshes. In Blender 3.0, support for creating and modifying curves objects was added to Geometry Nodes; in the same release, the Geometry Nodes workflow was completely redesigned with fields, in order to make the system more intuitive and work like shader nodes.

Simulation

Cloth simulation

Blender can be used to simulate smoke, rain, dust, cloth, fluids, hair, and rigid bodies.

Fluid simulation

Physics fluid simulation

The fluid simulator can be used for simulating liquids, like water being poured into a cup. It uses Lattice Boltzmann methods (LBM) to simulate fluids and allows for plenty of adjustment of particles and resolution. The particle physics fluid simulation creates particles that follow the smoothed-particle hydrodynamics method.

Blender has simulation tools for soft-body dynamics, including mesh collision detection, LBM fluid dynamics, smoke simulation, Bullet rigid-body dynamics, an ocean generator with waves, a particle system that includes support for particle-based hair, and real-time control during physics simulation and rendering.

In Blender 2.82, a new fluid simulation system called Mantaflow was added, replacing the old FLIP system. In Blender 2.92, another fluid simulation system called APIC, which builds on Mantaflow, was added. Vortices and more stable calculations are improved from the FLIP system.

Cloth Simulation

Cloth simulation is done by simulating vertices with a rigid body simulation. If done on a 3D mesh, it will produce similar effects as the soft body simulation.

Animation

Blender's keyframed animation capabilities include inverse kinematics, armatures, hooks, curve- and lattice-based deformations, shape keys, non-linear animation, constraints, and vertex weighting. In addition, its Grease Pencil tools allow for 2D animation within a full 3D pipeline.

Rendering

An architectural render showing different rendering styles in Blender, including a photorealistic style using Cycles

Blender includes three render engines since version 2.80: EEVEE, Workbench and Cycles.

Cycles is a path tracing render engine. It supports rendering through both the CPU and the GPU. Cycles supports the Open Shading Language since Blender 2.65.

Cycles Hybrid Rendering is possible in Version 2.92 with Optix. Tiles are calculated with GPU in combination with CPU.

EEVEE is a new physically based real-time renderer. While it is capable of driving Blender's real-time viewport for creating assets thanks to its speed, it can also work as a renderer for final frames.

Workbench is a real-time render engine designed for fast rendering during modelling and animation preview. It is not intended for final rendering. Workbench supports assigning colors to objects for visual distinction.

Cycles

Rendering of different materials using the Cycles render engine

Cycles is a path-tracing render engine that is designed to be interactive and easy to use, while still supporting many features. It has been included with Blender since 2011, with the release of Blender 2.61. Cycles supports with AVX, AVX2 and AVX-512 extensions, as well as CPU acceleration in modern hardware.

GPU rendering

Cycles supports GPU rendering, which is used to speed up rendering times. There are three GPU rendering modes: CUDA, which is the preferred method for older Nvidia graphics cards; OptiX, which utilizes the hardware ray-tracing capabilities of Nvidia's Turing architecture & Ampere architecture; HIP, which supports rendering on AMD Radeon graphics cards; and oneAPI for Intel Arc GPUs. The toolkit software associated with these rendering modes does not come within Blender and needs to be separately installed and configured as per their respective source instructions.

Multiple GPUs are also supported (with the notable exception of the EEVEE render engine) which can be used to create a render farm to speed up rendering by processing frames or tiles in parallel—having multiple GPUs, however, does not increase the available memory since each GPU can only access its own memory. Since Version 2.90, this limitation of SLI cards is broken with Nvidia's NVLink.

Apple's Metal API got initial implementation in Blender 3.1 for Apple computers with M1 chips and AMD graphics cards.

Supported features

Feature	CPU	CUDA	OPTIX	HIP	oneAPI	Metal
Hardware Minimum for 3.0	x86-64 and other 64-Bit	Cuda 3.0+: Nvidia cards Kepler to Ampere (CUDA Toolkit 11.1+)	OptiX 7.3 with driver 470+: Full: Nvidia RTX Series; Parts: Maxwell+	AMD RDNA architecture or newer, Radeon Software Drivers (Windows, Linux)	Intel Graphics Driver 30.0.101.3430 or newer on Windows, OpenCL runtime 22.10.23904 on Linux	Apple Computers with Apple Silicon in MacOS 12.2, AMD Graphics Cards with MacOS 12.3
Basic shading	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Shadows	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Motion blur	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Hair	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Volume	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Subsurface scattering	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Open Shading Language (1.11) (OSL 1.12.6 in 3.4)	Yes	No	Partial	No	No	No
Correlated multi-jittered sampling	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Bevel and AO shaders	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Baking	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Can use CPU memory		Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Distribute memory across devices	Yes render farm	Yes with NVLink	Yes with NVLink	No	No	No
Experimental features
Adaptive subdivision	Experimental	Experimental	Experimental	Experimental	Experimental	Experimental

Integrator

The integrator is the core rendering algorithm used for lighting computations. Cycles currently supports a path tracing integrator with direct light sampling. It works well for a variety of lighting setups, but it is not as suitable for caustics and certain other complex lighting situations. Rays are traced from the camera into the scene, bouncing around until they find a light source (a lamp, an object material emitting light, or the world background), or until they are simply terminated based on the number of maximum bounces determined in the light path settings for the renderer. To find lamps and surfaces emitting light, both indirect light sampling (letting the ray follow the surface bidirectional scattering distribution function, or BSDF) and direct light sampling (picking a light source and tracing a ray towards it) are used.

The default path tracing integrator is a "pure" path tracer. This integrator works by sending several light rays that act as photons from the camera out into the scene. These rays will eventually hit either: a light source, an object, or the world background. If these rays hit an object, they will bounce based on the angle of impact, and continue bouncing until a light source has been reached or until a maximum number of bounces, as determined by the user, which will cause it to terminate and result in a black, unlit pixel. Multiple rays are calculated and averaged out for each pixel, a process known as "sampling". This sampling number is set by the user and greatly affects the final image. Lower sampling often results in more noise and has the potential to create "fireflies" (which are uncharacteristically bright pixels), while higher sampling greatly reduces noise, but also increases render times.

The alternative is a branched path tracing integrator, which works mostly the same way. Branched path tracing splits the light rays at each intersection with an object according to different surface components, and takes all lights into account for shading instead of just one. This added complexity makes computing each ray slower but reduces noise in the render, especially in scenes dominated by direct (one-bounce) lighting. This was removed in Blender 3.0 with the advent of Cycles X, as improvements to the pure path tracing integrator made the branched path tracing integrator redundant

Open Shading Language

Blender users can create their own nodes using the Open Shading Language (OSL), although it is important to note that this feature is only fully supported with CPU rendering, and partially supported with OptiX rendering.

Using the node editor to create a moldy gold material

Materials

Materials define the look of meshes, NURBS curves, and other geometric objects. They consist of three shaders to define the mesh's surface appearance, volume inside, and surface displacement.

The surface shader defines the light interaction at the surface of the mesh. One or more bidirectional scattering distribution functions, or BSDFs, can specify if incoming light is reflected, refracted into the mesh, or absorbed. The alpha value is one measure of translucency.

When the surface shader does not reflect or absorb light, it enters the volume (light transmission). If no volume shader is specified, it will pass straight through (or be refracted, see refractive index or IOR) to another side of the mesh.

If one is defined, a volume shader describes the light interaction as it passes through the volume of the mesh. Light may be scattered, absorbed, or even emitted at any point in the volume.

The shape of the surface may be altered by displacement shaders. In this way, textures can be used to make the mesh surface more detailed.

Depending on the settings, the displacement may be virtual-only modifying the surface normals to give the impression of displacement (also known as bump mapping) – real, or a combination of real displacement with bump mapping.

EEVEE

EEVEE (or Eevee) is a real-time PBR renderer included in Blender from version 2.8. This render engine was given the nickname EEVEE, after the Pokémon. The name was later made into the backronym "Extra Easy Virtual Environment Engine" or EEVEE.

With the release of Blender 4.2 LTS in July 2024, EEVEE received an overhaul by it's lead developer, Clément Foucault, called EEVEE Next. EEVEE Next boasts a variety of new features for Blender's real-time and rasterised renderer, including screen-space global illumination (SSGI), virtual shadowmapping, sunlight extraction from HDRIs, and a rewritten system for reflections and indirect lighting via light probe volumes and cubemaps. EEVEE Next also brings improved volumetric rendering, along with support for displacement shaders and an improved depth of field system similar to Cycles.

Plans for future releases of EEVEE include support for hardware-accelerated ray-tracing and continued improvements to performance and shader compilation

Recently, with the release of version 4.20 LTS, Blender has released a refresh of EEVEE, called "EEVEE NEXT," which is focused on enhancing realism in EEVEE-based renders.

Workbench

Using the default 3D viewport drawing system for modeling, texturing, etc.

External renderers

Free and open-source:

• Mitsuba Renderer
• YafaRay (previously Yafray)
• LuxCoreRender (previously LuxRender)
• Appleseed Renderer
• POV-Ray
• NOX Renderer
• Armory3D – a free and open source game engine for Blender written in Haxe
• Radeon ProRender – Radeon ProRender for Blender
• Malt Render – a non-photorealistic renderer with GLSL shading capabilities

Proprietary:

• Pixar RenderMan – Blender render addon for RenderMan
• Octane Render – OctaneRender plugin for Blender
• Indigo Renderer – Indigo for Blender
• V-Ray – V-Ray for Blender, V-Ray Standalone is needed for rendering
• Maxwell Render – B-Maxwell addon for Blender
• Thea Render – Thea for Blender
• Corona Renderer – Blender To Corona exporter, Corona Standalone is needed for rendering

Texturing and shading

Blender allows procedural and node-based textures, as well as texture painting, projective painting, vertex painting, weight painting and dynamic painting.

Post-production

The Video Sequence Editor (VSE)

Blender has a node-based compositor within the rendering pipeline, which is accelerated with OpenCL, and in 4.0 it supports GPU. It also includes a non-linear video editor called the Video Sequence Editor (VSE), with support for effects like Gaussian blur, color grading, fade and wipe transitions, and other video transformations. However, there is no built-in multi-core support for rendering video with the VSE.

Plugins/addons and scripts

Blender supports Python scripting for the creation of custom tools, prototyping, importing/exporting from other formats, and task automation. This allows for integration with several external render engines through plugins/addons. Blender itself can also be compiled & imported as a python library for further automation and development.

File format

Blender features an internal file system that can pack multiple scenes into a single ".blend" file.

• Most of Blender's ".blend" files are forward, backward, and cross-platform compatible with other versions of Blender, with the following exceptions:
  • Loading animations stored in post-2.5 files in Blender pre-2.5. This is due to the reworked animation subsystem introduced in Blender 2.5 being inherently incompatible with older versions.
  • Loading meshes stored in post 2.63. This is due to the introduction of BMesh, a more versatile mesh format.
  • Blender 2.8 ".blend" files are no longer fully backward compatible, causing errors when opened in previous versions.
  • Many 3.x ".blend" files are not completely backwards-compatible as well, and may cause errors with previous versions.
• All scenes, objects, materials, textures, sounds, images, and post-production effects for an entire animation can be packaged and stored in a single ".blend" file. Data loaded from external sources, such as images and sounds, can also be stored externally and referenced through either an absolute or relative file path. Likewise, ".blend" files themselves can also be used as libraries of Blender assets.
• Interface configurations are retained in ".blend" files.

A wide variety of import/export scripts that extend Blender capabilities (accessing the object data via an internal API) make it possible to interoperate with other 3D tools.

Blender organizes data as various kinds of "data blocks" (akin to glTF), such as Objects, Meshes, Lamps, Scenes, Materials, Images, and so on. An object in Blender consists of multiple data blocks – for example, what the user would describe as a polygon mesh consists of at least an Object and a Mesh data block, and usually also a Material and many more, linked together. This allows various data blocks to refer to each other. There may be, for example, multiple Objects that refer to the same Mesh, and making subsequent editing of the shared mesh results in shape changes in all Objects using this Mesh. Objects, meshes, materials, textures, etc. can also be linked to other .blend files, which is what allows the use of .blend files as reusable resource libraries.

Import and export

The software supports a variety of 3D file formats for import and export, among them Alembic, 3D Studio (3DS), FBX, DXF, SVG, STL (for 3D printing), UDIM, USD, VRML, WebM, X3D and OBJ.

Deprecated features

Blender Game Engine

The Blender Game Engine was a built-in real-time graphics and logic engine with features such as collision detection, a dynamics engine, and programmable logic. It also allowed the creation of stand-alone, real-time applications ranging from architectural visualization to video games. In April 2018, the engine was removed from the upcoming Blender 2.8 release series, due to updates and revisions to the engine lagging behind other game engines such as Unity and the open-source Godot. In the 2.8 announcements, the Blender team specifically mentioned the Godot engine as a suitable replacement for migrating Blender Game Engine users.

Blender Internal

Blender Internal, a biased rasterization engine and scanline renderer used in previous versions of Blender, was also removed for the 2.80 release in favor of the new "EEVEE" renderer, a realtime physically based renderer.

User interface

Blender's user interface underwent a significant update with Blender 2.57, and again with the release of Blender 2.80.

Commands

Most of the commands are accessible via hotkeys. There are also comprehensive graphical menus. Numeric buttons can be "dragged" to change their value directly without the need to aim at a particular widget, as well as being set using the keyboard. Both sliders and number buttons can be constrained to various step sizes with modifiers like the Ctrl and Shift keys. Python expressions can also be typed directly into number entry fields, allowing mathematical expressions to specify values.

Modes

Blender includes many modes for interacting with objects, the two primary ones being Object Mode and Edit Mode, which are toggled with the Tab key. Object mode is used to manipulate individual objects as a unit, while Edit mode is used to manipulate the actual object data. For example, an Object Mode can be used to move, scale, and rotate entire polygon meshes, and Edit Mode can be used to manipulate the individual vertices of a single mesh. There are also several other modes, such as Vertex Paint, Weight Paint, and Sculpt Mode.

Workspaces

The Blender GUI builds its tiled windowing system on top of one or multiple windows provided by the underlying platform. One platform window (often sized to fill the screen) is divided into sections and subsections that can be of any type of Blender's views or window types. The user can define multiple layouts of such Blender windows, called screens, and switch quickly between them by selecting from a menu or with keyboard shortcuts. Each window type's own GUI elements can be controlled with the same tools that manipulate the 3D view. For example, one can zoom in and out of GUI-buttons using similar controls, one zooms in and out in the 3D viewport. The GUI viewport and screen layout are fully user-customizable. It is possible to set up the interface for specific tasks such as video editing or UV mapping or texturing by hiding features not used for the task.

Development

Game engine GLSL materials

Since the opening of the source code, Blender has experienced significant refactoring of the initial codebase and major additions to its feature set.

Improvements include an animation system refresh; a stack-based modifier system; an updated particle system (which can also be used to simulate hair and fur); fluid dynamics; soft-body dynamics; GLSL shaders support in the game engine; advanced UV unwrapping; a fully recoded render pipeline, allowing separate render passes and "render to texture"; node-based material editing and compositing; and projection painting.

Part of these developments was fostered by Google's Summer of Code program, in which the Blender Foundation has participated since 2005.

Historically, Blender has used Phabricator to manage its development but due to the announcement in 2021 that Phabricator would be discontinued, the Blender Institute began work on migrating to another software in early 2022. After extensive debate on what software it should choose it was finally decided to migrate to Gitea. The migration from Phabricator to Gitea is currently a work in progress.

Blender 2.8

Official planning for the next major revision of Blender after the 2.7 series began in the latter half of 2015, with potential targets including a more configurable UI (dubbed "Blender 101"), support for Physically based rendering (PBR) (dubbed EEVEE for "Extra Easy Virtual Environment Engine") to bring improved realtime 3D graphics to the viewport, allowing the use of C++11 and C99 in the codebase, moving to a newer version of OpenGL and dropping support for versions before 3.2, and a possible overhaul of the particle and constraint systems. Blender Internal renderer has been removed from 2.8. Code Quest was a project started in April 2018 set in Amsterdam, at the Blender Institute. The goal of the project was to get a large development team working in one place, in order to speed up the development of Blender 2.8. By June 29, 2018, the Code Quest project ended, and on July 2, the alpha version was completed. Beta testing commenced on November 29, 2018, and was anticipated to take until July 2019. Blender 2.80 was released on July 30, 2019.

Cycles X

On April 23, 2021, the Blender Foundation announced the Cycles X project, where they improved the Cycles architecture for future development. Key changes included a new kernel, removal of default tiled rendering (replaced by progressive refine), removal of branched path tracing, and the removal of OpenCL support. Volumetric rendering was also replaced with better algorithms. Cycles X had only been accessible in an experimental branch until September 21, 2021, when it was merged into the Blender 3.0 alpha.

Support

Blender is extensively documented on its website. There are also a number of online communities dedicated to support, such as the Blender Stack Exchange.

Modified versions

Due to Blender's open-source nature, other programs have tried to take advantage of its success by repackaging and selling cosmetically modified versions of it. Examples include IllusionMage, 3DMofun, 3DMagix, and Fluid Designer, the latter being recognized as Blender-based.

Use in industry

Blender started as an in-house tool for NeoGeo, a Dutch commercial animation company. The first large professional project that used Blender was Spider-Man 2, where it was primarily used to create animatics and pre-visualizations for the storyboard department.

The French-language film Friday or Another Day (Vendredi ou un autre jour) was the first 35 mm feature film to use Blender for all the special effects, made on Linux workstations. It won a prize at the Locarno International Film Festival. The special effects were by Digital Graphics of Belgium.

Tomm Moore's The Secret of Kells, which was partly produced in Blender by the Belgian studio Digital Graphics, has been nominated for an Oscar in the category "Best Animated Feature Film". Blender has also been used for shows on the History Channel, alongside many other professional 3D graphics programs.

Plumíferos, a commercial animated feature film created entirely in Blender, had premiered in February 2010 in Argentina. Its main characters are anthropomorphic talking animals. Blender is used by NASA for many publicly available 3D models. Many 3D models on NASA's 3D resources page are in a native .blend format.

Special effects for episode 6 of Red Dwarf season X, screened in 2012, were created using Blender as confirmed by Ben Simonds of Gecko Animation. Blender was used for previsualization in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Some promotional artwork for Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U was partially created using Blender. The alternative hip-hop group Death Grips has used Blender to produce music videos. A screenshot from the program is briefly visible in the music video for Inanimate Sensation.

The visual effects for the TV series The Man in the High Castle were done in Blender, with some of the particle simulations relegated to Houdini. NASA also used Blender to develop an interactive web application Experience Curiosity to celebrate the 3rd anniversary of the Curiosity rover landing on Mars. This app makes it possible to operate the rover, control its cameras and the robotic arm and reproduces some of the prominent events of the Mars Science Laboratory mission. The application was presented at the beginning of the WebGL section on SIGGRAPH 2015.

Blender was used for both CGI and compositing for the movie Hardcore Henry. The visual effects in the feature film Sabogal were done in Blender. VFX supervisor Bill Westenhofer used Blender to create the character "Murloc" in the 2016 film Warcraft.

Director David F. Sandberg used Blender for multiple shots in Lights Out, and Annabelle: Creation. Blender was used for parts of the credit sequences in Wonder Woman Blender was used for doing the animation in the film Cinderella the Cat.

VFX Artist Ian Hubert used Blender for the science fiction film Prospect. The 2018 film Next Gen was fully created in Blender by Tangent Animation. A team of developers worked on improving Blender for internal use, but it is planned to eventually add those improvements to the official Blender build.

The 2018 film Ralph Breaks the Internet was animated using Blender.

The 2019 film I Lost My Body was largely animated using Blender's Grease Pencil tool by drawing over CGI animation allowing for a real sense of camera movement that is harder to achieve in purely traditionally drawn animation. Ubisoft Animation Studio will use Blender to replace its internal content creation software starting in 2020.

Khara and its child company Project Studio Q are trying to replace their main tool, 3ds Max, with Blender. They started "field verification" of Blender during their ongoing production of Evangelion: 3.0+1.0. They also signed up as Corporate Silver and Bronze members of Development Fund.

The 2020 film Wolfwalkers was partially created using Blender. In 2021 SPA Studios started hiring Blender artists and as of 2022, contributes to Blender Development. The 2021 Netflix production Maya and the Three was created using Blender. Warner Bros. Animation started hiring Blender artists in 2022. VFX company Makuta VFX used Blender for the VFX for Indian blockbuster RRR.

Open projects

Big Buck Bunny promotional poster

Sintel promotional poster

Tears of Steel promotional poster

Since 2005, every one to two years the Blender Foundation has announced a new creative project to help drive innovation in Blender. In response to the success of the first open movie project, Elephants Dream, in 2006, the Blender Foundation founded the Blender Institute to be in charge of additional projects, with two projects announced at first: Big Buck Bunny, also known as Project Peach (a "furry and funny" short open animated film project); and Yo Frankie!, or Project Apricot, an open game utilizing the Crystal Space game engine that reused some of the assets created for Big Buck Bunny.

Elephants Dream (Project Orange)

Main article: Elephants Dream

In September 2005, some of the most notable Blender artists and developers began working on a short film using primarily free software, in an initiative known as the Orange Movie Project hosted by the Netherlands Media Art Institute (NIMk). The codename, "Orange", about the fruit, started the trend of giving each project a different fruity name. The resulting film, Elephants Dream, premiered on March 24, 2006.

Big Buck Bunny (Project Peach)

Main article: Big Buck Bunny

On October 1, 2007, a new team started working on a second open project, "Peach", for the production of the short movie Big Buck Bunny. This time, however, the creative concept was different. Instead of the deep and mystical style of Elephants Dream, things are more "funny and furry" according to the official site. The movie had its premiere on April 10, 2008. This later made its way to Nintendo 3DS's Nintendo Video in May 2012.

Yo Frankie! (Open Game Project: Apricot)

Main article: Yo Frankie!

"Apricot" was the project name for the production of a game based on the universe and characters of the Peach movie (Big Buck Bunny) using free software, including the Crystal Space framework. The resulting game is titled Yo Frankie!. The project started on February 1, 2008, and development was completed at the end of July. A finalized product was expected at the end of August; however, the release was delayed. The game was eventually released on December 9, 2008, under either the GNU GPL or LGPL, with all content being licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.

Sintel (Project Durian)

Main article: Sintel

The Blender Foundation's Project Durian (in keeping with the tradition of fruits as code names) was this time chosen to make a fantasy action epic of about twelve minutes in length, starring a teenage girl and a young dragon as the main characters. The film premiered online on September 30, 2010. A game based on Sintel was officially announced on Blenderartists.org on May 12, 2010.

Many of the new features integrated into Blender 2.5 and beyond were a direct result of Project Durian.

Tears of Steel (Project Mango)

Main article: Tears of Steel

The Dutch actor Derek de Lint in a composited live-action scene from Tears of Steel that used VFX

On October 2, 2011, the fourth open movie project, codenamed "Mango", was announced by the Blender Foundation. A team of artists assembled using an open call of community participation. It is the first Blender open movie to use live action as well as CG.

Filming for Mango started on May 7, 2012, and the movie was released on September 26, 2012. As with the previous films, all footage, scenes and models were made available under a free content compliant Creative Commons license.

According to the film's press release, "The film's premise is about a group of warriors and scientists, who gather at the 'Oude Kerk' in Amsterdam to stage a crucial event from the past, in a desperate attempt to rescue the world from destructive robots."

Cosmos Laundromat: First Cycle (Project Gooseberry)

Main article: Cosmos Laundromat

Cosmos Laundromat: First Cycle

On January 10, 2011, Ton Roosendaal announced that the fifth open movie project would be codenamed "Gooseberry" and that its goal would be to produce a feature-length animated film. He speculated that production would begin sometime between 2012 and 2014. The film was to be written and produced by a coalition of international animation studios. The studio lineup was announced on January 28, 2014, and production began soon thereafter. As of March 2014, a moodboard had been constructed and development goals set. The initial ten minute pilot was released on YouTube on August 10, 2015. It won the SIGGRAPH 2016 Computer Animation Festival Jury's Choice award.

Glass Half

On November 13, 2015, Glass Half was released in HD format. This project demonstrates real-time rendering capabilities using OpenGL for 3D cartoon animation. It also marks the end of the fruit naming scheme. Glass Half was financed by the Blender Foundation with proceeds from the Blender Cloud. It is a short, roughly three-minute long comedy in a gibberish language that addresses subjectivity in art.

Glass Half

Caminandes

Main article: Caminandes

Gran Dillama

Caminandes is a series of animated short films envisioned by Pablo Vazquez of Argentina. It centers on a llama named Koro in Patagonia and his attempts to overcome various obstacles. The series only became part of the Open Movie Project starting with the second episode.

• Caminandes 1: Llama Drama (2013)
• Caminandes 2: Gran Dillama (2013)
• Caminandes 3: Llamigos (2016)

Agent 327: Operation Barbershop

Agent 327: Operation Barbershop is a three-minute teaser released on May 15, 2017, for a planned full-length animated feature. The three-minute teaser is uploaded to YouTube by the official Blender Studio channel. Co-directed by Colin Levy and Hjalti Hjálmarsson, it is based on the classic Dutch comic series Agent 327. This teaser film also acts as a proof-of-concept to attract funding for the full-length animated feature. Agent 327: Operation Barbershop showcases the latest technology of Cycles engine, the render engine that has been included in Blender since 2011. Assets from this teaser have been released under Creative Commons license via Blender Cloud.

Agent 327

Hero

Hero is the first open movie project to demonstrate the capabilities of the Grease Pencil, a 2D animation tool in Blender 2.8. It was put on YouTube on April 16, 2018. It has a roughly four-minute runtime, which includes over a minute of "behind-the-scenes" "making-of" footage. It showcases the art of Spanish animator Daniel Martínez Lara.

Hero

Spring

Spring

"Spring is the story of a shepherd girl and her dog, who face ancient spirits to continue the cycle of life. This poetic and visually stunning short film was written and directed by Andy Goralczyk, inspired by his childhood in the mountains of Germany."

On October 25, 2017, an animated short film named Spring was announced. Spring was released April 4, 2019. Its purpose was to test Blender 2.8's capabilities before its official release.

Coffee Run

Coffee Run

"Fueled by caffeine, a young woman runs through the bittersweet memories of her past relationship."

On May 29, 2020, the open movie Coffee Run was released. It was the first open movie to be rendered in the EEVEE render engine. It was released on July 30, 2019.

Settlers

A collection of assets and animated scenes created by the Blender Studio in 2020, with an emphasis on expressive non-photorealistic rendering and experimental shading. All assets created for this are freely available to all.

Sprite Fright

Sprite Fright

Sprite Fright is the 13th open movie. It is set in Britain and draws inspiration from 1980s horror comedy. It is directed by Pixar story artist Mathew Luhn with Hjalti Hjalmarsson. It is about a group of teenagers being attacked and killed by Sprites after they litter the forest.

It premiered at Eye Film in the Netherlands on 28 October 2021 and was publicly released on Blender Studio and YouTube on 29 October 2021.

Charge

Charge

A cinematic short with an emphasis on photo-realism. The short takes place in Iceland and is intended to improve Blender's PBR texturing workflow.

Online services

Blender Foundation

Blender Studio

The Blender Studio platform, launched in March 2014 as Blender Cloud, is a subscription-based cloud computing platform where members can access Blender add-ons, courses and to keep track of the production of Blender Studio's open movies. It is currently operated by the Blender Studio, formerly a part of the Blender Institute. It was launched to promote and fundraiser for Project: Gooseberry, and is intended to replace the selling of DVDs by the Blender Foundation with a subscription-based model for file hosting, asset sharing and collaboration. Blender Add-ons included in Blender Studio are CloudRig, Blender Kitsu, Contact sheet Add-on, Blender Purge and Shot Builder. It was rebranded from Blender Cloud to Blender Studio on 22 October 2021.

The Blender Development Fund

The Blender Development Fund is a subscription where individuals and companies can fund Blender's development. Corporate members include Epic Games, Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Unity, Intel, Decentraland, Amazon Web Services, Meta, AMD, Adobe and many more. Individual users can also provide one-time donations to Blender via payment card, PayPal, wire transfer, and some cryptocurrencies.

Blender ID

The Blender ID is a unified login for Blender software and service users, providing a login for Blender Studio, the Blender Store, the Blender Conference, Blender Network, Blender Development Fund, and the Blender Foundation Certified Trainer Program.

Blender Open Data

Example of Blender Benchmark in use

The Blender Open Data is a platform to collect, display, and query benchmark data produced by the Blender community with related Blender Benchmark software.

Blender Network

The Blender Network was an online platform to enable online professionals to conduct business with Blender and provide online support. It was terminated on 31 March 2021.

Blender Store

A store to buy Blender merchandise, such as shirts, socks, beanies, etc.

Blender Extensions

Blender Extensions acts as the main repo for extensions, introduced in Blender 4.2, which include both addons and themes. Users can then install and update extensions right in Blender itself.

See also

• CAD library
• MB-Lab, a Blender add-on for the parametric 3D modeling of photorealistic humanoid characters
• MakeHuman
• List of free and open-source software packages
• List of video editing software
• List of 3D printing software

Further reading

• Van Gumster, Jason (2009). Blender For Dummies. Indianapolis, Indiana: Wiley Publishing, Inc. p. 408. ISBN 978-0-470-40018-0.
• "Blender 3D Design, Spring 2008". Tufts OpenCourseWare. Tufts University. 2008. Archived from the original on July 20, 2011. Retrieved July 23, 2011.
• "Release Logs". Blender.org. Blender Foundation. Retrieved July 23, 2011.

External links

• Official website