Blender is an open source software for 3D modeling, rendering, animation, post-production, interactive creation and playback. Available for Windows, Linux, Irix, Sun Solaris, FreeBSD or macOS.

Modeling

  • A range of 3D object types including polygon meshes, NURBS surfaces, Bezier and B-spline curves, metaballs, vector fonts (TrueType, PostScript, OpenType)
  • 'Smooth proxy' style catmull-clark subdivision surfaces
  • Boolean mesh functions

Animation

  • Armature (skeleton) deformation with forward/inverse kinematics, auto skinning and interactive 3D paint for vertex weighting
  • Non-linear animation mixer with automated walk cycles along paths
  • Constraint system
  • Vertex key framing for morphing, with controlling sliders
  • Character animation pose editor

Realtime 3D/game creation

  • Graphical editor for defining interactive behavior without programming
  • Collision detection and dynamics simulation
  • Supports all OpenGL lighting modes, including transparencies, Animated and reflection-mapped textures
  • Playback of games and interactive 3D content without compiling or preprocessing
  • Audio, using the fmod toolkit
  • Multi-layering of Scenes for overlay interfaces

Rendering

  • Very fast inbuilt raytracer
  • Integral support for the famous Yafray render engine
  • Oversampling, motion blur, post-production effects, fields, non-square pixels
  • Environment maps, halos, lens flares, fog
  • Various surface shaders such as Lambert, Phong, Oren-nayar, Blinn, Toon
  • Edge rendering for toon shading

What's New

Quality Blend

Blender 4.4 is all about stability. During the 2024 – 2025 northern hemisphere winter, Blender developers doubled down on quality and stability in a group effort called "Winter of Quality."

Winter of Quality

In just a few months, developers fixed over 700 reported issues, revisited old bug reports, and addressed unreported problems.

Alongside bug fixes, Winter of Quality also included tackling technical debt and improving documentation.

Action Packed

Blender 4.4 introduces Action Slots, revolutionizing animation workflows by letting multiple data-blocks share a single Action.

VSE: Vastly Superior Editing

The Video Sequencer continues to improve with quality-of-life upgrades for text editing, expanded support for codecs including H.265 and 10/12-bit videos, and performance improvements that make editing faster than ever.

Faster Editing Everything

  • Building proxies for image sequences is faster now.
  • Preview playback performance of float/HDR content is faster now.
  • Text strip background fill "Box" is several times faster for large fill areas.
  • Curves, Hue Correct, White Balance modifiers are 1.5x-2x faster now.
  • Many sequencer effects are slightly faster now thanks to more efficient multi-threading.

Expand Your Blender

The Blender Extensions platform keeps growing, with over 500 free add-ons and themes to customize your workflows.

You can also share your own add-ons and themes!

Video Beyond

Blender 4.4 adds support for rendering videos using the H.265/HEVC codec.

Videos are now rendered in BT.709 color space now, preventing playback inconsistencies from the previously unspecified color space.

Additionally, video playback YUV->RGB conversion is more accurate now, fixing color shifts and banding in dark regions.

Pole Position

A new option in the Select by Trait operator lets you select by pole count.

Easily find all 3-pole or 5-pole points in your mesh.

Given their impact on topology, the default selects all poles that do not have 4 edges, allowing for easy inspection.

Influencer

Joining triangles to quads now prioritizes quad-dominant topology, creating a more structured "grid" layout. This helps maintain cleaner geometry and improves mesh flow, especially in models where uniform quads are preferred.

This behavior can be adjusted using a topology influence factor, to better control how triangles are merged.

Vertex & Egde Dissolve

Dissolving edges may remove additional, unselected edges to ensure the mesh remains valid. Previously, this also dissolved vertices connected to those unselected edges.

The new behavior processes only vertices that belonged to the selected, now dissolved edges.

Read the complete release notes.

Previous Release Notes:

EEVEE

It's (real-)time for Light Linking

The real-time renderer EEVEE now supports Light Linking and Shadow Linking-features previously available only in Cycles. With light linking, lights can be set to affect only specific objects in the scene. Shadow linking additionally gives control over which objects acts as shadow blockers for a light. This is now feature parity with Cycles.

Shaders

A new Metallic BSDF node has been added to the shader editor. Metallic BSDF

This new node exposes existing, but hard to access metallic material configurations in a small node.

F82 Tint

The F82 Tint approximation is artist friendly, taking colors as inputs. This is currently in use by the Principled BSDF.

Conductor Fresnel

This method is more complex to use, requiring IOR and Extinction coefficients per color channel as inputs. However, it can produce subtly more accurate results for real-world metals, previously achievable only through custom OSL scripts.

EEVEE does not yet support the Conductor Fresnel type, so it internally remaps the IOR and Extinction coefficients to colors and uses them with the F82 Tint approximation.

Textures

Make Some (Gabor) Noise

A new texture node was added that can create procedural Gabor noise for random interleaved bands with controllable direction and width.

Compositor

Forget F12. EEVEE passes are now available for interactive compositing.

Read the complete release notes here.

Previous Release Notes:

The next generation of the render engine EEVEE is here. Completely rewritten from scratch to allow global illumination, displacement, better SSS, viewport motion blur, and so much more.

Read the complete release notes here.

Sunsational Lighting

Lighting is a breeze with added support for screen space global illumination. EEVEE can automatically extract intense lights from the World environment and treat them as Sun lights, improving the lighting quality and casting real shadows.

Bump up your game

Real displacement is now supported by EEVEE. Just like in Cycles, setting your materials to "Displacement and Bump" will combine true displacement and bump mapping for finer details. Vertex position is modified.

SSSuperb Scattering

Subsurface Scattering now doesn't leak between objects and has no energy loss. The subsurface translucency is now always computed, and the associated option has been removed.

Turn Up the Volume

Dithered volumetrics provide a much more stable result while navigating the scene.

Blurry Vision

Motion blur is now visible in the 3D Viewport through the camera view and supports a custom Shutter Curve, matching Cycles.