Blender

On January 2, 1994, Ton Roosendaal wrote the first source files named Blender; the project regards that day as its birthday. The software was initially used in-house at the Dutch animation studio NeoGeoNeoGeoNeoGeo was a Dutch 3D animation studio founded by Ton Roosendaal in the late 1980s; the free and open-source 3D software Blender began as its in-house tool.Open the full entry, and version 1.0 was released in January 1995.⁠[1]

In June 1998, Roosendaal and Frank van Beek founded Not a Number (NaN) to further develop and promote Blender. Its early model let users download the software for free and then pay to unlock certain features.⁠[1]

After NaN closed in early 2002, Roosendaal founded the nonprofit Blender Foundation in May of that year and launched the Free Blender fundraising campaign in July. Community fundraising enabled the foundation to acquire the rights needed to open the source code; on October 13, 2002, Blender was released under the GNU GPL.⁠[1]

Project Orange, launched in 2005, produced an animated short with open-source tools, resulting in Elephants Dream, and released the film and its production assets openly. The Blender Institute, established in 2007, provided a permanent workspace and continued to test creative pipelines through open movie, game and visual effects projects.⁠[1]

The 2.5 project, launched in 2008, redesigned the user interface, tool definitions, data access, event handling and the animation system. Version 2.61 in 2011 introduced the path-tracing renderer Cycles, which became an important part of subsequent rendering work.⁠[1]

Blender 2.80 rebuilt the interface and workspaces, made left-click select the default, and added the real-time renderer EEVEE. Grease Pencil was expanded into a 2D drawing and animation system, allowing 2D strokes to be placed, edited and rendered in 3D scenes.⁠[1][2]

This version also removed the Blender Internal renderer and the Blender Game Engine. The project stated that the Python API had incompatible changes and that existing add-ons and scripts needed to be adapted; the new features and the migration of older workflows therefore came at the same time.⁠[2]

Version 2.92 introduced Geometry Nodes, which builds geometry processing workflows with a node interface. The first release focused on object scattering and instancing, while sculpting, Grease Pencil and video editing also continued to improve.⁠[3]

On March 2, 2025, at the 97th Academy Awards, Flow, a Latvian animated feature made with Blender, won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, awarded to director Gints Zilbalodis and producers Matīss Kaža, Ron Dyens and Gregory Zalcman; the other nominees were Inside Out 2, Memoir of a Snail, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl and The Wild Robot. It was Latvia’s first Oscar, and the film had earlier won the Golden Globe for best animated feature.⁠[4][5]

Flow is a dialogue-free Latvian, French and Belgian co-production about a black cat that, with a dog, a capybara, a ring-tailed lemur and a secretary bird, tries to survive a catastrophic flood. Its production took about five and a half years with a team of roughly 15 to 20 people in total, usually only three to five of them working at any given time; Zilbalodis began using Blender with the 2.8 alpha and beta builds, and the last version used in production was 3.6. The film was rendered in EEVEE at about 0.5 to 10 seconds per 4K frame, without a render farm, with the final render done on the director’s own computer.⁠[5][6]

In an interview published on the Blender website, Zilbalodis said speed was really important to him and that Blender was ideal because it had all the tools he needed; he also advised independent creators not to try to copy what big studios do.⁠[6]

The Blender Foundation established Blender Lab as an innovation space within the Blender project, where designers, developers and researchers work together on challenging, future-facing projects. The foundation explained that as the software grew larger and more complex, and stability and reliability became critical for individuals and companies, development had shifted toward improving existing functionality, which made experimentation harder. Lab projects are independent of the Blender release cycle and are presented publicly on blender.org/lab with their objectives, timelines and participants.⁠[7][7][7][7][7]

The first projects listed were two “beyond mouse and keyboard” efforts, touch and pen and VR/XR, along with volume rendering and light transport; candidates for later inclusion included USD authoring and AI and ML technologies, starting with a Blender MCP server. The foundation gave special credit to Ton Roosendaal for advocating the project since 2018.⁠[7][7][7]

After Anthropic’s addition to the Development Fund’s list of corporate sponsors raised concerns in the community, the Blender Foundation announced that the funds would be treated as a one-time donation rather than a fund membership. Chairman Francesco Siddi said there should have been more discussion with contributors before the decision was made.⁠[8]

The announcement said the funds would support human-centered development, art and creativity, and that a generative AI policy would be discussed through public channels. The announcement stated at the time that Blender had no integrated generative AI features and no plans for such integration; this statement reflects the project’s official position as of May 2026.⁠[8]

Blender 5.2 LTS was released on July 14, 2026, with support planned until July 2028. New features include experimental node-based hair and cloth physics workflows, an online asset library, and improvements to Cycles, EEVEE, Grease Pencil and the sculpting tools. Experimental features and the stable maintenance commitment of the long-term support release apply separately.⁠[9]

As of September 24, 2026, the official download page listed 5.2.2 LTS, released on September 15, as the latest update in the 5.2 series, while 4.5 LTS was also maintained. Daily development builds are intended for testing and cannot be equated with official stable releases.⁠[10]

The Blender Developers Blog published Small Teams, Ambitious Projects by head of product Dalai Felinto, setting a shared goal for the next two years: making Blender the tool that enables small independent studios to work on long-form projects such as an animated feature film.⁠[11][12][11]

The six initial strategic targets were Dynamic Overrides, easing the toil of animation, rigging at scale, seamless transitions from board to previs, collaborative asset creation and complexity management. The list drew on 20 years of Open Movies, the work of Blender Studio and conversations with other studios, and was open to further refinement.⁠[11][11][11][11][11][11][11][11]

Beyond the main goal, the project also considered adoption by game studios, in large-scale animation and VFX pipelines and in mechanical engineering fields such as aerospace, automotive and industrial design. Blender Studio’s most ambitious goal to date is the feature film project OVERGROWN, to be made in Blender from start to finish with documentation and tutorials that other filmmakers can apply.⁠[11][11][11][11][11]

Blender Conference 2026 (BCON26) took place on September 23–25, 2026 at Felix Meritis in Amsterdam. According to the organizers, more than 700 attendees from over 50 countries took part over three days, and 126 speakers presented across four stages in a program of more than 100 hours; talk recordings were published on PeerTube and YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry during the event.⁠[13][14][14][13]

The program covered film and visual effects, rendering, scientific visualization and industrial design. Calvin Romeyn, associate visual effects supervisor of A24’s Backrooms, showed how Blender was part of the film’s VFX pipeline, building on creator Kane Parsons’ original YouTube short film; Jules Urbach, founder and CEO of OTOY, discussed traditional and neural rendering technologies and their converging workflows. Other topics included the interoperable OpenPBR material model, Intel Open Image Denoise 3 in Cycles, the automotive concept design workflow of the Zeekr and Lynk & Co design team, lattice infills that control the mechanical behavior of 3D-printed parts, visualizations of stellar evolution and microscopy data, synthetic LiDAR for autonomous systems, and a session on AI-enabled tools and workflows.⁠[15][15][16][16][17][17][18][17][17][17][17][17]

The Blender Education Community Meeting on September 25 brought together pre-university, university and professional teachers, with talks on why great tutorials still fail, rethinking industry-academia collaboration, moving teaching from MayaMayaMaya is a 3D modeling, animation, effects and rendering application now developed by Autodesk; first released by Alias|Wavefront in 1998, it is widely used by film, television and game studios.Open the full entry to Blender, the Blender Badges Project and education.blender.org; another community session discussed selling and marketing add-ons, assets and training.⁠[19][19][19][19][19][19][20]

The conference also celebrated 20 years of Blender Open Movies: the Blender HQ team built an installation showing each of the 17 Open Movies as a pillar holding the whole film frame by frame, and visitors could take a frame home and scan its QR code to jump to that second of the film; a screening was also held at de Balie. In the post-event survey, over 60 percent of respondents said they attended as part of their job and 79 percent planned to return the next year; the first talk listed among the attendees’ top 10 was Nathan Vegdahl’s session on color science.⁠[21][14][14][14][14][14]

The conference’s traditional opening keynote was given by Francesco Siddi, who had succeeded Ton Roosendaal as chairman and Blender CEO on January 1, 2026; it was his first opening keynote as CEO. He began with a table joking about the differences between himself and his predecessor, then reviewed the year’s organizational work: launching Blender Lab at the end of 2025, relaunching Blender Network as an invite-based directory of users and educators, introducing the Blender Roadmap in May 2026 as a central overview of major development projects, and, the week before the conference, a feature that lets supporters show support for favorite projects on the roadmap.⁠[22][12][23][23][23][23][24][23][25]

He named Netflix Animation Studios joining the Blender Development Fund as one of the announcements he was most proud of that year. Netflix Animation Studios joined as a Corporate Patron on January 27, 2026, with its support dedicated to Blender core development, and described itself as the first major animation studio to support Blender’s continued development. He also pointed to the foundation’s 2025 annual report, published that day, and to the in-depth discussions prompted by the project’s documents on AI-enabled contributions and AI-enabled tools.⁠[23][26][26][26][23][23][23]

On development, he presented online assets with self-hosted remote asset libraries, immersive VR/XR scene inspection advanced with support from PICO, a prototype running on an Android-based Wacom tablet, layered textures, and a video sequence editor with high dynamic range support together with story tools that take work from storyboards to the final edit; on platforms, he cited an Android port supported by Wacom, Windows on Arm work supported by QualcommQualcommQualcomm is a semiconductor and wireless technology company headquartered in San Diego, California. Founded in 1985 by Irwin Jacobs and six other former Linkabit colleagues, it built its business on CDMA technology and now rests on two pillars: its Snapdragon chip platforms and the licensing of cellular standard-essential patents. It has faced antitrust investigations and litigation in many jurisdictions, and in recent years has expanded into automotive, IoT, PCs and AI data centers.Open the full entry and others, and upcoming support for hardware such as the Nvidia DGX Spark. Native 3D Gaussian Splatting support was shown working in renderers including Cycles and is planned for Blender 5.3.⁠[23][23][23][23][23][23][23][23][23][23][23][23][23]

Under the heading The Joy of Small Things he highlighted everyday improvements such as the voxel remesher now interpolating vertex attributes, a Bevel Mesh node in Geometry Nodes and an improved Grease Pencil fill tool. He also presented Small Teams, Ambitious Projects as the goal for the coming years, linking it to the Open Movie tradition, and showed a feature film concept in development. He added that Blender is downloaded about 22 million times a year and that more than half of the issues in its tracker are resolved within a week.⁠[23][23][23][23][23][23][23][23][23][23]

The official license explanation distinguishes between source code, complete distributions and created works: the project’s own source code defaults to the GNU GPL v2 or later, and binary distributions combining all components are licensed under the GNU GPL v3 or later; some modules, such as Cycles, carry other compatible licenses. Images, films and .blend files made with Blender are not required to be released under the GPL merely because the software was used.⁠[27]

The Blender Foundation supports the project’s development and open ecosystem; the software, the foundation and the production organizations are related but distinct entities. The Blender name and logo are trademarks of the foundation, are not covered by the software’s GPL license, and are subject to separate brand usage rules on the official website.⁠[1][28]

Blender: Official website: https://www.blender.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[29]

Blender Foundation: Official page: https://www.blender.org/about/foundation/ (opens in a new window)⁠[29]

Blender Development Fund: Official website: https://fund.blender.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[29]

Blender Studio: Official website: https://studio.blender.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[29]

YouTube: Official channel: https://youtube.com/BlenderFoundation (opens in a new window)⁠[30]

PeerTube: Official video platform: https://video.blender.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[30]

MastodonMastodonMastodon is free and open-source decentralized social networking software created by Eugen Rochko in 2016; based on the ActivityPub protocol, it forms a federated network of independently run servers. Its user base grew sharply in 2022, and Rochko stepped down as CEO in November 2025.Open the full entry: Official account: https://mastodon.social/@blender (opens in a new window)⁠[30]

BlueskyBlueskyBluesky is a decentralized social platform built on the AT Protocol; it grew out of an open-protocol project funded by Twitter in 2019 and is now developed and operated by the public benefit corporation Bluesky Social, PBC. It dropped invite-only access and opened to the public in February 2024, and by 2026 had more than 40 million users.Open the full entry: Official account: https://bsky.app/profile/blender.org (opens in a new window)⁠[30]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Official page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/blender-org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[30]