Blender 4.5 brings big changes [LWN.net]

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Blender 4.5 LTS was released
on July 15, 2025, and will be supported through 2027. This is the last
feature release of the 3D graphics-creation suite’s 4.x series; it
includes quality-of-life improvements, including work to bring the Vulkan backend up to
par with the default OpenGL backend. With 4.5 released, Blender
developers are turning their attention toward Blender 5.0, planned for
release later this year. It will introduce substantial changes,
particularly in the Geometry
Nodes system, a central feature of Blender’s procedural
workflows.

Brief introduction

Blender is an open-source creative application released under the GPLv3.
The Blender Foundation
stewards development, with significant funding from the Blender Development Fund as well
as backing from individual contributors and industry sponsors. Its
code is primarily written in C and C++,
with Python used extensively for scripting and add-ons.

While Blender is often known as a 3D modeling and animation tool,
it has grown into a comprehensive open-source suite for digital
content creation. Alongside powerful 3D tools, it features
compositing, nonlinear
video editing, and 2D animation in 3D space. This integrated suite
of tools enables designers, animators, and other creators to work with
a single application across their digital pipeline. Blender also
provides access to its core functions through Nodes,
a visual programming system that enables procedural workflows for
complex operations. The Grease
Pencil tool, also accessible through the Geometry Nodes system, is
used for 2D animation, cut-out animation, motion graphics, and more. Blender’s procedural systems rely heavily
on these node-based graphical interfaces, and the 4.5 LTS focuses on
their continued evolution. These systems enable fully non-destructive
workflows, preserving all original data at every stage of the editing
process.

Blender strives to be compatible with visual-effects (VFX) industry
standards through alignment with the VFX Reference Platform, which is
updated annually. This allows Blender to be run on the same systems as
other VFX software, as well as share files with them. 4.5 brings a
slew of library updates to maintain alignment with the reference
platform.

A solid foundation

Historically, Blender has relied
on OpenGL for drawing its user
interface and powering its 3D-display capabilities. However, efforts
are underway to modernize this aspect of its core functionality
by abstracting
away the rendering backend, bringing support for running on additional
graphics APIs, including Vulkan
and Apple’s
Metal API. The Vulkan API is a
low-overhead, cross-platform standard that allows applications like
Blender to communicate more directly with GPU hardware than OpenGL. Being the
final feature release of the 4.x series, this LTS brings a critical
step in the maturity of
the Vulkan
backend. Though still not enabled by default due to multiple
outstanding issues, it now rivals the OpenGL backend in both features
and performance.

Vulkan is built on a parallel-execution model, allowing applications to send multiple commands
to the GPU simultaneously, while OpenGL relies on a sequential
model. Vulkan’s execution model makes better use of the increased number
of cores found in modern GPUs. This is a crucial
step toward smoother viewport performance and more responsive
interaction with complex scenes.

There are known
limitations still blocking the new backend from being adopted as
the default. Notably, large meshes with 100-million vertices or
more are not yet supported, resulting in poor performance on the
Vulkan backend for virtual reality and other high-mesh-count
applications. Future driver updates may address some of these
issues.

The viewport in Blender is an interactive view space where 3D
scenes are displayed and constructed. Rendering converts 3D scenes
into 2D images or video, producing the final output with Blender’s
built-in engines or third-party renderers. Rendering can also be
performed without the graphical interface by running Blender in
headless mode, both on individual systems and at scale on render
farms. The viewport and rendering upgrades in Blender 4.5 extend
beyond the improvements to its Vulkan backend. Specifically, work
continues
on EEVEE,
the realtime rendering engine built for rapid, interactive rendering
on modern GPUs. EEVEE 2.0, also known as EEVEE Next, receives several
critical improvements focused on stability and visual
accuracy. Shadows now render more smoothly thanks to the addition
of shadow
terminator normal bias. This is an area where EEVEE has struggled
to match other renderers, including Blender’s
own Cycles rendering
engine.

Two settings control shadow termination bias: “Geometry Offset” and “Shading
Offset”, found
in the “Shading” tab of the “Object Properties” panel. This gives
artists greater control over the position and angle of
shadows. However, due to the difficulties of creating shadows that work
equally well for all projects, the default for these settings is
“no bias”. These visual improvements coincide with fixes for rendering
problems such as light
leaking from large light sources. Light leaking is a phenomenon
where light incorrectly passes through or around solid objects,
creating unrealistic bright spots in the rendered scene. Overall,
these changes aim to bring EEVEE Next closer to parity with other
renderers.

Beyond rendering quality, this LTS release delivers
improvements to workflow fluidity. Texture loading, shader
compilation, and startup times all contribute to overall performance
and user experience, and all
three have
been improved. Textures are now loaded
using a
deferred, multithreaded process, resulting in more than double the
speed of the previous method. This change introduces a small CPU
overhead due to loading textures before redrawing the viewport, but
the cost is not significant enough to severely impact performance.

Shaders
are also
now compiled in parallel. Crucially, this
optimization is independent of the viewport backend in use, whether
Vulkan or OpenGL, translating to immediate benefits from these core
improvements. That said,
a new
preference allows users to revert to sub-process shader
calculation, if desired, which is faster but consumes more RAM. Additionally, by skipping unnecessary shading
steps during viewport initialization, startup times have been improved
significantly.

With ongoing efforts to improve the workspace, users can
now control
which tabs are visible in the Properties Editor through the
right-click pop-up
menu. The Asset
Browser, used for importing and organizing assets (including
scenes, 3D objects, textures, and more), has been
continually refined throughout the 4.x series. In 4.5 LTS, it receives
some key usability enhancements, particularly in how assets are
displayed, such as wrapping long lines used for asset labels, and
making it easier to create thumbnails for assets.

Nodes, Grease Pencil, and modeling polish

Rather than focusing solely on fixes
and performance
gains, this cycle emphasized tighter
integration between the various node systems in Blender. The result is
that Shader
Nodes, Compositor
Nodes,
and Geometry
Nodes (including Grease Pencil Nodes) now share more capabilities
and have a more consistent workflow.

The common nodes (including mathematical operations)
and procedural
textures available with Shader Nodes and Geometry Nodes
are now
available for use in the Compositor. This change enables effects
such as procedurally generated visual noise or cloudiness applied to
an image or video during post-processing. Common nodes can be copied
across Shader and Geometry Node setups, further aligning node logic
and capability design across the toolset. In Geometry Nodes, the new
“Set Mesh Normal” node grants artists direct control over custom
normals, which are perpendicular vectors that are used to represent
the orientation of a surface. By allowing users to define normals via
Fields,
Blender provides fine-grained
procedural controls for surface shading. For instance, an animator
could drive this node with a value to simulate a material seamlessly
transitioning from a soft, smooth surface to a rough, hard-edged one,
all without the need for manually editing the mesh.

In
4.5, Point
Clouds debut
as a
new object type, accessible from the “Add” menu in the viewport or
through various Geometry Nodes. Point Clouds represent objects as a
group of points in 3D space and have long been used in scientific and
industrial 3D scanning. According to the Blender developer
documentation on Point Clouds, this new object
type supports motion graphics, physics simulations (including particle systems),
granular materials (such as sand and gravel), and 3D scanning. To this
end, Blender
includes comprehensive
tools
and editable
object attributes, including standard transformations like
rotation and scale. It
also maintains
high rendering performance through EEVEE and Cycles, putting point
clouds on par with meshes.

Looking ahead

With 4.5 LTS out the door, the Blender developers have shifted
focus to 5.0, the next major release, which is now
under active development. As the beginning of a new, feature-breaking series,
5.0 introduces
significant refinements and modernized workflows without abandoning the
user
interface paradigm established by Blender 2.80 in 2019. The release
notes outline several key features planned for the release. Among
these improvements is the ability to mark
scenes as assets, allowing entire scenes with their contents and
setup to be pulled directly into the visual scene editor using the asset browser.

The Grease Pencil
tool in 5.0 supports the motion
blur effect, controlled by the new “Motion Blur Steps” setting in
the “Grease Pencil” render panel. Linux users now benefit from HDR
support in the viewport on Wayland when using the Vulkan
backend. Additionally, a
change to the .blend file format to handle larger content
allows Blender to store meshes with
more than a few hundred million vertices. This feature required
a change to the file structure of the .blend file format, meaning
that files created in version 5.0 are incompatible with Blender 4.4
and prior releases, but can be loaded in 4.5 LTS. While the new format
supports meshes with hundreds of millions of vertices, working with
such files still demands powerful hardware, specifically large amounts
of system RAM and GPU memory.

Blender
5.0 improves
symmetry in Edit Mode by ensuring mirrored operations no longer
fail or produce inconsistent
results. UV
mapping, the process of unfolding the surface of a 3D model onto a
2D image for applying textures, sees improvements in Blender 5.0
thanks to improved synchronization. This change ensures selections
remain aligned between the viewport and the UV Editor. Blender 5.0
finally resolves this longstanding limitation.

Those interested in downloading Blender 4.5
can get official
builds from the project
web site, install
the Flatpak via Flathub,
or install the snap package
from the Snap Store.

DOGWALK,
a game by the Blender Foundation, which was built using Blender and
the Godot engine,
was released at the same time as 4.5. The game is
freely available for
download from Blender
Studio, Steam, and Itch.io.

According to the release schedule, Blender 5.0 will enter beta on
October 1, 2025. Interested users can access official daily builds
from Blender’s
experimental downloads page. Blender’s development is open to
contributors of all backgrounds; instructions on contributing code,
documentation,
and more
are available in the developer portal.