Software » Animation 3D » Blender 5.3.0

Good Things
Come in 5.3s
Gaussian splats, DLSS denoising, light dispersion, EEVEE fisheye, Outliner sorting, ripple video editing, and so much more.
Watch the Recap Video

New features overview by Jonathan Lampel and Wayne Dixon from CGCookie.
4D Gaussian Splatting - Nunchuck
Make a Splat
Welcome native 3D Gaussian Splats support to Blender 5.3!

Import them as point clouds, experiment with Geometry Nodes, preview them in Workbench, and render them natively with EEVEE or Cycles.

Gaussian Magic
3D Gaussian Splats are commonly used to reconstruct 3D scenes from photos or videos. They consist of many small, soft, transparent blobs that combine to represent complex geometry and shading.

Blender can now import Gaussian Splats from PLY, SPZ, and glTF files, store them as point clouds, process them with Geometry Nodes, and render them in EEVEE, Cycles, and Workbench (solid mode).

PLY file imported as gaussian splats, featuring DOGWALK by Blender Studio.
Point Cloud Gaussian Splat settings
Point of View
Gaussian splats are represented as point clouds, using a new type to tell them apart and with special attributes:

scale: A vector represneting the size of the splat.
rotation: A quaternion to control the rotation of the splat.
radiance:base: 4D Vector as base (DC) radiance of the splats, followed by opacity.
radiance:sh_{index}: Coefficients of the spherical harmonics bands >= 1. The order is <L=1 M=-1>, <L=1 M=0>, <L=1 M=1>, <L=2 M=-2> … where L is the band index and M is the basis function.
Radiant Future
By default, a 3D Gaussian Splat is rendered using an emissive shader. The radiance attribute provides access to the resolved radiance of the splat at the current shading point.

There is rudimentary support for making the splat relightable by replacing the Emission node with a hard surface BSDF such as Diffuse BSDF.

Performance is still being optimized. Rendering may produce inaccuracies due to differences between the sRGB space used by most Gaussian Splat authoring tools and Blender’s linear color space, particularly in areas with low opacity and high radiance.

Example of relit Gaussian Splat
Simple example of relit Gaussian Splat.
More About Shading
Added support for seven Geometry Nodes
Improved color management interoperability
See all rendering changes
CYCLES
Divide and Shine
The Principled BSDF now supports Dispersion!

Turn ordinary glass and diamonds into beautiful little rainbows by splitting white light into its colorful components.
Cycles Dispersion overview on YouTube by Chris Tyler
Butterflies specter shader by Cartesian Caramel
CYCLES
A diamond
in the Rough
With Dispersion in the Transmission panel, the Principled BSDF can now reproduce the characteristic rainbow effect seen in glass and gemstones. This corresponds to OpenPBR v1.1.1.

Roughness anisotropy is also now supported by the Glass BSDF and the transmission component of the Principled BSDF. It behaves just like anisotropy for specular reflections.
CYCLES
Gone with Denoise
Blender 5.3 integrates DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction as a new denoiser, delivering cleaner images faster by upscaling and reusing samples from previous frames.

Think Cycles looks with EEVEE responsiveness.
Find DLSS denoising in the Denoise panel under Sampling.
NVIDIA DLSS brings near-final render quality to the viewport, making lighting and look development faster and more responsive while virtually eliminating flickering between frames during animation playback.

Find it in the Denoise panel under Render properties, Sampling.

DLSS denoising requires NVIDIA driver version 620 or newer.

NVIDIA RTX Spark
Ready to Spark

Blender 5.3 brings native support for NVIDIA RTX Spark devices running Windows 11, including memory optimizations.

EEVEE
Lights Meet Material Nodes
Material Lighting nodes allow authoring how the Material reacts to Lights.

This can, for example, be used for toon and stylized shading, but also for complex physical effects like iridescence.
All the nodes you need to adjust lighting to your liking.
Lighting to Your Liking
Per-light data, evaluation, and shadow information are now available in the Shader Editor, giving you more control over how materials respond to individual scene lights.

Four new nodes and two that received a “Light” mode/space:

Light Accumulation: Evaluates its inputs for each light in the scene and accumulates the results.
Light Info: Exposes light data properties (Color, Power, and Position).
Light Evaluation: Evaluates position-dependent light properties (Diffuse/Specular Term, Attenuation Mask, Direction, and Distance).
Shadow Raycast: Outputs a shadow mask value for the light being shaded.
Attribute (Light Mode): Queries custom properties from the Light Object or Light Data being evaluated.
Vector Transform (Light Space): Transforms coordinates to and from the local space of the light being evaluated.
A Wider Perspective
EEVEE can now render panoramic cameras, supporting all types of projections, from equirectangular and cubemap formats to various fisheye models and mirror ball.

EEVEE fisheye matching Cycles 1:1
The current implementation has a few limitations: depth of field, raytracing, and volumetric temporal reprojection in the viewport are not yet supported.

More in EEVEE & Viewport
Sky Texture now shows Sun Disc
Vulkan is now default
Raytraced Shadows in Workbench
See all EEVEE & Viewport changes

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COMPOSITOR
Side Effects
You can now stack Effects on your scene just like you would modifiers or constraints.

Applying compositing effects has never been easier.

Scene Effects stack featuring Storm by Blender Studio

New Compositor & Effects tab in the Properties editor.
One-click, Bloom!
Choose from built-in effects such as Bloom, Chromatic Aberration, Film Grain, and Vignette, as well as effects from online asset libraries or your own custom compositor node groups.

Internally, each effect is its own node group, with its output passed on to the next effect.

You can further customize effects at any time in the Compositor editor.
COMPOSITOR
Bundle Up
17 Geometry Nodes are now supported in the Compositor, bringing a range of new capabilities across bundles, math and logic, and utility operations.

This includes bundle support with Get Bundle Item, Store Bundle Item, Combine Bundle, Typed Bundle, and Separate Bundle.

Math and logic nodes such as Boolean Math, Compare, Float to Integer, Integer Math, Matrix SVD, Combine Transform, and Separate Transform. Plus utility nodes including Hash Value, Random Value, Is Viewport, Import Text, and Bone Info.

Play Fast
Playback is now up to 2x faster on GPU, particularly when playing back EXR sequences.

The interactive compositor now supports playback caching. It can be enabled from the sidebar, Options panel.

Anisotropic Kuwahara is now up to 10x faster on Apple GPUs, 2x faster on NVIDIA GPUs, and 25-30% on CPU.

Blender 5.2
Blender 5.3
CPU
NVIDIA GPU
Apple GPU
Relative time to process Anisotropic Kuwahara filter. Lower is better.
More in Compositor
Blend name as default file output name
Text Info overlay
Gizmos support for transform nodes
Blender 5.3 Splash by Blender Studio
Study the artwork
Blender splash artwork source files are available for you to play with!

Blender 5.3 Splash by Blender Studio
OVERGROWN, by Blender Studio
File Project menu
The new File Project menu, to create, open and access projects.
CORE
Blender, meet projects.
Until now, Blender’s preferences (such as asset libraries) were shared across all projects, and it was up to users to keep related files and resources organized.

Blender now supports projects, giving you a way to group related files, share resources, and manage settings across an entire project, whether you’re working alone or as part of a team.

Everything
Everywhere
All In a Project
Projects support custom variables that can be used throughout a project, such as a character’s name or a frequently used file path.

Per-project asset libraries and color management configurations are also supported. You can even set up a custom splash screen for your project, providing quick access to its files and other recent projects.

Add-ons and other extensions per-project will follow in future Blender versions.

Projects are entirely optional, most of the time you’ll probably work without one.

Project Splash
Project-specific splash and color management configuration.
Charge Open Movie
ASSETS
Asset Libraries Extensions
Asset libraries can now be shared as extensions! Just like add-ons or themes.

Browse hundreds of public domain assets available on the Extensions platform via the Get Extensions tab and install them directly from within Blender.

Create and share your own asset library extension. Optionally, access can be controlled via authentication tokens.

Extension Asset Libraries
A selection of public domain assets by the popular library Poly Haven is now available from within Blender. No add-ons required.
GREASE PENCIL
Drawn to Select
Draw Mode now has its own selection tools: Tweak, Lasso, Box, and Circle. Select strokes and adjust them right where you draw.

Move, rotate, scale, duplicate, copy, paste, and delete strokes using the usual shortcuts, or access all these actions from the new Stroke menu.

Carve Diem
Meet the new Carver tool in Draw Mode.

It cuts shapes using proper Boolean subtraction, creating clean cuts in strokes and fills based on a lasso selection. Holes are created automatically when needed.

When a shape has both a stroke and a fill, carving a hole into i...

Photorealistic Rendering
Blender now features a powerful new unbiased rendering engine called Cycles that offers stunning ultra-realistic rendering.

The built-in Cycles rendering engine offers:

GPU & CPU rendering
Realtime viewport preview
HDR lighting support
Permissive License for linking with external software
Rendering in Blender with Cycles
Modeling in Blender
Fast Modeling
Blender’s comprehensive array of modeling tools make creating, transforming and editing your models a breeze.

Blender’s modeling tools include:

Keyboard shortcuts for a fast workflow
N-Gon support
Edge slide, collapse and dissolve
Grid and Bridge fill
Python scripting for custom tools and add-ons
Realistic Materials
With Blender’s new rendering engine the possibilities for materials are endless.

Key features are:

Complete Node Support for full customization
Physically accurate shaders like glass, translucency and SSS
Open Shading Language (OSL) support for coding unique shaders
Materials in Blender
Rigging in Blender
Fast Rigging
Transforming a model into a posable character has never been easier!

Blender offers an impressive set of rigging tools including:

Envelope, skeleton and automatic skinning
Easy weight painting
Mirror functionality
Bone layers and colored groups for organization
B-spline interpolated bones
Animation toolset
Whether it’s simple keyframing or complex walk-cycles, Blender allows artists to turn their still characters into impressive animations.

Blender’s animation feature set offers:

Automated walk-cycles along paths
Character animation pose editor
Non Linear Animation (NLA) for independent movements
IK forward/inverse kinematics for fast poses
Sound synchronization
rigging
Sculpting in Blender
Sculpting
Experience the joy of sculpting organic subjects using the built-in sculpting feature set of Blender.

Sculpting in Blender includes:

20 different brush types
Multi-res sculpting support
Dynamic Topology sculpting
Mirrored sculpting
Fast UV Unwrapping
Easily unwrap your mesh right inside Blender, and use image textures or paint your own directly onto the model.

Blender allows for:

Fast Cube, Cylinder, Sphere and Camera projections
Conformal and Angle Based unwrapping (with edge seams and vertex pinning)
Painting directly onto the mesh
Multiple UV layers
UV layout image exporting
UV Unwrapping in Blender
Compositing in Blender
Full Compositor
Blender comes with a fully fledged compositor built right in. That means no more exporting to third party programs, you can do it all without leaving the program.

The compositor comes with:

Impressive library of nodes for creating camera fx, color grading, vignettes and much more
Render-layer support
Full compositing with images and video files
Ability to render to multiLayer OpenEXR files
Multi-threaded
Amazing Simulations
Whether you need a crumbling building, rain, fire, smoke, fluid, cloth or full on destruction, Blender delivers great looking results.

Blender’s simulation tools include

Fluid – Realistic water and fluid simulations.
Smoke – Billowing smoke with flames and scene interaction.
Hair – Beautiful wafts of hair that blows in the wind and interacts with collisions.
Cloth – Amazingly realistic cloth simulations for clothing and environments
Rigid Body Physics – Makes any object destructable and collidable
Particles – For creating things like rain, sparks and shrapnel
463e785104
Blender Game Engine Screenshot
Game Creation
Included in Blender is a complete game engine, allowing you to create a fully featured 3d game right inside Blender.

The game engine includes:

Ability to port your models to any third-party game engine
Create or code your own game logic
Full Bullet Physics integration
Python scripting API for advanced control and AI
Support for all OpenGLTM dynamic lighting, toon shading, animated materials as well as Normal and Parallax Mapping
Playback of games inside Blender without compiling or preprocessing
3D spatial audio using OpenAL
Camera and Object tracking
Blender now includes production ready camera and object tracking. Allowing you to import raw footage, track the footage, mask areas and see the camera movements live in your 3d scene. Eliminating the need to switch between programs.

The Camera and Object Tracker includes:

Auto and manual tracking
Powerful camera reconstruction
Real-time preview of your tracked footage and 3d scene
Support for Planar tracking and Tripod solvers
Camera tracking in Blender
3057383d1a
Library of Extensions
With a large community of enthusiasts and developers, Blender comes loaded with a vast array of extensions that you can turn on or off easily.

Some existing extensions include:

Generators for trees, terrain, ivy and clouds.
Fracture Objects.
3D Printing Toolbox.
Rigify meta-rigging system.
Import and Export format support for AfterEffects, DirectX, Unreal Game Engine and more!
Plus many more that you can download here

Video Editing
Blender even comes with a built-in Video Editor.

The Video Editor allows you to perform basic actions like video cuts and splicing, as well as more complex tasks like video masking.

The Video Editor includes:

Live preview, luma waveform, chroma vectorscope and histogram displays
Audio mixing, syncing, scrubbing and waveform visualization
Up to 32 slots for adding video, images, audio, scenes, masks and effects
Speed control, adjustment layers, transitions, keyframes, filters and more.
caminandes_edit_final
Exporting in Blender
File Formats
Blender comes packed with import/export support for many different programs.

Including:

Image
JPEG, JPEG2000, PNG, TARGA, OpenEXR, DPX, Cineon, Radiance HDR, SGI Iris, TIFF
Video
AVI, MPEG and Quicktime (on OSX).
3D
Alembic, 3D Studio (3DS), COLLADA (DAE), Filmbox (FBX), Autodesk (DXF), Wavefront (OBJ), DirectX (x), Lightwave (LWO), Motion Capture (BVH), SVG, Stanford PLY, STL, VRML, VRML97, X3D.
Flexible Interface
Novice and advanced users will love the ability to customize their layout completely. From simply splitting their viewport, to fully customizing it with python scripting, blender works for you.

Blender’s interface also offers:

Consistency across all platforms
No disruptive pop-up windows
Crisp text (support for retina on OSX)