Blender 4.5 brings big changes

Blender 4.5 brings big changes We're bad at marketing We can admit it, marketing is not our strong suit. Our strength is writing the kind of articles that developers, administrators, and free-software supporters depend on to know what is going on in the Linux world. Please subscribe today to help us keep doing that, and so we don’t have to get good at marketing. 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. Index entries for this article GuestArticles Taylor, Roland to post comments