From an in-house tool at a Dutch animation studio to the free 3D suite used by studios, schools and hobbyists everywhere. Three decades of code, community and open movies.
Pick a year, use the arrows, or swipe the card. Each milestone links to its official source.
Blender became a production suite in stages. Each era changed who made it, who paid for it and who used it.
1994 to 1998
Blender starts as the private toolkit of a Dutch animation studio. Its defining idea is already there: a single window you can split any way you like, so the interface bends to the job instead of the other way round.
1998 to 2002
NaN gives Blender away and sells keys for advanced features. Venture funding and a SIGGRAPH booth grow the user base, but the company closes in the 2002 downturn and development stops.
2002 to 2008
The community buys Blender's freedom. Development moves into the open, and Elephants Dream and Big Buck Bunny test the software on real productions.
2008 to 2019
The 2.5 project rewrites the interface, event handling and animation system. Cycles, motion tracking and a steady stream of open movies follow.
2019 to today
Blender 2.80 brings EEVEE and a modern interface, and studios take notice. Geometry Nodes, Cycles X, a rebuilt EEVEE and the 5.x series keep the pace up.
When NaN shut down, Blender's rights sat with its investors. Ton Roosendaal asked the community to buy them back, in one of the earliest crowdfunding campaigns in software.
Around 250,000 users raised €110,000. On 13 October 2002, Blender was released under the GNU General Public License, which keeps its source code free for any purpose.
A harsh market and strained investor relations end the company, and Blender development stops.
Roosendaal starts a non-profit with one goal: to make Blender open source.
The Foundation asks for €100,000 to buy the rights from NaN's investors.
Seven weeks later, the target is met.
The source code is published, free to use, study, change and share.
Modeling, sculpting, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and editing live in the same file. Open any card for details and a real-world example.
Most studios chain several applications together. Blender keeps every stage in one place, and anyone can extend it.
Released under the GNU GPL. Use it for anything, study the code, change it and share it, with no licence fees.
Tools, panels and complete add-ons are written in Python with the bpy API, and the Extensions platform distributes them.
The Blender Development Fund, backed by individuals and companies, pays for the core developers.
A new version roughly every four months, plus a yearly LTS release that is maintained for two years.
Cycles traces light physically for final-quality images. EEVEE rasterizes in real time for instant feedback. You can switch between them at any point.
A production path tracer. Light bounces around the scene the way it does in reality, so glass refracts, metal reflects and shadows soften on their own. Renders on CPU or GPU through OptiX, CUDA, HIP, oneAPI and Metal.
A real-time renderer that also drives the Material Preview viewport. Rebuilt for Blender 4.2 LTS with screen-space ray tracing, virtual shadow maps and better volumes, it renders final frames in seconds.
Both cow images use the same models and camera; only the engine and lighting setup differ.
Smoke, liquids, cloth, hair, rigid and soft bodies all live inside Blender and can interact. The small demos below run live in your browser to show what each system does.
These are simplified 2D sketches written for this page, not Blender output. They pause when scrolled out of view.
Each Blender Foundation film is a stress test. Real productions expose what's missing, and the fixes ship to everyone. The films and their production files are released under Creative Commons.
Drag the handle, or focus it and use the arrow keys, to compare real screenshots from different releases.
Loaded live from the official Blender news site and developer blog each time you visit.
New add-ons from Blender’s official Extensions platform and the liveliest add-on threads on Blender Artists, checked every six hours. Further down, a place to talk about them.
Share add-on tips, ask questions or suggest something for this page. Anyone can read along; posting needs a free GitHub account, and posts are stored in GitHub Discussions.