New features:

• Vulkan backend with support for OpenXR, Subdivision, USD/Hydra and more
• New Manifold boolean solver
• New Geometry Nodes for mesh normals, file import, Grease Pencil and more

Enhancements:

• Grease Pencil: Added a new supersampling anti-aliasing (SSAA) method for rendering
• File I/O: New experimental FBX importer and improvements to USD, glTF, OBJ and SVG
• Cycles: Improvements to Adaptive Subdivision, Bump Mapping and new custom cameras
• Compositor: New nodes and most options are exposed as single value inputs now
• Sculpt: Pen Tablet Tilt Support, brush and performance improvements

New features:

• Animation: The structure of Actions has changed, introducing the concept of Slots
• Brushes: A new brush type, the Plane brush, has been added
• Compositor: The CPU compositor was rewritten and should generally be faster

Enhancements:

• Viewport: The overlays have been rewritten for better consistency and better extendability
• Modeling: Improved Vertex and Edge Dissolve
• UI: Improvements for Status Bar display, Tooltips and Window decoration
• Video Sequencer: Improvements for text strips, performance and 10 and 12 bit/channel video support
• Stability: More than 700 issues have been fixed that existed in Blender 4.3 or older

New features:

• Grease Pencil was rewritten to remove deeper limitations and improve overall performance
• New Unwrapping Method "Minimum Stretch"
• Cycles: hardware accelerated ray-tracing on Linux/AMD, new volume scattering phase functions

Enhancements:

• Rendering: New Metallic BSDF and Gabor Noise texture
• Sculpt / Paint: Brush Assets and many performance improvements
• UI: New area docking, SVG icons for better resolution and more
• Video Sequencer: The preview area now supports snapping, various performance improvements

New features:

• EEVEE: Completely rewritten from scratch to allow global illumination, displacement, better SSS, viewport motion blur, and so much more
• Cycles: Ray Portal BSDF, Thin Film interference effect, better sampling for volumes
• Extensions: Add-ons and themes got a big overhaul and are now unified as Extensions

Enhancements:

• Collections can now specify their own exporters
• USD: support for importing and exporting hair curves, and for importing point clouds
• Visual overhaul for the video sequencer
• Polyline gestures, allowing for a quick way to create polygonal shapes

New features:

• OpenImageDenoise is now GPU accelerated on supported hardware.
• Geometry Nodes: new Bake node and several enhancements and performance improvements.
• New File Handler API allows for drag-and-drop behaviour throughout Blender. Initial use has been added for file formats such as Alembic, OBJ and OpenUSD.

Enhancements:

• The video Sequencer got many performance optimizations across the board, improved filtering and visually updated scopes.
• User Interface improvements such as input placeholders, visual improvements and more infos on file browser tooltips.
• Bone Collections are now hierarchical
• The Musgrave Texture node was replaced by a more versatile Noise Texture node.

New features:

• New Principled BSDF. More energy conserving, more efficient, and more flexible.
• A new view transform has been added: AgX, providing better color handling in over-exposed areas compared to Filmic.
• Cycles now has support for Light Linking
• Geometry Nodes Tools

Enhancements:

• The Voronoi Texture node has support for fractal noise.
• Cycles Path Guiding now works on glossy surfaces in addition to diffuse surfaces.
• Performance and drawing optimizations in the Graph Editor.
• Support for Bone collections.

New features:

• Simulation Nodes
• New transparent Render Pass
• Animation: A new Gaussian Smooth operator for keyframe data was added.

Enhancements:

• PLY I/O:About 4x-20x faster export, 8x-30x faster import
• Improved UV packing
• Python API: Custom script directories
• USD Curves/Hair export
• Major improvements to the Library Overrides resyncing process

New features:

• Real-Time compositor
• Vector displacement sculpting
• Built-in hair node groups
• Cycles many light sampling
• Metal Viewport for macOS

Enhancements:

• Support for importing and exporting compressed .USDZ files
• New Ease operator in the graph editor
• New Geometry Nodes, like Image Info and Blur Attribute
• Font previews now differentiate better between Korean, Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese

New features:

• Cycles Path Guiding
• Sculpt geometry-based relax brush
• Viewport overlay for Geometry Nodes Viewer Node
• EEVEE headless rendering support on Linux

Enhancements:

• Many new Geometry Nodes for meshes, curves and more
• NLA editor usability improvements
• FFmpeg AV1 codec encoding
• Improved font thumbnails
• Blender as a Python Module

New features:

• New hair system
• Cycles Rendering on Intel Arc GPUs
• Grease Pencil Light and Shadow calculations
• Motion Tracker Image Plane Marker

Enhancements:

• Faster Line Art loading time
• Library Overrides improvements
• Massive performance gains importing large amounts of objects in USD, Alembic, and OBJ
• UV improvements
• Improved sculpting performance in EEVEE
• Cycles GPU rendering improvements for AMD GPUs and Apple Silicon

New features:

• Cycles Light Groups
• Cycles Shadow Caustics using Manifold Next Event Estimation
• New Tools and usability improvements for Polygon Painting
• More Geometry Nodes, including Duplicate Elements
• Asset Browser: Support for Asset Collections

Enhancements:

• Enhanced channels in the video sequencer
• Support for WebP format
• New experimental OBJ importer
• Motion Paths improvements
• Grease Pencil Envelope Modifier
• New Curve Pen Tool

New features:

• GPU acceleration for the Subdivision modifier
• Cycles Metal GPU backend, contributed by Apple
• Point Cloud rendering
• More Geometry Nodes, including extrude mesh

Enhancements:

• Faster and less memory usage in geometry nodes
• Grease Pencil Dilate/Contract fill
• Vertex Creasing support
• Faster .obj and .fbx export
• Image editor is able to handle large images
• Python 3.10
• User Interface updates

New features:

• Asset browser
• Geometry nodes fields
• Video editor thumbnail previews
• Transformation tools for video strips
• Virtual reality navigation
• Quicker save and better compression

Enhancements:

• Cycles performance and quality improvements
• About 100 new geometry nodes
• EEVEE attribute support
• User Interface updates
• OpenImageDenoise upgraded to 1.4
• Shadow terminator geometry offset
• Shadow catcher indirect and environment light support

New features:

• Mesh primitive nodes
• Line Art
• EEVEE Realistic depth of field and volumetrics
• Spreadsheet editor

Enhancements:

• Geometry nodes 22 new nodes and improved attribute search
• Mask loops, textures and patterns for sculpting
• Grease pencil interpolate refactored and SVG and PDF support
• Persistent Data rendering settings for Cycles
• Video Sequencer Editor auto-proxy system

New features:

• Geometry nodes
• EEVEE AOV and Cryptomatte support
• Grease pencil Bézier curves edit
• APIC fluid simulation method
• Add primitive tool

Enhancements:

• Silhouette, elastic snake and smearing for sculpting
• Grease pencil tracing image sequences support
• Sparse NanoVDB grid for volume
• OptiX hybrid rendering and new AO and bevel
• Viscosity settings for fluid simulation

New features:

• Volume modifiers
• Precise boolean
• Cloth brush collision
• Custom curve bevels
• Grease Pencil image tracer
• Property search and fuzzy search

Enhancements:

• Boundary and pose cloth brushes
• Material holdout for Grease Pencil
• Sculpting gestures
• Overrides resync and transform support
• Animation proxy conversion
• Compound shape collision
• Outliner collection colors
• Snappier F-Curves and seamless keyframe insertion

New features:

• Nishita sky texture for Cycles
• EEVEE motion blur
• Cloth filter
• Ocean modifier spray
• Correct face attributes modeling
• OpenVDB fluid integration with mantaflow
• Nuke lens distortion model for motion tracking

Enhancements:

• Intel Embree for faster motion blur in Cycles
• Viewport Intel OpenImageDenoise
• Shadow terminator offset setting
• NVLink support for CUDA and Optix
• Multires unsubdivide, rebuild and modes
• Pose brush transformations
• Correct face attributes modeling
• User interface improvements: new search, modifiers, headings, stats

New features:

• Volume object to import OpenVDB files
• VR support for scene inspection through OpenXR
• Cycles adaptive sampling and OptiX viewport denoising
• Sculpt face sets and cloth brush
• Video sequencer disk cache

Enhancements:

• Grease Pencil closer integration and improved performance
• EEVEE improved render passes, light cache and hair transparency
• Faster undo system
• Rewritten multiresolution modifier
• Improved hair physics collisions

New features:

• New Mantaflow fluid and smoke simulation system
• UDIM textures for rendering and painting
• USD scene export
• Bevel custom profiles
• Cycles custom shader AOVs
• Cloth air pressure simulation
• Weld modifier for meshes

Enhancements:

• New and improved sculpt tools
• New grease pencil tools and modifiers
• New bone and constraint settings for rigging

New features:

• Many sculpt tools and poly build tool for retopology
• Voxel remesh and quad remesh
• Transform origins, new snapping, mirroring and auto merge options
• Revamped shaders for texturing
• Cycles denoising with OpenImageDenoise and NVIDIA RTX support
• Library overrides to make local overrides to linked characters and other data

Enhancements:

• EEVEE shadows, transparency and bump mapping redesigned
• Viewport options for look development with Cycles and EEVEE
• Finer control over rotations and scale in bones, constraints and drivers
• Outliner improvements, new file browser and batch rename

New features:

• Revamped user interface
• Toolbar with tools and gizmos
• EEVEE - physically based realtime renderer
• Modern 3D viewport
• Full 2D animation and drawing system
• New shaders for hair, sss, volumes, bevel and AO
• Cryptomatte compositing
• Collections system for organizing objects
• glTF import and export

Enhancements:

• Multi-object editing
• Animation and rigging improvements
• Cloth simulation improvements
• More powerful unit system
• ...And many more!

New features:

• Denoiser
• Filmic color management
• PBR shader
• Shadow catcher
• Surface Deform modifier
• More bundled add-ons

Enhancements:

• Faster OpenCL
• Cycles improvements
• Modeling tool improvements
• Animation improvements
• Grease Pencil improvements
• Automatic scaling on high DPI displays
• Alembic import and export improvements
• ...And many more!