Blender 5.3 adds native 3D Gaussian Splat support and Vulkan as default backend
Blender 5.3 is out from the Blender Foundation. It brings 3D Gaussian Splat import, a DLSS viewport denoiser, new Cycles and EEVEE material features, and a new optional project system.
Digital Developer Desk, 14h ago, 3 min read
Blender 5.3 is released, and its headline feature is native support for 3D Gaussian Splats. You can import them from PLY and SPZ files as point clouds. From there, they can be edited and processed with Geometry Nodes, then relit and rendered in Workbench, EEVEE and Cycles.
On the rendering side, Cycles adds dispersion and anisotropic roughness for glass and transmissive materials, so it can reproduce the rainbow effect seen in glass and gemstones. EEVEE gets Material Lighting Nodes for control over how materials react to lights, aimed at NPR work and physical effects such as iridescence. EEVEE also gains panoramic cameras and the full Sky Texture sun disc.
Vulkan becomes the default backend on Windows (except ARM) and Linux, with lower minimum requirements. Workbench can use hardware raytraced shadows on Metal and Vulkan. On NVIDIA GPUs, a new DLSS denoiser for the viewport upscales and reuses samples from previous frames for a cleaner image faster. Blender 5.3 also adds native support for NVIDIA RTX Spark devices running Windows 11, including memory optimizations.
Geometry Nodes gets the first building blocks for custom fluid simulations through new volume grid nodes, plus a low-level node for building curves with custom topology. The Compositor can now use a stack of effects, similar to Geometry Nodes modifiers, where each effect is a node group that passes its output to the next.
Grease Pencil adds selection tools in Draw Mode and a Carver Tool that cuts shapes with boolean subtraction. The Fill tool can fill many regions at once. The Video Sequencer gets a ripple editing framework, a rewritten blade tool and initial OpenTimelineIO support.
Blender 5.3 also introduces an optional project system that makes Blender aware of context beyond the open .blend file. Animation & Rigging adds operators to copy and paste world-space animation and to convert rotation modes. The Blender Foundation points to its release notes for the full list, and says the release is supported by over 7500 individuals and 46 organizations contributing to the Blender Development Fund.
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Blender 5.3 adds initial support for 3D Gaussian splats
Blender 5.3 can import, edit and render 3D Gaussian splats (gsplats), with support in EEVEE, Workbench and Cycles. The Blender developers blog covers the file formats, the Geometry Nodes attributes and the current limitations.
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