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Blender 5.3

Stable

Blender Foundation, released Nov 10

Blender 5.3 is the Blender Foundation's release that wraps up 2026 with features across the board. Its headline change is native support for 3D Gaussian Splats, imported from PLY and SPZ files as point clouds.

Highlights

  • Native 3D Gaussian Splat support: import PLY and SPZ files as point clouds, edit them with Geometry Nodes, and render in Workbench, EEVEE and Cycles
  • Vulkan is now the default backend on Windows (except ARM) and Linux, with lower minimum requirements
  • Cycles adds dispersion and anisotropic roughness for glass and transmissive materials
  • EEVEE adds Material Lighting Nodes, panoramic cameras and the full Sky Texture sun disc
  • New DLSS denoiser for the viewport on NVIDIA GPUs

Changelog

New14

  • Native support for 3D Gaussian Splats imported from PLY and SPZ files as point clouds
  • Asset Libraries can be shared as extensions, and the Extensions platform accepts Asset Libraries with Public Domain (CC0) assets
  • DLSS denoiser for the viewport on NVIDIA GPUs, upscaling and reusing samples from previous frames
  • Native support for NVIDIA RTX Spark devices running Windows 11, including memory optimizations
  • Cycles: dispersion and anisotropic roughness for glass and transmissive materials
  • EEVEE: Material Lighting Nodes for control over how materials react to lights
  • EEVEE: panoramic cameras and the full Sky Texture sun disc
  • Geometry Nodes: new volume grid nodes as first building blocks for custom fluid simulations
  • Geometry Nodes: low-level node for building curves with custom topology
  • Compositor: stack of effects, similar to Geometry Nodes modifiers, with each effect as its own node group
  • Grease Pencil: selection tools in Draw Mode and the new Carver Tool for boolean subtraction cuts
  • Video Sequencer: full ripple editing framework, rewritten blade tool and initial OpenTimelineIO support
  • New optional project system that makes Blender aware of context beyond the open .blend file
  • Animation & Rigging: operators to copy and paste world-space animation and to convert rotation modes

Improved6

  • Vulkan is now the default backend on Windows (except ARM) and Linux, with lower minimum requirements
  • Workbench can use hardware raytraced shadows on Metal and Vulkan
  • Grease Pencil Fill tool can fill many regions at once
  • Video Sequencer gets many editing, interface and performance improvements
  • Animation & Rigging gets friendlier playback and many smaller improvements
  • Geometry Nodes, Workbench, EEVEE and Cycles can process and render Gaussian Splats, including relighting