LogInHead of Product at Blender Dalai Felinto has joined 80 Level to discuss Blender's most notable successes in 2024, plans for 2025, the software's upcoming features, and the "Join the 2%" campaign on Blender's social media pages.
What were the highlights for Blender in 2024? What accomplishments are you proud of the most?
Dalai: 2024 was a fantastic year for Blender, featuring three new releases (4.1, 4.2 LTS, and 4.3), consistent updates for the two active LTS versions (3.3 LTS and 3.6 LTS), a successful donation campaign, and numerous projects – both large and small – by the community and full-time developers alike.
Take the 2D animation system refactor Grease Pencil 3.0, for instance. Grease Pencil was originally created as a community effort. Throughout the years, it kept growing and allowed Blender to be used by entirely new segments of the animation industry, from short 2D animations to Oscar-nominee films. All this community groundwork led this project to now being actively developed at the Blender Institute and getting even more integrated with Blender (a lot of time was spent on making it production-performance-ready as well as combined with other features like the Geometry Nodes procedural tools).
It was also the first year of an official Blender Conference held outside of Amsterdam, fully organized by the community – BCon LA.
I also want to give a shoutout to another big project from 2024: the Extensions Platform. It's more than just adding a new feature to Blender – it opens up so many new possibilities for community contributions. Before this, there wasn't a centralized way for people to share and manage free add-ons (and themes), and keeping everything up to date was a real headache for artists. Now, with over 300 add-ons already on the platform – way more than what Blender used to come with – it's been a total game-changer.
Among all the new features and improvements introduced to Blender over the year, which ones are your favorite? Which of them were the most difficult to implement?
Dalai: Personally, I'm excited about Grease Pencil 3.0 and its integration with Geometry Nodes in particular. We've already seen some early experiments and oh my... you simply must check the ClayPencil work shown at the latest Blender conference. This shows the intersection of two maturing projects (Grease Pencil and Geometry Nodes), and I can't wait to see what the community does with it.
As for the most difficult to implement, it has to be EEVEE next. This is the project that was running for the longest period, so give the team a round of applause for persevering and finally landing it in a release. This was one of those engineer-centric projects that set the foundation for user-facing features in the future. We shall see it paying off for many years to come.
2025 is here, meaning we're bound to hear more about the Animation 2025 initiative sometime very soon. Can you provide an update on the current state of the initiative and what 3D Animators should look forward to?
Dalai: In 2024, the ongoing animation project was re-scoped as multi-layered multi-character animation. It had two main components:
- Slots (similar to material slots – but in this case means the same Action data-block can contain the animation of multiple objects/props).
- Support for multiple action layers for blending animations together (which will replace the possibilities of the Non-Linear Animation – NLA editor)
Slotted animation will be part of the upcoming Blender 4.4.0 release, early in 2025, as a way to bring the first step of the multi-year-long development project into an official release. This is the groundwork for the most eye-catching feature, multiple layers, which will have its development resumed later.
In between them, there are other planned 'buffer' projects, to give the animation team more time to gather feedback on the 4.4.0 feature. You can read the full list on the development documentation page. It includes pose library improvements and the long-awaited mini-map.
What are the biggest updates coming to Blender in the coming year? What long-awaited features will finally see the light of day?
Dalai: I invite everyone to read the "Projects to Look Forward to in 2025" announcement. Features aside, there is a big focus on stability, with hundreds of bug fixes tackled as part of the Winter of Quality initiative. Together with the planned LTS releases, this is a big deal for users who rather have reliable robust software than flashy new features (but don't worry, we can still have both).
Now for long-standing features, I personally think Story Tools and better tablet support will really expand the possibilities for the editorial world (read: storyboarding) within Blender.
Online asset libraries will also help community-centered content repositories elevate the "out of the box" experience for everyone who wants to quickly get started with creating. Part of this will be organized by Blender Foundation itself with a subset of curated assets available online to download/use from within Blender.
Over the past few months, Blender's official Twitter page has been posting a lot of "2%" memes, can you tell us a little bit more about this campaign, how you came up with it, what its purpose is, and what your end goals are?
Dalai: I wasn't directly involved in this campaign, but I was very happy with how it went, and its outcome. It is an ongoing effort to find effective ways to communicate with the user base, and be it memes or banners on the websites, I think there is a lot to be gained by showing how much Blender depends on everyone's support to thrive. The "2%" target specifically was presented by Ton during his keynote last year and published on Blender's official website.
Blender is free for everyone. However, developing and maintaining the project is not without cost. These costs are solely covered by donations from thousands of individuals and several corporations. While having a good relationship with corporations is important, individual donations from users are crucial, as they allow Blender to remain an independent community project with development focus on end-user benefits.
Blender is massively popular: 20 million downloads were registered in 2023. Understandably, most people are not in a position to financially support the project, but it's reasonable to estimate that around 2% of the users have benefited from Blender in one way or another. It's to these people that the Foundation wishes to reach out: join the 2% of users that donate to Blender and keep it free for everyone!
The campaign itself is over (and successfully so), and we now urge artists and studios to join the Development Fund year-round to help sustain the future of open-source 3D creation.