2023 was an incredible year for Blender: Blender 4.0 was released, another great Blender Conference took place, and it was all rounded off with a successful donation drive resulting in more than 10000 individual donations in the last month of the year, insuring the project's independence and sustainability of its development. So what does 2024 hold for our beloved software and community?
Ten thousand gifts for Blender!
In the month of December 2023, Blender received over 10000 donations!
This helps the project to stay independent and develop the best free and open source content creation tools. Thank you to everyone who donated to https://t.co/Tf18irBnrE. #b3d
— Blender ? (@Blender) January 1, 2024
Blender just turned thirty, and what a year of celebration it will be: Blender Foundation's Dalai Felinto published an article outlining Blender's project for the upcoming year.
In the first quarter of 2024, five projects are expected to wrap up:
Once these projects are wrapped up, a few more are lined up with their design mostly ready, with a possible development date starting around the second quarter of the year:
- Pipeline & Assets
- Sculpting & Painting
- Physics & Simulation
- Tablet Input Mapping
- GPU Projects
This year will hold three big Blender releases, 4.1, 4.2 LTS and 4.3, as well as the first Blender Conference in North America, in Los Angeles!
Check out the Dalai's article on the link below for more information on all these projects and more, and support Blender's development fund to support Blender's development and constant growth:
3 Comments
Disappointed and disappointing. Usability and discoverability not on menu. Blender needs more than anything else another UI push. Eevee Next seems an almost redundant project with hardware improvements with Cycles.
Geometry Nodes on hold is good. It is too complex for most Blender users.
Agree Blender's UI is overcomplicated but hard to see how they could fix that. Ideally a UI and underlying application are separate, but Ton said in Blender they are closely intertwined. EEVEE is fast and beautiful. Cycles is too slow and beautiful. Understand many people still use Cycles, but EEVEE is the future. Agree Geometry Nodes is too hard for most users, but it provides a way to do things the traditional modifiers can't. So use modifiers and if you need to do something different, Geometry nodes is there.