Projects to Look Forward to 2025January 13th, 2025Development, NewsDalai Felinto html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"Planning session 2025.One of the long-standing traditions of the Blender project is to start the year announcing what to be expected in the coming period. It gets artists excited (and developers anxious) to think of everything that will be soon possible.Are we going to see new features, or a focus on stability? Improvement in long-standing areas, or investment in new tech?Last year the focus was on finishing up long-standing projects, and that was a success! All the projects announced for Q1-2024 are now available in the latest release.Projects to Look Forward to 20242025 started with the Winter of Quality project, aiming at stability and documentation of all areas of Blender. We can now shift focus to start (and finish!) brand-new projects.Some of them are regular module work, and projects previously agreed on. While others are development targets for the Blender Studio upcoming open projects, which helps with direction (and testing) in the traditional Blender fashion.The proposed projects for this year are organized into the following areas:Node SystemsIntegrate the node-systems across different workflows.Better integration across node trees will allow node groups to be shared between different types of node systems, like Geometry Nodes and the compositor.Hair dynamics represents a major milestone: Geometry Nodes is set to reach feature parity with the legacy particle hair system. This will be the first step towards replacing the existing high-level simulation systems.Node-based image/texture Data-blocks will introduce procedural texture generation (think texture nodes 2.0), possible thanks to the GPU compositor development.Make productions more accessible for small and medium-sized studios.Project Setup, meaning project-wide variables and environments, will provide a unified way to share settings and properties across multiple .blend files within a single production. This will make asset management and shot creation more efficient and ensure consistency throughout the pipeline.Online Remote Assets will allow artists to access resources directly from online libraries such as third-party, community-curated content and various stores. This feature will also help remote productions that need their own asset libraries. This is the next step for the Extension Platform.Overrides will be simplified and re-iterated upon to provide an intuitive way to define properties dynamically for specific contexts, such as files, scenes, or collections. These improvements will reduce the need for external tools to handle override conflicts, making production pipelines smoother and more reliable.PerformanceBring more responsiveness into asset creation.While improving performance is an on-going effort, there are two areas in particular that currently are blocking for some productions requirements.EEVEE material shader compilation is currently a blocking operation for certain production requirements, especially during look development with heavy assets. The focus will be on enabling parallel compilation, investigating issues with the shader cache, and optimizing material compilation in complex production scenes.Shape Keys are another area requiring attention, particularly for character pipelines that rely on multiple shape keys for finer details and adjustment layers. The current storage system significantly impacts scalability. The plan is to modernize their storage, transitioning it to a more generic attribute systemsimilar to the approach used for UVsand implement sparse storage, ensuring that only the parts of a shape key that differ are stored.SculptingNon-destructive sculpting with layers, and better keyboard-less workflow.Multires propagation spikes remain a critical issue. These occur when changes to lower subdivision levels are not properly reflected in higher levels, leading to infamous artifacts. Fixing this problem is a priority to ensure the multires modifier works reliably in production.Sculpting Layers are a natural next step now that sculpting mode can handle more data, thanks to last years performance improvements. Adding support for mixing multiple layers will enable higher levels of detail and deforming layers essential for animation workflows, giving artists greater control and flexibility.Tablet pen support is important for workflows like sculpting, painting, and 2D animation. While the mouse can often be replaced by a pen, Blenders heavy reliance on keyboard input makes it cumbersome to use. Even more so for display tablets and, in the future, portable devices. The initial focus will be on supporting touch inputs, with basic gestures for navigation, undo, and redo.Storyboarding and basic camera editing from the VSE (video sequence editor).Sequence data-block.Quick access to Grease Pencil drawing for the active scene strip.Edit/animate scene strip camera from VSE.Storyboarding tools (e.g., easy of use to create new scene strips).Editorial and Storyboarding are key to film production. Inspired by the Storypencil add-on, and with Grease Pencil 3.0 complete, some of the team is now shifting the focus to editorial tools. The goal is to create a seamless workflow for storyboarding, combining sketching, timing, and editing to help artists bring their stories to life efficiently.On-going ProjectsThere is on-going maintenance and development in the modules. Here are a few of the areas being worked on.Rendering (Cycles, NPR, ).Vulkan (including a presentation at Vulkanised 2025).UV syncing and other improvements.HDR support in all the editors.Layered Animation.USD and game interoperability via glTF.Blender 5.0 backward incompatible changes.Other module work.ReleasesWhile projects dont target specific releases, Blender Foundation follows the cadence of 3 releases a year. The planned releases for 2025 and their initial dates are:Blender 4.4 (March) will be focused on stability and polishing.Blender 4.5 LTS (July) to wrap up the Blender 4 series.Blender 5.0 (November), to kickstart a new development cycle.On top of this, LTS release updates are expected throughout the year:Blender 3.6 LTS until June 2025.Blender 4.2 LTS until July 2026.Blender 4.5 LTS until July 2027.In 2024 there were 24 LTS releases among Blender 3.3 LTS, 3.6 LTS and 4.2 LTS.Blender ConferenceIn other news, the date for the traditional Blender Conference in Amsterdam moved to September this year. Learn more.Make this PossibleAll of this progress is made possible thanks to the donations and ongoing community involvement and contributions.The ambitious plans for 2025 reflect the growing scope of Blender, but they are also limited by the current resources available. While Blender is a community-driven project, much of the work is carried out by developers employed by Blender Institute or working with development grants.Further, some of the targets outlined here may need to be delayed or put on hold if the development team gets too busy managing ongoing maintenance or dealing with unforeseen delays.The same applies to certain development goals that have been proposed over the years, such as Blender Apps and Layered Textures, which are not feasible with the current team size. Support the Future of BlenderDonate to Blender by joining the Development Fund to support the Blender Foundations work on core development, maintenance, and new releases. Donate to BlenderTo follow new developments keep an eye on theBlender Developers Blog.On behalf of everyone, I hope we have a great 2025, and happy Blending!Dalai FelintoHead of Product, Blender