Projects to Look Forward in 2024

2023 was a remarkable year. We started new projects, continued others, finalized several, and postponed some. There is a pattern over the years that surfaced once again: there are too many projects.

As everyone would admit, having too many concurrent projects is difficult. That leads to energy and attention getting spread too thin. Many projects and small teams add the risk of projects dragging for too long when any emergency arises. It leads to frustration and the feeling that we could have done better.

The modules will continue to work, and the blender.org community will continue to help lift the quality bar for the core functionality. And on top of that, we will start 2024 finishing projects!


For the first quarter the goal will be finishing the following projects:

Projects like Geometry Nodes and Vulkan will be put on hold for the time being. High priority issues and community patches for these and other modules will still be handled once a week.
The Character Animation project will still be the sole priority of the Animation & Rigging module during this year.

Extensions Platform

Blender Foundation will launch an official community-moderated website for sharing, discovering and downloading add-ons, themes, and asset libraries.

This project consists of two parts: an online platform and the Blender integration. The next steps will be to support the new schema, design discussions about the Blender integration and a break-dow of the next tasks.

GPU-based Compositor

This project adds a new compositor backend, taking advantage of GPU acceleration to be performant enough for real-time interaction.

The initial version was added in the 3D viewport in Blender 3.5. Nearly all nodes are supported now. The remaining work is to make it production ready for final compositing, adding render passes and other missing features to unify the behavior across CPU and GPU compositing.

EEVEE Next

Blender’s realtime rendering engine EEVEE has been evolving constantly since its introduction in Blender 2.80. The current goal is to make EEVEE ready for the latest hardware innovations, and new techniques.

This is a massive refactor which has been going on for a few years. Although the original target was to stick to feature-parity, a few new features were added already, like screen space global illumination and displacement support. At the moment it is available in the daily builds, but it still lacks some features and it has performance problems with integrated GPUs which makes it unclear which Blender it will be ready for.

Grease Pencil 3.0

Grease Pencil is undergoing a full rewrite, aiming to lay a solid foundation for the next 10+ years. It will lead to increased performance and memory usage and pave the way to new features (e.g., Geometry Nodes).

The new iteration of Grease Pencil is available as an experimental feature in Blender. There are still many features that need to be ported. While Geometry Nodes support was planned for after feature parity, it is already in Blender.

Brush Assets

The asset system and browser will fully support brushes for painting and sculpting. This makes it easy to use, make and share bundles of brushes with others.
The initial targets are already in Blender since its 4.0 version (the “All” asset library and yet to be polished asset shelf). The main part of the project (brush assets themselves) got a redesign recently which will allow for direct creation of assets without the need of the originally proposed draft system.


Finishing a project will be followed by a buffer to look back at the different modules and catch up on the issues and patches.

Then shortly afterwards, at different moments during the second quarter, we have interesting projects lined up:

  • Pipeline & Assets
  • Sculpting & Painting
  • Physics & Simulation
  • Tablet Input Mapping
  • GPU Projects

Most of these projects need to have their design fleshed out in order to pinpoint their scope and planning. This will happen during the first quarter, or ultimately before the project officially kicks off.

And there’s more!

  • There are three releases planned for 2024: 4.1, 4.2 LTS and 4.3.
  • In April the first North American Blender Conference will take place in Los Angeles.
  • Cycles, USD and other modules will still continue their usual development.
  • There are ideas already for the 3rd and 4th quarter, but they will be announced closer to the date, to keep the planning more realistic.

Medium and long-term list

  • Blender Apps (unknown yet, we lack resources for it).
  • Layered texturing (with a bit of luck it starts 2nd half 2024).
  • Move to Vulkan (might be 2nd half 2024, depends on GPU Projects).

To follow new developments keep an eye on the Blender Code Blog.
On behalf of everyone, I hope we have a great 2024, and … happy Blending!

Dalai Felinto, Product Manager at Blender.

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