What’s New Recap
Round-up of what’s new in Blender 4.5 LTS, in detail.
VULKAN
The Vulkan backend is now fully supported in Blender 4.5 LTS
The final frontier.
After years of work, support for the popular backend in Blender is now on par with OpenGL.
It’s not enabled by default yet; make it so in the Preferences.
Make sure to keep your drivers up to date! Blender works closely with hardware manufacturers to ensure Vulkan performs as well as possible.
See the supported platforms and drivers, and the current limitations.
GEOMETRY NODES
BRING’EM ON
Got OBJ, CSV, STL, VDB, PLY, or a custom text file?
Bring them all together with Geometry Nodes.
Drag & Drop
Import files by dragging and dropping them onto the Geometry Node Editor.
Smart Sequencing
When combined with the new Format String node, importing sequences is as flexible as it gets.
THE NEW NORMAL
Custom mesh normals are now editable in Geometry Nodes with the new Set Mesh Normal node! Modify both “Tangent Space” normals and a new, faster “Free” format.
Node Tools
Custom node tools are now easier to organize thanks to support for collapsible panels, including the use of boolean sockets as checkboxes in their headers, just like native built-in operators!
This is part of a refactor that allows the Adjust Last Operation panel to share the same code as modifiers, so future improvements will benefit both systems.
For example, you can now search for attributes within the Adjust Last Operation panel.
What the community is creating with Geometry Nodes
ON PERFORMANCE
What’s Next?
Get a glimpse of what’s to come to Geometry Nodes (spoiler alert: hair dynamics and physics!).
EVEN MORE GEOMETRY NODES
EEVEE & VIEWPORT
Start Me Up, Fast
Blender 4.5 LTS is noticeably faster thanks to performance improvements such as faster texture loading, quicker startup times, and multi-threaded shader compilation by default on supported platforms.
A new user preference allows choosing between multi-threaded and subprocess compilation.
- Blender 4.5 LTS
- Blender 4.4
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Startup Time
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Texture Loading
- 0
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- Lower is better
- Unit: seconds
EEVEE
Hasta La Vista
A new shadow terminator bias has been introduced, helping eliminate self-shadowing artifacts on low-polygon geometry. This is a per-object setting to shift the shadowed position along the shading normal.
Sound familiar? Cycles introduced this feature in Blender 3.0, and it has now become a global setting shared by both engines.
MORE EEVEE & VIEWPORT
INDUSTRY READY
All libraries used in Blender 4.5 LTS are aligned with the VFX Reference Platform 2025, making studio pipeline integration and maintenance easier.
COMPOSITOR
Go Procedural
All the procedural texture nodes you know and love from Shaders and Geometry Nodes, are now available in the Compositor.
The usual suspects:
- Brick: Highly customizable texture producing bricks.
- Checker: Simple checkerboard texture.
- Gabor: Noise visually characterized by random interleaved bands.
- Gradient: Color band gradient.
- Magic: Classic Blender’s magic sauce.
- Noise: Fractal Perlin noise.
- Voronoi: Worley noise.
- Wave: Procedural bands or rings with noise distortion.
- White Noise: Random number based noise.
Compositing Harmony
The Compositor is now more unified than ever.
Common nodes have been added and can be easily copied across Shader and Geometry Nodes setups.
MORE COMPOSITOR
EXPAND
YOUR BLENDER
The Blender Extensions platform keeps growing, with 600 free add-ons and themes to customize your workflows.
You can also share your own add-ons and themes!
GREASE PENCIL
GLOW UP
This release is a big one for Grease Pencil. Featuring integration with the Compositor, introducing support for Geometry Nodes tools, missing features have been brought back, and strokes look better than ever.
Blender 4.5 LTS is the perfect match for your next 2D/3D animation project.
Pencil Perfect
A new render pass outputs the visible Grease Pencil strokes and fills into a separate layer.
This pass is useful for isolating, enhancing, or applying effects to Grease Pencil elements during compositing.
Full Control
In addition to the render pass, Grease Pencil rendering can be completely disabled per View Layer using the Filter option, similar to Surfaces, Volumes, and other types.
LOOKING
SHARP
A new supersampling anti-aliasing (SSAA) method improves line quality for smoother lines.
The current subpixel morphological anti-aliasing (SMAA) method is still used for the viewport and final render but now can be controlled independently under Render properties, Grease Pencil panel. This example uses threshold 1.0.
The SSAA sample count can be adjusted under Render properties, Grease Pencil. Note that the SSAA filter size is the same as the Film > Filter Size setting. This example uses 8 Samples.
Using both methods together is also possible (for final rendering), but might cause overblurring.
MORE GREASE PENCIL
UV EDITING
UVs
Everywhere
All At Once
View UVs for the active or all selected objects, in any mode, at all times.
Previously limited to Edit Mode, UVs are now visible across all object modes in the Image Editor’s Mask and Paint views.
UVs visibility and opacity can be controlled through the Overlays popover.
GET THE ARTWORK
Blender splash artwork source files are available for you to play with, not only for Blender 4.5 LTS but for previous versions as well.
Make Your Point
Meet Point Cloud, a new object type for representing large numbers of individual points in 3D space. Ideal for visualizing 3D scan data, particle simulations, or sparse datasets.
ちょっと前に東京都の無料の点群データ公開されてたの知らなかった。とりあえずBlenderに入れてみた。ホログラム系表現とかでなかなか使えそうじゃん pic.twitter.com/8ihpsxkVzL
— Hirokazu Yokohara (@Yokohara_h) December 18, 2024
Tokyo point cloud visualization by Hirokazu Yokohara.
Checkpoint
Point Cloud objects are much more performant than regular meshes.
Each point in a point cloud can store data using Attributes that define properties such as radius, position, color, and more. Future updates may expand support to include simulation systems like particles.
To the Point
Add a Point Cloud object directly from the Add menu in the 3D Viewport, or generate it procedurally using Geometry Nodes.
MODELING
What a Filling
The Grid Fill operator can now replace or correct existing geometry, as well as fill holes as before.
FILLS LIKE MAGIC
It can be used to clean up an area with bad geometry, which will be replaced with a fresh, smooth, grid-filled set of quads. It almost feels like cheating.
MORE MODELING
Play the Splash!
This release splash artwork features DOGWALK, the latest open game project by Blender Studio.
The game is free and open source like every Blender Studio project, with a DLC available for those who wish to support the team.
PAINT
Jitter Creeper
Painting in Sculpt, Vertex Paint, and Texture Paint modes supports randomization of hue, saturation, and value either throughout the entire stroke or on a per-stroke basis.
SCULPT
Chop Chop
Manifold is the new faster solver for Trim tools in Sculpt mode. Its name comes from the term “manifold” (also called ‘water-tight’ meshes), and refers to the limitation that it works best on this type of geometry.
It uses the same Manifold library as the Boolean modifier and Geometry Node.
It’s much faster than the previous Fast mode, now called Float.
AND MORE
USER INTERFACE
LOOKING GOOOOD
Blender’s user interface continues to get more polished, more intuitive, and more accessible than ever.
NODE EDITORS
Easy Frames
Adding nodes into frames is easier than ever:
- Press F
- Give it a name (optional)
- Done!
Detaching them is just as simple: press F while dragging the nodes.
You can now create empty frames. Labels are better positioned, and nested frames now alternate in value for easier reading.
PROPERTIES
Clean Workspace
Not using a tab in the Properties Editor? Hide it to reduce the clutter.
This is especially useful for tailoring the editor to specific workflows. For example, in the Video Editing workspace, you might hide the Object and Shading tabs to reduce visual noise.
Tabs can be brought back at any time through the top-right popover menu.
ASSET & FILE BROWSER
More at a Glance
The Asset and File Browser now allows you to see more in two ways:
Labels will now wrap to two lines, prioritizing the beginning and end to clearly show the file extension.
A new Horizontal List mode lets you fit more content on screen, and adjust the preview and column sizes individually.
ASSET BROWSER
Quick Capture
Making previews for your assets just got much easier!
Simply capture what’s on the screen, no need to render.
MORE UI
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE
Cycles
Rigging
Animation
Video Sequencer
- Improved Cache.
- Faster video rotation and color space conversions.
- HDR support in Sequencer Preview.
- Mute/Unmute and Mirror now work in Preview.
- Strip Pivot can be adjusted in Preview.
- Snap by default and added Snap to Frame Range.
- Better editor resizing.
- Better reports on framerate/color space change.
- Improved Slip operator with clamp.
- Added cursor to Blade tool.
- Improved handle selection.
- See all changes
Core
Lights
Rendering
I/O: glTF
I/O: USD
- Import animated camera properties.
- Import USD Skeleton rest pose.
- Import primitives: Plane, Capsule_1, Cylinder_1.
- Import DomeLight_1 schema.
- Export: MaterialX now writes Principled BSDF as OpenPBR Surface.
- Export: better support of point instancing
- Export: support Blender Text objects.
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I/O support for
UsdPrimvarReader_TYPEfor UsdPreviewSurface materials.
Plus hundreds of bug fixes, code cleanups and refactors.
See the full list of changes.