The splash screen art for Blender 5.3: an image from the Blender Studio’s teaser for Overgrown.

The Blender Foundation has released Blender 5.3, the latest version of the popular open-source 3D software for VFX, animation, game development and visualization.

As usual, the list of changes is huge and wide-ranging, but below, we’ve picked out five new features that we think are particularly significant, from Gaussian Splatting to DLSS denoising.

At the end of the story, you can find a round-up of the changes to the other core toolsets, including updates to digital sculpting, animation, Grease Pencil and the Video Sequencer.

We’ve also tried to pick out a few hidden gems – like work that lays the foundations for a new liquid simulation system inside the Geometry Nodes toolset.

The main character from Dogwalk, Blender Studio’s recent game project, imported into Blender as Gaussian Splats. Blender 5.3 makes it possible to render splats in both Eevee and Cycles.

1. Blender now imports and renders Gaussian Splats

Easily the most talked-about feature in Blender 5.3 is support for 3D Gaussian Splats (3DGS): a new way of reconstructing and rendering real-world objects or environments in 3D.

Like photogrammetry, the process begins by generating a point cloud from a set of source photos, but rather than converting the point cloud to a textured mesh, it converts it to gaussians – tiny fuzzy ellipsoids – that look like a solid object when packed densely enough.

Gaussian Splats are increasingly being used in VFX and visualization work, and are supported in other DCC applications, including 3ds Max, Houdini and Nuke, plus renderers like V-Ray.

If you’re new to the technology, you can find a good overview of Gaussian Splatting, and its strengths and weaknesses compared to existing techniques, on V-Ray developer Chaos’s blog.

Blender 5.3 makes it possible to import and render 3DGS data natively in Blender, rather than having to use third-party add-ons like 3DGS Render.

It’s possible to import 3DGS data in a range of standard formats (PLY, SPZ, glTF and USD), to manipulate it with Geometry Nodes, and render it in both the Cycles and Eevee render engines.

You can read a deep dive into the current implementation – and what still needs to be added in future releases – on the Blender Developer blog.

In particular, the tools for editing Splats inside Blender are the same as for point clouds and “are starting to feel clunky”, and support for relighting – having scene lights illuminate the Splats, rather than just using the baked-in lighting – is still “rudimentary”.

A test shot from upcoming Blender Studio open movie Cowboi. The Material Lighting nodes added to Eevee in Blender 5.3 provide new ways to create non-photorealistic rendering effects.

2. New Eevee Material Lighting nodes help create stylized looks

Eevee, Blender’s real-time renderer, gets its biggest update for some time in Blender 5.3.

One change that could be particularly significant is the new set of Material Lighting nodes, which provide new ways to control how a material reacts to light.

There are six in total, and the descriptions in the release notes are quite abstract, but you can see each one in action in this video by Blender animator and educator SouthernShotty.

While the Material Lighting nodes could be used in a range of ways, including setting up physical effects like iridescence, the most obvious use is for non-photorealistic rendering.

In his video, SouthernShotty calls Blender 5.3 a “new era for stylized shading”, arguing that the new nodes will make it possible to create much more complex and dynamic toon shaders.

The Blender Studio itself is using the Material Lighting nodes on Cowboi, its upcoming anime-style open movie, so expect to see more development work – and more documentation on how they can be used in practice – as the project progresses.

For users of NVIDIA GPUs, Blender 5.3’s new DLSS denoiser improves viewport performance when working in the Cycles renderer, delivering ‘Cycles looks with Eevee responsiveness’.

3. DLSS denoising delivers a cleaner, faster Cycles viewport

Cycles, Blender’s production render engine, also gets some important updates in Blender 5.3.

One that could make a big difference to day-to-day work is the DLSS denoiser, available as an alternative to the existing OIDN and OptiX denoisers when using Cycles as a viewport renderer.

It uses the new Ray Reconstruction model rolled out in DLSS 4.5 earlier this year, which combines denoising and render upscaling into a single model.

The result should be a cleaner-looking, more responsive viewport, with the new denoiser “virtually eliminating” flickering between frames when playing back animation.

The Blender Foundation describes it as “Cycles looks with Eevee responsiveness”, providing “near-final render quality in the viewport”.

Being a NVIDIA technology, you will need a NVIDIA GPU to make use of it – Ray Reconstruction is supported on RTX 20 Series and newer GPUs – and to be running NVIDIA driver 620 or later.

Blender’s Principled BSDF shader now supports dispersion, making it possible to recreate real-world materials like glass or diamonds more accurately. Render by Christopher 3D.

4. Light dispersion creates more realistic glass and diamonds

Another eye-catching change in Blender 5.3 is support for Dispersion in the Transmission component of the Principled BSDF shader, Blender’s default ‘ubershader’.

Dispersion splits white light into rainbow colors, making it possible to recreate materials like glass and diamond more accurately, as you see in the video above.

Both the Principled BSDF and the Glass BSDF also now support roughness anisotropy, making it possible to create more realistic directional effects on the surface of transparent materials.

Blender’s built-in Compositor now includes an effects stack, making it possible to control the look of a composite by reordering layers, not just by wiring nodes together.

5. The Compositor now uses layers, not just nodes

Blender 5.3 also shakes up workflow in the software’s built-in compositing toolset, with the update introducing the new Layered Compositor.

Whereas you used to control the look of a composite by wiring nodes together, you can now do so by reordering layers, which many artists find more intuitive.

The new Effects Stack uses a workflow similar to Modifiers, with each effects layer processing the output of the layers below it.

There are a range of readymade effects, including Bloom, Chromatic Aberration, Film Grain and Vignette, each with its own control sliders inside the Blender interface.

However, you can also create your own custom effects by setting up node groups, bringing the best of both workflows to compositing projects.

In addition, the interactive compositor now supports playback caching, with playback “up to 2x faster” on GPU, particularly when playing back EXR sequences.

Blender 5.3 adds new operators for copying and pasting world-space animation, used here to transfer the motion of the character’s head to a different kind of head: the Suzanne primitive.

Other changes: what’s new in the other key toolsets?

Blender’s UI gets a “leap in usability”, with long-awaited quality-of-life features, like custom sorting in the Outliner, and built-in search in the sidebars of all the editors.

The UI also now supports basic markdown formatting, so you can directly via a new Comment node, or in regular layouts for scripts and add-ons.

Other workflow improvements include support for mixing global undo with other undo systems, so Edit mode no longer prevents edits made in other modes being tracked by Undo.

The 3D modeling toolset now includes the functionality from the popular LoopTools add-on, plus a new Quad Sphere mesh primitive.

For sculpting and painting, meshes with a Multires modifier now display textures in Sculpt Mode, and auto-masking is now supported in Vertex Paint and Weight Paint modes.

The Geometry Nodes toolset gets a new Construct Curves node for building curves with custom topology, plus new nodes for accessing built-in attributes of NURBS curves.

However, perhaps the most exciting change is a new set of nodes for working with volume grids, described as the “first building blocks” for a complete FLIP fluid simulation system inside Geometry Nodes – one of the most-requested features on the Blender roadmap.

As well as the new Material Lighting nodes, Eevee now supports the same panoramic cameras as Cycles, and uses the Vulkan backend by default on Windows and Linux.

Animators get new operators for copying and pasting world-space animation between bones or objects, and for converting animation between rotation modes.

Grease Pencil, Blender’s storyboarding and 2D animation toolset, gets a new set of selection tools in Draw mode, plus a Carver tool for cutting Boolean shapes.

The Video Sequencer gets a ripple editing framework, with strips in the timeline automatically pushed forward or pulled back by edits, and quality-of-life updates to the Blade tool.

Asset libraries can now be shared as extensions, and assets in online libraries can be replaced with versions for new Blender releases, making them easier to maintain.

For pipeline integration, OpenColorIO configurations can now be set on a per-project basis.

In production, a new project system makes Blender aware of a larger context than the currently open .blend file, providing access to properties and shared variables for an entire project.

For file import and export, the USD importer can now be associated with a Collection, streamlining the process of re-importing the same assets repeatedly.

And finally, in the Python API, the OpenEXR and OpenTimelineIO modules are now exposed to developers, making it easier to support the open production standards.

License and system requirements

Blender 5.3 is compatible with Windows 8.1+, macOS 13.0+ and glibc 2.28+ Linux. It’s a free download. The source code is available under a GPLv3 license.

Read the Blender Foundation’s overview of the new features in Blender 5.3

Read a longer list of new features in the Blender 5.3 release notes

Download Blender 5.3