11/11/26

Blender 5.3 learns to work with Gaussian splats

Soft Blender

On 10 November 2026, the Blender Foundation together with the community released Blender 5.3. The headline feature of the version is built-in support for 3D Gaussian Splats. Scene captures in splat form can now be loaded into a scene, processed with nodes and rendered by the standard engines alongside ordinary geometry.

Splats are not the only change. Cycles has learned to break light into a rainbow inside glass and gemstones. In the viewport, a DLSS denoiser has appeared on NVIDIA cards. Vulkan has become the default graphics backend on Windows and Linux. For studios, an optional project system with shared color settings and asset libraries has been added.

“The highlight of the release is built-in support for 3D Gaussian Splats.”
— Blender Foundation in the Blender 5.3 announcement

Splats: from scan to render inside a single package

A Gaussian splat does not create a polygon mesh. A set of photographs is turned into a radiance field made of a multitude of tiny blurred “blobs”. Structurally this resembles a point cloud, but it allows materials, lighting, transparency, hair and fine detail to be conveyed in a single object.

Blender 5.3 imports splats from PLY and SPZ files, as well as from USD and glTF. Internally they become a point cloud. They can be edited and processed procedurally in Geometry Nodes, relit and rendered in Workbench, EEVEE and Cycles. In practice this means that an environment captured with a professional scanner or a phone can be placed in the frame as just another scene object, without conversion to a mesh.

Developers Mark van de Ruit and Sergey Sharybin call the support initial in the development blog and promise to refine it in upcoming releases; relighting splats, by their account, is still at an early stage. For a demonstration, the team made a file with a splat scan of real physical models of assets from the game DOGWALK. Separately, the blog shows a scene from the Blender Studio project OVERGROWN rendered with splats in Blender 5.3. The .blend file with the release splash screen scene is available on the Blender demo files page.

Glass with a rainbow, and light you can control

In Cycles, the Principled BSDF has gained a Dispersion parameter in the Transmission panel. White light in glass or a diamond is now split into a spectrum, which will be useful in jewellery visualization and product photography. Anisotropic roughness now works on transmission as well: in the Glass BSDF and in the transparent component of the Principled BSDF it behaves the same way as in reflection. This may come in handy for ground or frosted glass with an elongated highlight.

There are also small workflow changes. Viewport rendering automatically pauses while a final render is running. Texture baking quality has improved for small and thin triangles and at the edges of the UV layout.

EEVEE has received Material Lighting Nodes: with them you can precisely define how a material responds to light sources. The developers name two applications: non-photorealistic rendering and physical effects such as iridescence. In addition, EEVEE has gained panoramic cameras and a full solar disc in the Sky Texture.

Faster viewport, lower requirements

DLSS in the viewport. On NVIDIA graphics cards the new denoiser raises the resolution and reuses samples from previous frames, so a clean image appears sooner. An NVIDIA driver of version 620 or newer is required.
Vulkan by default on Windows (except ARM) and Linux. Minimum requirements have dropped as a result.
Hardware ray-traced shadows in Workbench on Metal and Vulkan.
NVIDIA RTX Spark. Blender 5.3 has gained built-in support for these devices under Windows 11, with optimized memory handling.

A project instead of a standalone .blend

The new project system is enabled at will. A project has a root folder: everything inside it is considered part of the project by Blender, and the configuration is stored in a service folder at the root. File paths can use templates with the project root and custom variables, so paths can be specified relative to the project rather than to a particular drive. Project assets can be browsed in one place or split across several libraries.

For the color pipeline, something else matters more: the project sets the OpenColorIO configuration. The choices are Blender's standard configuration, ACES 1.3, ACES 2.0 or a custom one. There is also a project's own splash screen and a list of recent files within it. Undo now works across different editors.

There are changes in data exchange as well. USD has gained a Collection Importer: the importer is bound to a collection, and its settings are stored in the .blend. This saves time when the same asset has to be re-imported over and over. glTF has received KTX2 textures and import presets. Alembic now carries over surface subdivision, point clouds, velocities and attributes, including color ones.

Asset libraries can be distributed as extensions, and the Extensions platform is already accepting libraries with public domain (CC0) assets.

Nodes, 2D animation and editing

Geometry Nodes: nodes for working with voxel grids have become the first building blocks for custom fluid simulations. A separate low-level node makes it possible to build curves with arbitrary topology.
Compositor has received a stack of effects modelled on Geometry Nodes modifiers. Each effect is its own node group, and the result is passed to the next one. This way a chain of color correction, glow and vignette can be assembled from separate blocks.
Grease Pencil: selection tools in Draw Mode and a new Carver Tool that cuts out shapes with a full boolean subtraction. Fill fills several areas at once, which can speed up coloring complex line art.
Video Sequencer: full ripple editing, a rewritten blade tool and initial support for OpenTimelineIO for exchanging edits with other programs.
Animation and rigging: copying and pasting animation in world coordinates and conversion of rotation modes. This should simplify transferring motion between objects with different hierarchies.

Modellers have something to try as well. As Jonathan Lampel from CG Cookie explained in the official overview on the Blender channel, three more operations from the LoopTools set have been built into the package: smoothing edge loops, bending loops along selected vertices and fitting loops to an annotation stroke. The transform panel in edit mode, in his words, now shows the dimensions of the selection, and an exact size can be entered there.

Who gains the most from the release

In our assessment, the biggest change will be for those who build environments from scans: environment artists, visualization specialists and virtual production professionals. Composing a splat with CG objects and rendering the whole frame can now, in all likelihood, be done without a separate tool. The limitation is spelled out by the developers themselves: support is initial, relighting is at an early stage, and the editing tools are for now the same as those for point clouds. How splat objects will behave in heavy production scenes will only become clear in practice.

Only owners of NVIDIA cards with driver 620 or newer will benefit from DLSS in the viewport. For everyone else, the viewport optimizations amount to Vulkan by default on Windows and Linux and ray-traced shadows in Workbench on Metal and Vulkan. The Collection Importer so far works only with USD; the team speaks of other formats as a possible future. The choice of ACES 2.0 at project level will probably make life easier for small studios where the color configuration had to be reconciled between workstations by hand.

The foundation asks for 10 euros each

Blender's development is paid for by the Blender Development Fund. It is currently supported by more than 7,500 individuals and 46 organizations. Along with the release, the fund asked users to donate 10 euros each. By its calculation, if every active user does so this month, the funding goal for all of 2027 will be met.