Time for Action

Improved animation workflow, better modeling, new sculpt brush, and smoother video editing, plus over 700 issues fixed.
Download Blender 4.4 Watch Recap Video
Splash artwork: Flow © Dream Well Studio, Sacrebleu Productions, Take Five Image licensed under CC-BY-SA - https://flow.movie/
Splash artwork: Flow © Dream Well Studio, Sacrebleu Productions, Take Five
Image licensed under CC-BY-SA – https://flow.movie/

What’s New Recap

Round-up of what’s new in Blender 4.4, in detail.

Blender 4.4 new features overview by Jonathan Lampel from CGCookie, Harry Blends, Paul Caggegi, and Wayne Dixon.

QUALITY BLEND

Blender 4.4 is all about stability. During the 2024–2025 northern hemisphere winter, Blender developers doubled down on quality and stability in a group effort called “Winter of Quality.”

Amount of high severity bugs since January 1st.
Amount of high severity bugs since January 1st, 2025

Winter of Quality

In just a few months, developers fixed over 700 reported issues, revisited old bug reports, and addressed unreported problems.

Alongside bug fixes, Winter of Quality also included tackling technical debt and improving documentation.

Read Blog Post

Issues Addressed per Module

ACTION PACKED

Blender 4.4 introduces Action Slots, revolutionizing animation workflows by letting multiple data-blocks share a single Action.

WHAT ARE
ACTION SLOTS?

Before Action Slots, each data-block specific animation—like an object’s position, a camera’s depth of field, or a material’s shader properties—needed its own separate Action. This made it difficult to animate multiple elements together or share animations between objects or even projects.

For example, if you wanted to animate a camera moving while also changing its depth of field, you’d need two separate Actions, which couldn’t be easily linked or reused.

Now you can mix all sorts of animations such as an object’s position, its material properties, even compositing effects—all within a single Action.

Release Notes
Read Manual
Action Slots in Blender 4.4

MORE ANIMATION

VSE: Vastly Superior Editing

The Video Sequencer continues to improve with quality-of-life upgrades for text editing, expanded support for codecs including H.265 and 10/12-bit videos, and performance improvements that make editing faster than ever.

EDIT TEXT ON THE SPOT

Introducing: Edit mode for text strips in Preview!

Simply press Tab and type away.

FIND YOUR CENTER

Multi-line text strips can now be properly aligned to the left, right, or center.

FASTER
EDITING EVERYTHING

VIDEO
BEYOND

Blender 4.4 adds support for rendering videos using the H.265/HEVC codec.

Videos are now rendered in BT.709 color space now, preventing playback inconsistencies from the previously unspecified color space.

Additionally, video playback YUV->RGB conversion is more accurate now, fixing color shifts and banding in dark regions.

Blender now supports 10 and 12 bit/channel videos!

During rendering, you can set a color depth of 10 or 12 bits for supported codecs (10 bit for H.264, H.265, AV1, 12 bit for H.265, AV1).

When reading 10-bit or 12-bit videos, they are loaded as floating-point images.

A BIT
MORE

EVEN MORE SEQUENCER

EXPAND
YOUR BLENDER

The Blender Extensions platform keeps growing, with over 500 free add-ons and themes to customize your workflows.

You can also share your own add-ons and themes!

Browse Extensions
Share Your Extensions
MODELING

Pole Position

A new option in the Select by Trait operator lets you select by pole count.

Easily find all 3-pole or 5-pole points in your mesh.

Given their impact on topology, the default selects all poles that do not have 4 edges, allowing for easy inspection.

See Manual
Topology Influence
MODELING

Influencer

Joining triangles to quads now prioritizes quad-dominant topology, creating a more structured “grid” layout. This helps maintain cleaner geometry and improves mesh flow, especially in models where uniform quads are preferred.

This behavior can be adjusted using a topology influence factor, to better control how triangles are merged.

See Manual
MODELING

Vertex & Edge Dissolve

Dissolving edges may remove additional, unselected edges to ensure the mesh remains valid. Previously, this also dissolved vertices connected to those unselected edges.

The new behavior processes only vertices that belonged to the selected, now dissolved edges.

See Manual
Mesh Dissolve

MORE MODELING

Projects to Look forward to in 2024

PUT IT TO THE TEST

Share and compare your computer’s score with openly accessible benchmarks provided by the Blender community.

Download Blender Benchmark
SCULPT

Plane & Simple

Stay grounded or reach new heights with a new sculpt brush type: Plane.

Sculpt Plane Brush in Blender 4.4
Customized settings for the Plane brush type in Blender 4.4

The Plane brush is a generalization of the existing Flatten, Fill, and Scrape brushes, with new options to control stabilization and range of influence above and below the brush plane.

Key features include adjustable height above the brush plane, depth control for vertices below it, and an option to invert these settings.

Stabilization options for the Normal (brush plane’s orientation) and Plane‘s position are also available for precise control.

See Manual

MORE SCULPT

Blender UI Window Border
New window decorations on Windows 11
USER INTERFACE

She Comes in Colors

Window decorations now follow the theme colors on Windows 11 and macOS.

Snap Into Place

Editors now softly snap to minimum and maximum sizes, with improved splitting previews and docking feedback.

Scrollbars are hidden for small editors.

Resizing editors now snaps to a minimum, maximum, and half way.
Scrollbars are now automatically hidden.

Hidden Away

Horizontal scrollbars are now hidden automatically when they don’t fit in the editor.

See at a glance whether inputs are valid.
Node Editor

Fade

In Node Editors, inputs that can’t affect output are now grayed out for group nodes, Geometry Nodes modifiers, and node tools.

More Node Editor Improvements

OTHER EDITOR IMPROVEMENTS

macOS

Quick Look

On macOS, you can now preview blend file contents in a thumbnail in Finder, App Exposé and Spotlight.

macos Preview
.blend file previews on macOS Finder.

EVERYTHING UI

COMPOSITOR

Speed
for Everyone

The CPU compositor was rewritten to pave the way for future development.

The rewrite provides significant improvements in performance in certain configurations of some nodes, caching of static resources like images, and less memory usage on node setups with many nodes that operate on pixels.

Filter nodes are particularly faster now:

  • Levels node is up to 10x faster.
  • Filter and Kuwahara are twice as fast.
  • Blur nodes up to four times faster.
  • Glare filter is not only more advanced but also 6x more performant.
  • Pixelate node is 9x faster.

Adjusting compositor node trees can be significantly faster and more interactive. That’s because the compositor now avoids computing outputs that aren’t viewed by the user through the backdrop or image editor.

The overall compositing experience should now feel more responsive, whether you’re using the CPU or GPU.

  • Blender 4.3
  • Blender 4.4
  • Levels
  • Pixelate
  • Glare
  • Pixel Nodes
  • Bilateral Blur
  • Variable Blur
  • Kuwahara
  • Masks
  • Lens Distortion
  • 0
  • 2
  • 4
  • 6
  • 8
  • 10
  • Relative performance (higher is better)
Comparison between Blender 4.3 and Blender 4.4
COMPOSITOR

Glare Glow Up

The Glare node got a major revamp for better control and usability:

  • Linkable Inputs – Most node options are now input sockets you can connect.
  • New Outputs – Generated glare and highlights are now exposed as output sockets.
  • A new Strength input lets you adjust glare intensity.
  • Fog Glow and Bloom sizes are now linear and scale properly.
  • More realistic, energy-conserving, and properly scaled Bloom.
  • Adjust glare saturation and tint with dedicated inputs.
  • Highlight Control – Clamp and smooth highlights with the new Smoothness and Maximum inputs.
  • Tidy UI – Inputs are now neatly organized into collapsible panels.
See Manual

MORE COMPOSITOR

Still from Agent 327: view of Amsterdam.

INDUSTRY READY

All library versions used in Blender 4.4 are aligned with the VFX Reference Platform 2025, making studio pipeline integration and maintenance easier.

VFX Platform
See All Library Changes

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

USD

Plus hundreds of bug fixes, code cleanups and refactors.
See the full list of changes.

CREDITS

List of developers that contributed to Blender 4.4

Blender is a community project.
Learn more on how you can contribute to Blender.

Splash artwork: Flow © Dream Well Studio, Sacrebleu Productions, Take Five – Licensed under CC-BY-SA – flow.movie

Huge thanks to everyone involved 🧡

The Blender team. March 18th, 2025

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