Blender Lab

Open source innovation.

The innovation space within the Blender project, where designers and developers can work together on challenging or future-facing projects, to keep Blender relevant in the years to come.

The following projects are being worked on, planned, or looking for stakeholders and supporters. These activities are supported thanks to the Blender Development Fund.

Note that Lab activities are not part of the current Blender roadmap, and do not have a release timeline or target.

Read the full announcement blogpost.

Touch and Pen
Beyond mouse and keyboard Touch and Pen

Support and improve the user experience when using Blender on iPad, Android, and regular graphic tablets.

In Progress
VR and XR
Beyond mouse and keyboard VR and XR

Improve the user experience in VR and AR, adding features such as Location Scouting.

In Progress
Clay Pencil
2D + 3D Animation Clay Pencil

Generate 3D animated meshes with 2D animation techniques.

In Progress
MCP Server
AI and ML MCP Server

Building a standalone Model Context Protocol server and integration with Blender (as an add-on), allowing LLM chats and other systems to interact with the software using natural language.

In Progress
Volume Rendering
Rendering Volume Rendering

Make unbiased volume rendering research practical for GPUs and production rendering. There are recent advances to render volumes more accurate without manual user tweaking, however making it performant for a wide variety of production scenes is challenging.

In Progress
Light Transport
Rendering Light Transport

Integrate and improve advanced light transport methods for production rendering. While there are many promising algorithms, making them GPU friendly, robust for a variety of production scenes and easy to control requires focused work.

Planned
USD Authoring
Core USD Authoring

Expand authoring capabilities and enable Blender to read and write USD files more natively and seamlessly.

Requires Funding and Stakeholders