

Scene created with the help of Blender’s geometry nodes feature

Geometry nodes, which was introduced in 2.92, will see big updates this year, as well. In Dalai Felinto’s Blender 2021 roadmap post, we learn that this year will introduce a long-anticipated asset browser, library overrides, Vulkan support, improvements to the character animation pipeline, and perhaps most intriguingly, we’ll also see the introduction of a USD importer (thanks in big part to the efforts of NVIDIA). With the help of a couple new blog posts, the Blender Foundation goes over the many ways the software is going to be bolstered this year, and as you might suspect, there’s a lot to take in. With that particular release, much of the industry seemed to finally catch on that Blender is a full-featured tool that is worth supporting, with the likes of AMD, NVIDIA, Epic, and others helping to accelerate development and get new features and polish pushed out the door quicker.

Since the release of Blender 2.80, development of the popular open-source design software has been supercharged.
