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Blender 5.3 released with Gaussian Splat import and rendering

The Blender Foundation released Blender 5.3 on November 10, 2026. The headline feature is native support for 3D Gaussian Splats: you can import them, edit them with Geometry Nodes and render them in EEVEE and Cycles. Gaussian Splats are a way to store 3D scenes captured from photos or video. The release also adds Projects, a DLSS 4.5 denoiser in Cycles, a much faster compositor and new Python API modules, according to the official Blender 5.3 release page.

What’s new

Gaussian Splats

  • Import from PLY, SPZ and glTF files. Splats come in as a new kind of point cloud.
  • Edit them with Geometry Nodes, like any other geometry.
  • Render them in EEVEE, Cycles and Workbench (solid mode).
  • Each splat keeps its own scale, rotation, base color with opacity, and spherical harmonics coefficients for the higher bands.
  • Splats are emissive by default. Swapping the Emission node for a Diffuse BSDF gives what Blender calls “rudimentary” relighting.

Blender lists two known limitations: performance is still being optimized, and differences between sRGB and linear color can make low-opacity, bright areas look slightly off.

Rendering

  • Cycles: the Principled BSDF gets Dispersion (following OpenPBR v1.1.1), and glass and transmission support anisotropic roughness. A new DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction denoiser needs NVIDIA driver 620 or newer. Cycles also adds native support for NVIDIA RTX Spark devices on Windows 11.
  • EEVEE: new material lighting nodes (Light Accumulation, Light Info, Light Evaluation, Shadow Raycast), and panoramic cameras, including fisheye and mirror ball. Depth of field and raytracing don’t work with panoramic cameras yet.
  • Viewport: Vulkan is now the default graphics backend on Windows (except ARM) and Linux, with the minimum lowered to Vulkan 1.1; macOS keeps Metal. Workbench gets hardware raytraced shadows on Metal and Vulkan.

Compositor

A new Scene Effects stack comes with built-in Bloom, Chromatic Aberration, Film Grain and Vignette, and accepts custom node groups. GPU playback is up to twice as fast. Anisotropic Kuwahara is up to 10x faster on Apple GPUs, 2x on NVIDIA GPUs and 25-30% faster on CPU.

Projects and assets

Projects (File > Project) group a set of .blend files with shared settings: custom variables, per-project asset libraries and color management. Blender says per-project add-ons will come later. Asset libraries can now be distributed as extensions, and Poly Haven assets are available inside Blender.

Everything else

  • Grease Pencil: selection tools in Draw mode, a Carver tool that cuts strokes with Boolean subtraction, multi-region fills and ColorRamp gradient fills.
  • Video Sequencer: Ripple, Shuffle and Overwrite modes, a rewritten Blade tool, hardware decoding and early OpenTimelineIO import and export.
  • Interface: search in the sidebar of every editor (Ctrl/Cmd+F), custom sorting in the Outliner, basic Markdown rendering, a Comment node and IME support.
  • Modeling and Geometry Nodes: Volume Grid nodes, Construct Curves, NURBS input nodes, Loop Tools and a Quad Sphere primitive.

What it means for developers

The Python API changes are the part most relevant for anyone writing add-ons or pipeline scripts:

  • New OpenEXR and OpenTimelineIO modules, so scripts can read and write those formats without bundling their own libraries.
  • Access to all markers and to the selected markers.
  • Better color space interoperability.
  • New label_markdown and label_multiline UI widgets for add-on panels.

Scripting is also how other creative tools are opening up to automation. Adobe, for example, is previewing MCP support for Photoshop and Premiere so that AI agents can edit files in them.

For 3D web and app developers, the splat import matters most. PLY, SPZ and glTF are the formats web viewers and capture apps already use, so you can now bring a captured scene into Blender to clean up, light and render, or combine it with regular meshes, without converting it first. Add-on authors should check the compatibility notes before moving to 5.3: the default name property of PropertyGroup is now read-only (a name property on a subclass is still fine), and gpu.types.GPUBatch.draw_instanced now prefers gpu_InstanceIndex, which includes the base instance.

Blender 5.3 is not a Long Term Support release. Studios that need a stable base for a long project should stay on Blender 5.2 LTS or 4.5 LTS.

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