Blender 4.5 LTS launches with major UI overhaul, Vulkan support and Animation upgrades

Blender 4.5 LTS is now available with two years of guaranteed support through July 2027, offering a stable release across Windows, macOS, and Linux. The update introduces a refreshed UI with horizontal scrolling, streamlined menus, and better pen tablet support. The Vulkan rendering backend is now fully supported, matching OpenGL in performance, though not enabled by default and requiring specific hardware like NVIDIA 550+ drivers on Linux. It supports subdivision and multi-threaded shader compilation but still struggles with very large meshes. Stability fixes for AMD and Intel GPUs are expected in future updates.

Animation and rigging see key upgrades, including per-bone display overrides, independent snapping in the Drivers Editor, and tools like "Duplicate Shape Key" and "Update from Objects." Vertex Groups in edit mode gain auto-normalization, and pose mode adds four new grouped selection types. These changes streamline workflows and come with noticeable performance improvements in vertex processing and viewport rendering.

Additional features include new compositor nodes, integration of texture nodes like Voronoi and Gradient, adaptive subdivision and custom camera support in Cycles, expanded Geometry Nodes for external formats, a more functional Asset Browser, and improved Grease Pencil nodes for editing depth, color, and softness.