Blender 5.3 released with Gaussian Splat support

Blender 5.3 adds native support for 3D Gaussian Splats, a point-cloud format used to reconstruct scenes from photos or video. Splats can be imported from PLY, SPZ, and glTF files, edited with Geometry Nodes, previewed in Workbench, and rendered in EEVEE or Cycles. The release also expands rendering tools: Cycles gains dispersion for rainbow effects in glass and gemstones, while NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction offers faster denoising and smoother animation playback on supported hardware. EEVEE gains material-lighting nodes for controlling how surfaces respond to individual lights, plus panoramic camera projections including fisheye. Vulkan becomes the default, and Workbench gains ray-traced shadows.

Other major changes improve compositing, project organization, and drawing workflows. A new effects stack makes it easier to apply and adjust treatments such as bloom, film grain, chromatic aberration, and vignette; compositing also gains 17 Geometry Nodes and faster GPU playback. Projects can hold shared resources, custom variables, asset libraries, and color-management settings, while asset libraries can be installed and shared as extensions. Grease Pencil’s Draw Mode adds selection tools, a Boolean-based Carver for cutting strokes and fills, multi-region filling, and more flexible gradient colors. Together, the updates broaden Blender’s rendering and scene-reconstruction capabilities while making compositing and project-based work more convenient.