Blender 5.3 Adds Native Gaussian Splats, DLSS Denoising and Ripple Video Editing

Blender 5.3 adds native 3D Gaussian splat support, so splats reconstructed from photos or video can be imported, processed with Geometry Nodes and rendered directly in Cycles or EEVEE. Reconstructed scenes now sit in the same open-source package as the rest of a Blender project.

• Splats are a native data type. Blender imports splats from PLY, SPZ and glTF files, stores them as a new point cloud type, and renders them in EEVEE, Cycles and Workbench solid mode.
• Cycles gets a DLSS denoiser. DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction upscales and reuses samples from previous frames, and requires NVIDIA driver version 620 or newer.
• The Video Sequencer gets ripple editing. A new Ripple overlap mode arrives alongside Ripple, Shuffle and Overwrite modes applied consistently across edits, a rewritten blade tool and initial OpenTimelineIO import and export.
• EEVEE renders panoramic cameras. Equirectangular, cubemap, fisheye and mirror ball projections now work in EEVEE.
• Projects group files and settings. Projects can carry custom variables, their own asset libraries and their own color management configuration.

Gaussian splats arrive as editable point clouds, with relighting still rudimentary

Blender describes splats as many small, soft, transparent blobs that combine to represent complex geometry and shading, commonly used to reconstruct 3D scenes from photos or videos. Phone photos have already fed Blender scene rebuilds, as when Codex rebuilt a real theater from them.

In 5.3, each splat carries dedicated attributes for scale, rotation, base radiance with opacity, and spherical harmonics coefficients. Because they live as point clouds, splats can be processed with Geometry Nodes.

By default a splat renders with an emissive shader, using its radiance attribute as the color at each shading point. Swapping the Emission node for a hard surface BSDF such as Diffuse BSDF gives what Blender calls "rudimentary" relighting.

Performance is still being optimized, and renders may show inaccuracies because most splat authoring tools work in sRGB while Blender uses a linear color space, particularly in areas with low opacity and high radiance.

DLSS denoising targets faster lookdev in Cycles, plus dispersion for glass

The new denoiser uses NVIDIA's DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction and sits in the Denoise panel under Render properties, Sampling. According to Blender, it brings near-final render quality to the viewport and virtually eliminates flickering between frames during animation playback.

Blender 5.3 also adds native support, including memory optimizations, for NVIDIA RTX Spark devices running Windows 11.

On the shading side, the Principled BSDF gains Dispersion in its Transmission panel, splitting white light into rainbow fringes in glass and gemstones. Blender says this corresponds to OpenPBR v1.1.1, and roughness anisotropy now applies to the Glass BSDF and Principled transmission too.

Ripple editing and OpenTimelineIO come to the Video Sequencer

The Video Sequencer update adds a ripple overlap mode that moves strips forward or backward as edits are made, closing gaps automatically. Ripple, Shuffle and Overwrite modes now apply consistently across operations, toggled with R, S and V while moving strips.

• Ripple Add. Holding Shift while dropping strips inserts them and makes room in the timeline.
• Ripple Trim. Shift+Q or Shift+W trims at the playhead and closes the gap.
• Ripple Delete. Shift+X removes strips and pulls later content back.
• Blade 2.0. Splits show as a line, tooltips display frame values, and a live preview shows the frame under the cursor.

Hardware decoding and initial OpenTimelineIO import and export round out the editing changes.

EEVEE renders fisheye to match Cycles, while the Compositor stacks effects like modifiers

Blender shows EEVEE's panoramic cameras producing fisheye renders that match Cycles 1:1, though depth of field, raytracing and volumetric temporal reprojection in the viewport are not yet supported. New Material Lighting nodes expose per-light data and shadows in the Shader Editor, and Vulkan is now the default.

The Compositor's new effects stack applies Effects to a scene like modifiers, with built-in Bloom, Chromatic Aberration, Film Grain and Vignette. Blender says playback is up to 2x faster on GPU, particularly with EXR sequences, and the interactive compositor adds playback caching.

The new Projects system is optional and groups related files with shared variables, per-project asset libraries, color management configurations and a custom splash screen. Asset libraries can also ship as extensions, and USD gains Collection Importers for one-click re-imports.