Blender, one of the best 3D creation tools, is getting ported to iPad. And it won’t be some dumbed-down “lite” version, but a full version of the application.
It’s coming to others tablets too, but iPad Pro will be first.
Create 3D projects with Blender for iPad… eventually
Blender is a powerful, open-source application used for 3D creation, offering a full suite of tools for modeling, sculpting, animation, rigging, simulation, rendering, compositing and video editing. It’s popular among indie artists, game developers and visual effects professionals — perhaps because the software is completely free.
It’s already available for macOS and Windows plus more. And now an iPadOS version is on the way.
“Multi-touch interfaces like tablets have been common for years, but only recently thanks to increased processing power have they started to serve as primary computing devices. To support Blender’s mission of making 3D technology accessible to everyone, it’s important to fully embrace these platforms,” reads a post published on the Blender blog by Dalai Felinto on Thursday. “The initial platform where this idea will be tested is the Apple iPad Pro with Apple Pencil.”
As noted, this won’t be a reduced-feature version created specially for tablets. “The idea is to bring the full power of Blender to these devices,” said Felinto.
The application is intended for artists that need a pen-device for specialized tasks, such as painting, sculpting and 2D animation, as well as those that need Blender on-the-go.
At the demo stage
While the full functionality of Blender will be included, a new user interface for tablets is needed. The team developing Blender for iPad created some exploratory mockups showing how the UI and the interaction could look like on a tablet. These are expected to change as the project progresses, however.
A tech demo will be available at the Blender booth at SIGGRAPH 2025 in Vancouver, which starts August 10.
The development team did not estimate on when Blender for iPad will be released.
Ed Hardy has been writing full-time about tech for 25 years, and using it for much longer than that. His intro to Apple was a Macintosh Classic II (which he still has), but now he uses a 13-inch iPad Pro as his primary computer. He’s written for NotebookReview, TabletPCReview, and Brighthand, as well as other sites.
