Announcing 'Cowboi'

Let’s make it official: the Blender Studio team is working on Cowboi, our 18th Open Movie!

The Legend. The Boi. The Cow.

Two years ago, Pablico created the character of Cowboi for testing Grease Pencil 3, and figuring out the effective approach to anime NPR. That animation test turned out to be iconic, and its advancement into a bigger project was only a matter of time and planning of the studio schedule.

Fast forward to 2026: Pablico sits in his director's chair, bringing Cowboi's testosterone-intensive story to life.

Meet Cowboi: the unstoppable action hero on his way to serve justice to the evil corporate carnivore.

When it comes to inspiration, Cowboi takes the best bits from anime and 90s cinema: the color palette, the insane pacing and scale of fight scenes, and, of course, the comedy of punchlines.

If you followed Pablico's Story Tools training, you might have seen some spoilers already. Cowboi's storyboard was the muse and source material for the course explaining the power of workflow combining Grease Pencil and VSE.

What new cool stuff can we expect?

The Return of Sticky GP

The Sticky GP tool was initially created by Simon while working on Cowboi as an animation test. The first prototype allowed Grease Pencil strokes to be drawn directly onto a 3D mesh surface so that they stick and follow the underlying geometry and animation. It wasn't released, but was never forgotten by the NPR community: despite the minimal amount of information available about it, the interest stayed strong throughout the two years.

When Cowboi expanded into a short film project, Blender Studio found a new, practical way for Sticky GP to return. More polished and powerful, available for everyone.

EEVEE's Material Lighting Nodes

Material Lighting Nodes is a new in-development feature of Blender. Blender Studio is using the new possibilities it opens up for material lighting customization on Cowboi, which is set to become one of the feature's flagship examples.

Double Camera Setup

To deliver the ultimate anime experience, we are building a specific "3D for 2D" production camera rig. It includes separate cameras for the foreground and the background, allowing us to shift the view between them. With this trick, we are emulating the way traditional anime production scans over a flat drawing.

Along with working on Cowboi, we will continue to develop the Blender Studio Tools and improve our production pipeline. Blender Studio uses daily builds of Blender in production, so, as usual, we will stress-test new features and help make the release version of Blender 5.3 nice and smooth for everyone to use (you can join the quest too by downloading Blender 5.3 Alpha and reporting bugs early).

Follow our progress in the coming months in our Production Logs and on the Blender Studio Log!