Applender is a fork of Blender, the free and open source 3D creation suite, rebuilt exclusively for Apple Silicon macOS. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing, motion tracking and video editing—on top of a Metal-only graphics and compute backend.

Applender is not officially affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the Blender Foundation. "Blender" is a registered trademark of the Blender Foundation.

• Apple Silicon (arm64) macOS only. Windows, Linux, and Intel-Mac code paths, along with the OpenGL, Vulkan, CUDA, HIP, and oneAPI backends, have been removed rather than left dormant.
• Metal-only rendering and compute, including Cycles Metal ray tracing (opt-in), native NEON vectorization, and Apple GPU-specific tuning (occupancy, half-precision shaders, async PSO compilation, opt-in on-disk pipeline caching).
• Hardened by default (WITH_HARDENING): stack protector, libc++ hardening, and FORTIFY.
• Native MCP support (WITH_MCP): a C++ facade plus embedded-Python transport, exposed to Python as bpy.mcp.
• User preferences and data continue to live under the Blender folder name, so existing Blender configurations and add-ons carry over unchanged.

Applender selectively ports upstream Blender's logic, math, and security fixes rather than tracking every upstream commit; it is not a drop-in replacement for upstream Blender and does not aim for build or platform parity with it.

• Applender Repository
• Blender Manual (applies to shared functionality; Applender-specific behavior may differ)
• Blender Main Website

• Build requirements: macOS on Apple Silicon (arm64), Xcode/Metal toolchain. Upstream Blender's Build Instructions apply to the shared parts of the build system; platform-specific steps for other operating systems do not apply to this fork.
• Issues and pull requests are tracked on the Applender GitHub repository.
• For general Blender development background, see the Developer Documentation and Developer Forum.

Blender (and thus Applender) as a whole is licensed under the GNU General Public License, Version 3. Individual files may have a different but compatible license.

See blender.org/about/license for details.