Tequila 2026.11.13.2336

An assistant that works Tequila for you, and Blender files

• The Assistant is a chat: a list of chats, a New chat button, and the model picker in the message box. Connect Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini through their own apps, an API key, or a local model through Ollama. Every assistant is held to the same rules: it works in Tequila and the open project's folder only, never a shell or other folders. Scene changes happen straight away and can be undone; it asks before anything leaves the scene, such as exporting, saving somewhere new or rendering to a file. A Connections page shows every way it can be answered and where each one stands. New, and not yet tried in a real conversation with every service: tell us how yours goes.
• It knows the whole app: a built-in guide, a page at a time, so any assistant finds the right tool. It looks in the material library first, leaves the view where you put it, recolours any material in one step, and has new tools for graphs a node at a time, UV seams, turntable frames, Improve model and model units.
• Blender files: Tequila opens .blend files, the scene as Blender shows it and its materials node for node, and brings in the file's own lights, world and exposure when you choose them.
• Import with the file's up axis, and an import that clashes with one already in the scene is refused instead of breaking undo.

Lighting and Studios

• Light like a photographer: aim a light by clicking where you want its highlight; add a softbox, strip, card or flag in one click. Softboxes fall off toward their edges, alike in Tequila's renderer and Cycles.
• New Studios: Photo Studio (real softboxes close to the product in a dark room, on a graduated backdrop), Catalogue Studio (cut out on white), and seven more lit as a photographer lights a table.

Materials and library

• Over fifty new procedural materials for product enclosures and hardware: plastics, metals, paints, grilles, zinc and plating. Plastics, metals and paints round their edges as their making leaves them: no more knife edges.
• Thin sheets glow when lit from behind.
• The graph: a browser that brings in whole materials with a picture beside each row; Blend, Two-sided and Composite setups; random colour, varied colour and random placement per part; Herringbone and Basketweave; twelve finish and wear maps; Distance, Blackbody and Curves; a colour and a number of a part's own; pictures tiled without visible repeats; the names other renderers use, in search. The swatch sharpens as it renders.
• Any part a shadow catcher.
• The library: a preview, a description, search words and use tags for every material, in sixteen categories.

Viewport and camera

• The Rendered view answers a move at once, keeps up with a moving camera, is sharp on a Retina screen, and on a Mac holds about 2 GB for its denoiser instead of 3 to 10. The floor reflection stays sharp while you orbit.
• Depth of field from the lens's own opening: f/4 blurs as f/4 does.
• Composition guides: thirds, golden spiral, triangles and more.
• Universal gizmo (Q): move, turn and scale at once. Shift+H hides the selection outline, Shift+G the gizmo.
• Texture mapping you can see: the projection on the part, with handles.
• Add › Shape: plane, cube, cylinder, sphere, disc or backdrop, set by number, plus a back wall. Patterns repeat a part along a line or around a circle. Ctrl+D duplicates in place.

Working in Tequila

• Portable Windows version: a zip that keeps everything in a folder beside itself.
• Preferences: every choice in one window; every key of the main window can be changed; navigation presets move the view as Blender, Maya or a CAD package does.
• 3D mouse on a Mac, read through 3Dconnexion's driver. Not yet tried on a real device: if you have one, tell us.
• Snapshots are the saved shots, Screenshot is on P, the render window shows a live preview for every render, and Statistics show the engine, device, frame rate and memory.
• Less memory: textures keep their bytes, and a long session lets go of what it no longer shows.
• A damaged file is an error, never a crash.

Tequila 2026.11.06.0224

Look at a design in AR, and bring in more kinds of files

• USDZ export for AR: File > Export USDZ for AR makes the file an iPhone, iPad or Apple Vision Pro opens in AR, at real size and standing on the ground. Materials are baked into what AR viewers draw, with normal, coat and occlusion maps, and repeated parts are stored once. Tequila also imports .usdc and .usdz. Not yet tried on a device: tell us how yours looks.
• Rhino .3dm: Rhino 5 to 8 files, with their layers as the scene tree, materials (Rhino 7's PBR too) and textures, meshes, polysurfaces, extrusions, SubD and blocks. All 72 of McNeel's own sample files read.
• FBX, 3MF and PLY: FBX through the open-source ufbx reader, with its hierarchy, units, instances, materials and textures; 3MF with its parts, colours and textures, as slicers write it; PLY with its colours, normals and UVs.
• Adobe Substance materials: open .sbsar and .sbs files with their settings in the Material tab. With Adobe's Substance tools installed, Tequila re-renders the textures as you change a setting. Without them, you still see every setting, and the project keeps the textures it rendered. New, and not yet tried with Adobe's own files: please tell us how it goes.

Rendering

• Glossy reflections, finished: softboxes, area lamps and the sun now show in chrome and mirrors on every light path, including a mirror seen in a mirror and a softbox hidden from the camera. Parts set to cast no shadow let light past for reflections, the sky, lamps and caustics, in Cycles too. Scenes with a few weak accent lamps are about half as noisy in the same time.
• Fibres: a texture on velvet or fur now colours each fibre where it grows, in both renderers. The limit of 250,000 fibres a part is gone: a scene now has a budget of 6 million, shared between its parts, so a rug or a sofa gets the density it asks for.
• Smooth curves: no more thin dark lines along a coarse mesh's facets at the edge of curved glass and velvet in Tequila's renderer.
• Clear glass under a camera-only backdrop no longer shows a hard band across the middle.
• Cycles agrees with Tequila's renderer on bottles: a liquid in its glass meets the glass, not air, so perfume and drinks are no longer paler; and a solid saved inside out renders as the solid, not as an air bubble.

Materials

• Previews ready from the start: the library's materials come with their previews, and previews of your own materials render in the background.
• Suedes and footwear materials: fourteen new procedural materials: roughout and fine suedes, jersey lining, nylon taffeta, outsole rubber, flat laces, bonded thread and nylon webbing.
• Faux Fur Camel: the long, clumped fibre look many of you liked on the roughout suede, now a material of its own.
• glTF: a map is multiplied by the factor beside it, as glTF says, so tinted textures come in tinted, and the material extensions' maps (clear coat, sheen, thin film and the rest) are read.

Working in Tequila

• Test this computer (Help menu, or tequila --self-test): renders a small scene with every engine and graphics card it finds, times each run, checks it against a reference, and gives you a short report to paste into our Discord. Nothing is sent anywhere. It helps us see how Tequila does on machines we don't have.
• SpaceMouse: turn, pan and zoom the view with a 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse, with settings under the new Edit > Preferences. Not yet tried on a real device: if you have one, tell us.
• Studios: each Studio's picture is saved with the project, so a project you reopen shows its Studios at once. Drag a Studio to reorder it.
• UV editor: pins are saved with the project and can be undone, seams on the back of a part no longer show through the front, Line up edges straightens more, As on the part turns islands the way they read, and the checker follows the UV set you are looking at.

Tequila 2026.11.02.1748

A third sample: the palma P8

The start screen has a third finished scene to open: palma P8, a handheld designed for Tequila, in clear lime polycarbonate with its boards, battery and screws seen through the shell, a pixel-art screen, and rim lights in the dark. Its shell and lens carry faint fingerprints, smudges and dust, made with patterns in their roughness. It renders in Cycles on the graphics card.

Fixes

• Thin clear lenses: in Tequila's own renderer, what sits just behind a thin, clear part, such as the mask or a logo printed behind a screen's lens, came out nearly black. Rays leaving a surface now step off it by an amount that suits the part's own size, so they no longer start past what lies microns behind it. Shadows through glass use the same step, so a print on a lens shades what is under it. Tequila's renderer and Cycles now agree there.
• Textures beside a project: a project's textures saved with paths relative to the project are now found beside the project, wherever it is opened from, as the file format has always said. They were looked for beside wherever Tequila happened to be running.
• Cycles from a path with forward slashes: TEQUILA_CYCLES written as C:/…/tequila_cycles.dll now loads. Before, Windows could not find the libraries beside it.
• AI apps: apps connected through Tequila's built-in bridge (tequila --mcp) get the same tools and options as through the Python one again, including framing the view, the start screen and the updates window.

On the website

A new Learn section takes you from your first render to scripting, in three tracks of lessons, with a map of the window and every feature with where to find it: https://ifpintac.github.io/tequila/learn.html

Tequila 2026.11.01.1340

Wireframe renders

Render wireframe, beside Render, draws the model's edges at the render's size in a second or two, with no ray tracing:

• every triangle's edges, as the viewport's Wireframe shows them, or the parts' own edges and outline, for a line drawing;
• hidden lines faint, hidden or shown;
• any line width;
• dark or paper colours, or your own, and a transparent background when the file keeps alpha.

Also --wireframe on the command line, and render(..., wireframe=True) from scripts and AI apps.

Labels and UV layouts

The UV editor (View → UV editor, or a label's UV editor button) lays a part's surface out flat, with its labels and textures where they print. Every change is one step to undo, and every tool can be used from scripts and AI apps.

• Unwrap lays a part out flat. Its faces come apart at sharp edges, and curved surfaces come apart in a few even pieces. A part's existing UVs are kept, and the Labels tab unwraps a part that has none.
• Labels: drag a label, scale it by its corner and turn it by its handle. Fit it to a face, centre it, turn it along its length, or set its width in millimetres. Labels turn as a whole: a wide label turned a few degrees used to come out sheared.
• A real workspace:
  • Snapping, rulers and guides (saved with each part), a grid and a measure tool.
  • A Transform panel and Align.
  • Layers, with locking, for labels and the material's UV textures.
  • Shortcuts for nearly everything; ? lists them.
• Islands:
  • Pick labels, islands, edges or vertices (keys 1 to 4).
  • Move, turn, scale and flip them.
  • Cut along edges and stitch seams. Pin vertices and lay the rest out flat again.
  • Pack, into the square or between the guides. Straighten, even out the size, or unwrap again in place.
  • A heatmap shows stretch. Pick between UV sets, and export the layout as SVG or PNG.
  • Pointing at a face lights it on the part, and pointing at the part lights the face on the layout.
• Shape tools:
  • Unwrap again with least stretch, or across or down only.
  • Lay a path out as a straight line, faces as a grid, a border as a rectangle or a circle, and faces as they are seen straight on.
  • Relax, grow or shrink a border, weld nearby vertices, line up the two sides of a seam, and cut along edges sharper than an angle.
• Symmetry: make one side of a symmetric part the mirror of the other, about the layout's middle, the best fit or the 2D cursor. Snap vertices to their mirror, select one side, or select the mirror of what's selected.
• Arranging:
  • A 2D cursor to align to and to turn and scale about.
  • Align by a corner, and line up vertices and edge paths.
  • Square up edges, and stand islands upright the way the part stands.
  • Sort islands into rows, columns or a grid by where they sit on the part. Spread them out, match their sizes, fit them to the square, stack repeated pieces exactly, copy and paste a shape, swap and shuffle, or lay them out as the part looks from a side.
• Texel density: read and set the pixels per centimetre at 512 to 8K, and see how much of the texture the layout covers and overlaps.
• Select similar islands, borders, horizontal or vertical edges, faces with no area, or flipped faces.
• See it on the part:
  • A checker in the viewport (plain, lettered or numbered) shows stretch, turns and mirrored islands right on the model.
  • A texture shown behind the layout, with exposure.
  • The padding round each island at a texture size, with islands that sit too close marked red.

KeyShot scenes

Open or import .ksp and .bip files: parts, materials, labels, environments, cameras and model sets.

Materials

• Real fibres: a material's Fuzz can grow fibres for felt, velvet and tennis-ball fuzz. Set them in the Material tab, wherever Sheen is: how many fibres per square centimetre, how long, how thick, how much they lean and curl, and how much their colour varies. Both renderers draw them and they look alike. The rendered view shows them; the Solid view and the quick preview show the sheen alone.

Rendering

• Spectral rendering in Tequila's renderer: four wavelengths a path, on its own for scenes with dispersive glass (Render → Quality → Spectral). Gems and crystal show their fire with about half the colour noise.
• AMD graphics cards render with Cycles (HIP), and every graphics card in the computer renders together.
• ACES colour: the ACES studio config works end to end through OpenColorIO, with every ACES 1.3 output transform and the common camera log curves.
• Light through glass: with caustics off, light passes through clear glass in both renderers, so what's behind a window or inside a bottle is lit. Dark glass covers in bright studios also render with less speckle.
• Glossy reflections of glass and lamps: a shiny floor now mirrors a softbox solid and smooth, where it rendered as specks, and shows the lamp through a glass ball or bottle standing on it, as Cycles does.
• Caustics, three ways: Lighting → Caustics is now Off, Photons or Manifold. Photons, which Jewelry uses, stay the best choice for most scenes. Manifold works out each lamp's path through smooth glass: sharp where it finds the path, but noisier than photons and short of light in a bottle's caustic. In Cycles, Manifold turns on Cycles' own manifold caustics.

Import

• STEP and IGES layers show in the Scene tab; show or hide a layer at once. Part metadata comes through too.
• More texture formats: TGA, WebP, TIFF, BMP, SVG, GIF, DDS and JPEG XL.

Linux

The Linux version now has Cycles (NVIDIA and AMD cards) and OpenCASCADE's STEP reader.

Mac

• Intel Macs: Tequila-<version>-intel.dmg runs on Macs with an Intel processor (macOS 12 or newer). It renders with Tequila's own renderer: Cycles comes from Blender, whose current version no longer runs on Intel Macs.
• API keys are kept in the Keychain.
• Tequila has its own menu bar.

Fixes

• With an area light the camera could see, clicking a part could select a different one, and render layers could show the wrong parts.
• In Cycles, models exported with their faces turned inside out rendered black.

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Already on 2026.10.30.1120? Help → Check for updates installs this one.

Windows: run the installer over your current Tequila; your materials, plugins and settings stay. Mac: open the disk image (the -intel.dmg one on an Intel Mac) and drag Tequila into Applications. Linux: unpack the .tar.gz anywhere and run ./Tequila; ./install.sh adds it to the application menu.

If anything closes Tequila, the next launch shows a crash report. Copy for Discord puts it on your clipboard.

Tequila 2026.10.30.1120

Now on Linux

Tequila for 64-bit Linux, with glibc 2.35 or newer (Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12, Fedora 36 or later). It renders with Tequila's own renderer and reads STEP files with its own reader: Cycles comes to Linux later. Help → Check for updates finds new versions for it too.

A start screen, samples, and updates from inside Tequila

• The start screen greets you at launch: New project, Open and Import, your recent projects with a picture of each, two finished sample scenes (headphones and a perfume bottle) to open as new projects, and links to Discord, GitHub and the guides. Help → Start screen brings it back; Show at startup turns it off.
• Help → Check for updates finds a newer Tequila on GitHub, shows what it brings, and installs it. Once a day Tequila looks on its own when it starts, which the same window can turn off. This is the last version you install by hand.
• Opens maximized.

Studio presets

A whole studio applied to any product in one step: lights, cameras and views, the floor, the look, and the render settings, framed to the product's size. One Undo takes it all back.

• Library → Studios: presets by family, the size nearest your product marked Suggested. Choose which way the product faces, what scales with it, whether to keep your own lights or cameras, and whether to dress it with the studio's materials.
• Save current studio…, Install… and Export… keep and share presets as .tqstudio files.
• Views switch lights, turn the product and name the file; Render all views renders each one. Soft Studio comes built in.

Rendering

• Per-part visibility: in the Scene tab, choose what each part is seen by: the camera, reflections, the light it bounces, glass, shadows. Or make it a holdout.
• Light linking and shadow linking: keep a light, or just its shadow, to some parts.
• Glowing parts light their surroundings properly in Tequila's own renderer (LED windows, light guides), with no fireflies clipped away.
• Sun light with an angle that softens its shadows; softbox grids (spread) on area lights; spot falloff and glass dispersion now in Cycles too.
• Cameras in Cycles: shift, orthographic and panoramic. Use camera exposure makes ISO, shutter and f-number count.
• Rounded edges, glow inside, 16-bit PNG, and new floor options: fade distance, transparency by brightness, bounce, fade by distance.

Turntables

The Studio tab makes a turntable; the Render window renders a frame range, and --frames A-B does it from the command line. A stopped run picks up where it left off.

Materials

• New graph nodes, in both renderers: Curvature and Occlusion, Light Path (a different look for the camera, reflections or shadows), and Shader, Mix Shader and Add Shader to blend two materials.

Passes and relighting from Cycles

Renders with passes or relighting now come from Cycles too: depth, normal, position, albedo, clown, both Cryptomattes, diffuse/lighting/GI/reflection/refraction, and light groups that add up to the picture.

AI

• Connect an AI… connects the AI apps on your computer in one click: Claude, Cursor, VS Code with GitHub Copilot, Codex, Gemini CLI, Windsurf, LM Studio, or any other MCP app. Claude Code gets a command to copy, and ChatGPT connects through OpenAI's Secure MCP Tunnel.
• The Assistant now works with OpenAI, Claude, Google Gemini, OpenRouter, Mistral, DeepSeek, xAI, Groq, Ollama, LM Studio or your company's AI.
• The Tequila skill (Tequila-Skill.zip) installs for Claude Code and Codex in one click.

Labels

• Prints on keeps a flat label to the faces turned toward it; Ink sets the colour white artwork prints in.

Fixes

• Tequila's own render passes now include a lamp's direct light on the first surface (Diffuse and Lighting were missing it).
• A turntable no longer swings the product off-centre when something else, such as a bounce card, is in the scene.
• Screenshotting a minimized window from a script no longer closes Tequila.

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Windows: run the installer over your current Tequila; your materials, plugins and settings stay. Mac: open the disk image and drag Tequila into Applications. Linux: unpack the .tar.gz anywhere and run ./Tequila; ./install.sh adds it to the application menu.

If anything closes Tequila, the next launch shows a crash report. Copy for Discord puts it on your clipboard.

Tequila 2026.10.21.0106

Fixes

• Glass, acrylic or liquids in the Rendered view could close Tequila after a few edits, on a Mac and on Windows. Cycles kept reading parts that an edit had already removed. Found and fixed on a MacBook Pro, where a 700-part model crashed the earlier release three times out of three.
• The first render after starting Tequila on a Mac could rarely close it. Two of Cycles' threads were setting up the same folder name at once.

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Windows: the update installer updates 2026.10.20.1656 in place, or use the full installer. Mac: the disk image is attached below.

If anything closes Tequila, the next launch shows a crash report. Copy for Discord puts it on your clipboard.

Tequila 2026.10.20.1656

Fixes

• Resizing a label on a Mac closed Tequila on big models. In the Rendered view, every step of a drag rebuilt the whole Cycles scene: every mesh, and its BVH on the graphics card.
  • Changing a material, such as resizing a label or picking a colour, now rebuilds only that material.
  • Dragging a part now only moves it.
  • On a 2-million-triangle model, a change now takes 46 ms instead of 391 ms.
• Quitting while Cycles prepares the graphics card no longer hangs. This happens the first time Cycles runs on a Mac and takes a few minutes.
• A floor with its shadows off no longer catches glass caustics, matching Cycles.

From your list

• Mac: open files from Finder. Double-click a project or model, drop it on the Dock icon, or use Open With. It works when Tequila starts and while it is running.
• Retina: library tiles, the Material tab's sphere and the graph editor's swatch are sharp on a Retina screen.
• STEP layers and attributes: part numbers, descriptions, releases, materials and your own properties arrive in the Metadata panel.
  • Each part's layer comes in as Layer, so you can search Layer = Outer in the Scene tab or use it in Material Templates.
  • Parts on a switched-off layer arrive hidden.
• Photoshop labels saved without "Maximize Compatibility" are put together from their layers. They came in blank before.
• Video labels: add an MP4 or MOV as a label, pick the frame, and it prints like any label. Windows and macOS decode it themselves.
• Studios show a picture of the shot they recall. Click the picture to apply it.

Auto Materials 3.0

Every part now gets a material, even ones the rules can't name.

• It learns from you. Save a project, or click Learn from this scene, and parts with the same names get the same materials in the next model.
• It reads names harder:
  • CAD shorthand (HSG, BRKT, SCR);
  • German, French, Spanish and Italian;
  • fastener standards (ISO 4762, DIN 934, M3x10, 1/4-20, McMaster numbers);
  • the part's description and layer from a STEP file.
• Copies follow: copies of a matched part, and parts named like it (Screw <3>, Bracket_2), get its material.
• Shape and colour cover the rest: see-through parts become glass, many identical small parts become hardware, thin rods become steel, and anything else gets a moulded finish in its own colour.
• The preview shows what decided each part. Recoloured copies are named for their colour, e.g. "ABS White (red)".

Plugins

• Plugins that are switched off are now listed in the Plugins menu, and one click turns one on. On a new computer Studio Lighting and the others seemed missing because every plugin starts off. Plugins with code need Python 3, and the menu says so where it's missing.

Solid and Material Preview

• Up to 8 labels per part show, up from 4.
• Clear and translucent parts show what is behind and inside them.
• No more moiré rings on fine patterns such as FDM layer lines seen from a distance.

KeyShot packages

• Car paints read their measured flakes from the AxF scan: colour, density, spread and size.
• X-Rite grain maps (..._n.exr) are read as normal maps.
• Mold-Tech's encrypted textures are replaced by a fine, even moulded texture.
• Tip: very fine flakes sparkle best up close or with the denoiser off.

Windows code signing

Free signing through the SignPath Foundation is being set up. Until then, Windows still shows "Windows protected your PC" once. See the code signing policy.

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Windows: the update installer updates 2026.10.20.0920 in place, or use the full installer. Mac: the disk image is attached below.

Mac testers: if anything closes Tequila, the next launch shows a crash report. Copy for Discord puts it on your clipboard.

Tequila 2026.10.20.0920

New

• FDM 3D Print materials. Eleven PLA presets in the library's new FDM 3D Print category: white, black, grey, red, blue and yellow, and translucent natural, red, orange, green and blue. Each has real 0.2 mm layer lines up the walls, the seam, the raster lines on the top and bottom skins, a satin that's rougher in the creases, and the sheen along the layers. They're ported node for node from the PLA 3D Print materials for Blender, and checked against them at 76,000 points. The surface is a new node, FDM Layer Lines, for your own prints (Add menu, search "3D print"). Parts from STL and STEP are built along their own Z. For a part from glTF or OBJ, set the node's Build Along Z to 0.
• Crash reports you can see. If Tequila closes unexpectedly, the next launch shows what happened, and Copy for Discord puts a short version on the clipboard to paste in #bug-reports. Help → Crash reports keeps the last 20. On a Mac it reads macOS's own crash report.
• KeyShot packages come in much closer.
  • Measured X-Rite AxF materials, such as TIGER powder coats, now read their scanned colour, gloss and texture.
  • KeyShot's Noise, Fractal Noise, Bump Add and Color Adjust become real nodes.
  • Toon materials get their outlines.
  • Pearl paints look like pearl.
  • Metal photos and the texture sizes of older packages are fixed.
• Auto Materials 2.0.
  • It matches parts by name, by the material the CAD file gave them ("Aluminum 6061", "ABS"), and by the assembly they're in.
  • About 60 built-in rules sit under your own.
  • Plastics keep the colours your model gave them.
  • There's a preview of what would change.

From your feedback

• Labels show in the Solid and Material Preview views, not only in the render.
• The engine chip at the top of the viewport switches between the graphics card and the processor.
• The Environment tab has an HDRI map: drag a light to move it, scroll to resize it, double-click to add one.
• Favourites and recent materials survive updates.

Fixes

• In Cycles, brushed metals no longer stretch their highlights twice as far as in Tequila's renderer.
• Fine bump detail, like 0.2 mm layer lines, is no longer flattened in the Tequila engine.
• Clear plastics have Surface Tint, Scatter and Bump in the Material tab.

Tequila 2026.10.19.1721

Your requests from the Discord: KeyShot materials, sending models from SolidWorks and ZBrush, polypaint, the render's frame in the viewport, mirrored labels - and a studio lighting plugin.

Download

• Windows: Tequila-Setup-2026.10.19.1721.exe, for Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit). It installs over an older Tequila, keeping your settings and library.
• Already on 2026.10.17.1952? Tequila-Update-2026.10.17.1952-to-2026.10.19.1721.exe updates it in place. It only applies to 1952.
• Mac: Tequila-2026.10.19.1721.dmg, for a Mac with Apple's own chips (M1 or newer), attached here automatically a little while after this release.

The first time you open it, Windows or macOS warns you once that Tequila isn't signed with a paid certificate: on Windows click More info, then Run anyway; on a Mac open System Settings > Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway.

What's new

• KeyShot materials (.kmp) import into your library: File > Import material, or drop one on the window. Plastics, metals, paints, glass, liquids, fabrics and their textures come across; what can't (procedural patterns, measured AxF materials, KeyShot's protected Mold-Tech textures) is approximated or left out, and Tequila tells you which.
• Send to Tequila from SolidWorks and ZBrush (beta) - a toolbar macro for SolidWorks and a ZPlugin button for ZBrush 2026, both in Tequila-Bridges-2026.10.19.1721.zip below, with how to install them. Send again after a change and the model updates, keeping the materials you gave it. Neither has been run inside SolidWorks or ZBrush yet: if you try one, please tell us how it went.
• ZBrush polypaint comes in with OBJ files, and painted vertex colours (glTF's too) now show in renders, in Cycles as well as Tequila's own renderer.
• The viewport shows the render's frame: set a 16:9 render and the view is 16:9, so nothing you see is cut off and nothing you don't appears. View > Render frame turns it off.
• Labels: Mirror buttons (horizontal and vertical) that flip the artwork where it sits, and labels now land the right way up - they used to arrive upside down on a front face and on their side on a side face. Shift + scroll turns a label 5 degrees a notch, not 31.
• Studio Lighting comes with Tequila: 21 product-photography studios, from clean white and light tents to glass, jewellery, chrome and low-key sets, each one click and then fine-tuned. Turn it on in Plugins > Manage plugins.
• Plugins and materials zipped with any tool install - a ZIP made with Windows' Compressed folder used to be refused.
• Tequila --send <file> hands a model to the Tequila that is open, for anyone connecting another application (how).

Questions and bugs

Join the Tequila Discord, or open an issue.

Tequila 2026.10.17.1952

Fixes for the Mac, for labels in Cycles, and for floors - everything from the first week since the first release.

Download

• Windows: Tequila-Setup-2026.10.17.1952.exe, for Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit). It installs over an older Tequila, keeping your settings and library.
• Already on 2026.10.17.0122? Tequila-Update-2026.10.17.0122-to-2026.10.17.1952.exe updates it in place (11 MB instead of 127). It only applies to 0122.
• Mac: Tequila-2026.10.17.1952.dmg, for a Mac with Apple's own chips (M1 or newer), attached here automatically a little while after this release.

The first time you open it, Windows or macOS warns you once that Tequila isn't signed with a paid certificate: on Windows click More info, then Run anyway; on a Mac open System Settings > Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway.

What's new

• Mac: the viewport renders at the Retina screen's own resolution, sharp instead of soft.
• Orbiting while Cycles renders keeps showing pictures as you move, instead of waiting until you stop.
• Labels and decals with soft or faded edges - transparent artwork, fading prints - now look the same in Cycles as in Tequila's own renderer. Partly transparent ink used to come out too faint, or solid.
• Textures with pure white in them use a quarter of the graphics memory in Cycles: they load as 8-bit, as they always should have.
• Catch shadows unticked now leaves no shadow under a reflecting floor.
• A photometric (.ies) file on an area light no longer turns the light round. (Area lights shine along their local +Z; the docs said -Z and now don't.)
• Connect the Claude app finds Claude's program however its path is written.

Questions and bugs

Join the Tequila Discord, or open an issue.