What's New in Blender 5.1! Official Overview

Blender 5.1 has just been officially released and it includes some awesome new features with most of the focus being on quality of life enhancements, stability, and polish after the devs just finished up another round of winter of quality. I'm Jonathan Lampel from cgcookie.com and in this video, we're going to talk all about it. First up, font filling for text objects is now significantly better. So, the types of fonts you can use in 3D are no longer so limited. Filling in general is now up to five times faster, especially for end guns with many sides. When it comes to snapping, you can now snap to the center of faces. You can now choose to correct the normals for flipped faces when applying an object's scale. When selecting edge loops, there's now a redo panel and you can choose where that loop ends, such as at seams or sharp edges. When the loop is a boundary loop, you can control whether it passes through inner corners, outer corners, or end guns. When the loop is a face loop or edge ring, you can even stop at material boundaries. While beveling, you can now hold down control to snap to even increments and use shift for more precision. You can now reliably use the redo panel to adjust vertex slides. Undo in edit mode is now 20 to 30% faster. The exact Boolean solver can be up to 35% faster for meshes with lots of attributes and the manifold solver is slightly faster as well. For reference, this object is almost a half a million triangles. Curve fitting is now more accurate, which gives better results when drawing freehand Bezier curves. The curves also now have more stats in the statistics overlay. The lasso, box, and circle selection tools were added to the curves sculpt mode. In the UV editor, you can now select everything inside of any given UDIM tile and there's a new edge opacity slider to match the face opacity slider. In mesh sculpting mode, strips of faces are better handled when masking and smoothing. You can now toggle to the mask brush by alt left clicking or toggle to mask erasing with control alt left click. You can now cancel a stroke while painting by hitting escape. The asset shelf icons can now go as small as 24 pixels. A blur brush for colors was added to sculpt mode. You can now add sampled colors to the palette while sculpting with shift X and left click. Sampling colors in vertex paint mode now reads the attribute color directly rather than the viewport color that might have a view transform. And color sampling in any mode now supports dragging to get an average of the colors you draw over for easy blending. Changing things like selection and which texture is active in texture paint mode can now be undone with control Z. When modifying face sets or masks, the overlay for it will be turned on if it isn't already so that you always see what you're doing. The save modified images checkbox when closing files with unsaved texture changes is now always on by default. In weight paint mode, you can now select loops when using vertex selection. In the dope sheet, interpolation line colors now indicate the interpolation type. This is also true in menus. The timeline now looks much nicer when you have sub frames enabled and the marker region is a little thinner. A new replace action operator swaps out an action for all objects that share the same action. The graph editor now has a nice smooth modifier for non-destructive smoothing, though it needs to be first in the modifier stack. A new apply to basis operator for shape keys can apply the deformations of a selected key and then remove it all in one step. And last but certainly not least, the performance of actions and shape keys is significantly faster. Depending on the file, you can get anywhere from 4% to 304% improvement in frames per second. Blender's 2D animation tool got a pretty big upgrade in that can now finally support holes in shapes. This means you can import SVGs and PDFs without any weirdness. The fill tool just works and you don't have to use holdout materials as a workaround. As part of this overhaul, whether lines are fills or strokes is now an attribute of the line itself rather than a material property. You can choose between fills and strokes while drawing new lines, choose which to remove when deleting, set the type with an operator, join multiple strokes into the same fill or separate them out, and select everything that makes up the fill. Oh, and performance while drawing very long strokes has improved, and the ability to make a lattice object a parent during a lattice deform was added back in. In geometry nodes, a new bone info node allows you to get the transform data of any bone in an armature. Combine this with the attribute constraint from the last release, and you can now both rig your nodes and node your rigs. There are six new grid nodes for creating and manipulating volumes. You can use them to create volume grids from scratch, expand or contract the number of cells, find averages, and convert the cells into points. These are going to be great specifically for simulations. The font and various menu inputs for the string to curves node are now sockets and can be used as group inputs. There's also a new handy output for the word index. There are new get and store bundle item nodes for extracting just one socket from a bundle, so you don't have to separate and combine the entire bundle just to use one property. You can even use slashes to access properties in nested bundles. The UV unwrap node now supports minimum stretch unwrapping and the no flip option. The pack UV islands node can now pack into a custom region. Control F can now be used to search for warnings. A new matrix SVD node can be used for singular value decomposition of 3 by 3 matrices. This may not sound thrilling, but one of the main use cases for this is finding the minimum bounding box and its orientation for any set of components, which is going to be extremely helpful in all sorts of things. And if you're making your own node tools, each one now has its own registered operator, which makes it easy to call with Python or assign hot keys to. There's a new shader in Blender 5.1 for ray casting. This one is pretty incredible because it allows for so many effects from faking custom subsurface scattering, creating NPR outlines, creating fake shadows, and blending objects together. Just know that when you're using Eevee, the ray is in screen space, while in Cycles, it's in world space. Normal map nodes can now be switched to reading the direct X format. Eevee got new sliders for adjusting the intensity of direct and indirect light. Eevee reflection planes now support glossy materials again. The shader to RGB node now works with transparency again. The maximum number of AOVs, the arbitrary output variables for compositing, was bumped to 128. Also, the AOV list in the properties editor now shows the socket color it has in the compositor. The light path node now works in world shaders. HDR environments can now be locked in the material preview mode to act more like matcaps, like they could in older Blender versions. Initial material compilation in Eevee is now significantly faster thanks to preprocessing and some parallelization, and in some cases, this cuts the wait time in half. Eevee also saves memory via texture pooling now, which really helps reduce the amount of VRAM needed for a scene. So, now you can render bigger scenes on your same graphics card. It's awesome to see optimizations like this, and really the whole 5.1 release for Eevee has been all about directly addressing community feedback, which is very cool to see. For Cycles, GPU performance has improved 5 to 10% for a lot of scenes, and HIPRT ray tracing is now enabled by default on AMD GPUs. When previewing with Cycles, viewport navigation now syncs up a bit better with the overlays. And use nodes was removed for light objects, and they just always use nodes now. In the video sequence editor, you can now click and drag with the blade tool to quickly ripple cut sections. You can also hold shift to keep the gaps and not ripple. The speed control strip can now use negative multiply values to reverse footage. A new clock icon is shown on strips that have been retimed, and you can now hide the retiming keys. The time property panel was also cleaned up, and the property names now make much more sense. Shift S, which snaps the selection to the playhead, now keeps the strips offset by default when you have multiple strips selected. Holding control when scaling or rotating in the preview area now snaps to even increments. Sound strips have new modifiers for non-destructively editing the pitch and echo. Meta strips, the strips that contain other strips, now have a master volume setting. Soloing strips using the right click select keymap is now shift left click, so scrubbing with left mouse drag is a bit easier. For left click select users like me though, soloing is still shift right click. A new sequencer strip info node in the compositor allows you to make some great procedural effects that work on any strip out of the box. Having those frame numbers now is a huge power unlock. You can also create new sequencer modifier node trees directly from the compositor. And speaking of compositing, the default workspace now uses an image editor at the top and has the node backdrop disabled. A new mask to SDF node was introduced, which lets you turn black and white masks into gradients and find the nearest pixel inside the mask, both of which are extremely powerful. The index switch, radial tiling, boolean input, integer input, and vector input nodes were all added to match the shader and geometry node editors. The mix node now mixes the alpha channel when mixing the colors, and this is also true in all the other node editors as well. The relative to pixel node now works with image and mask inputs and not just single values, which makes it easy to do variable blur effects. The movie distortion node, which adds or cancels out lens distortion based on a lens set in the movie clip editor, has modes which now better cancel each other out and make the effect more reversible. Plus, the new lens distortion model now supports anamorphic lenses. The image and file output nodes can now write custom metadata. The file output node regained the ability to use slashes in file names to write to subfolders. The humble group input node was optimized and can sometimes improve the animation performance of an effect by about 30%. The glare, directional blur, lens distortion, anti-alias blur, and vector blur nodes were all sped up, too, between 20% and 100% faster, depending on the effect. The infinite grid in the 3D view got a cleanup. It now draws 85% faster. Z-fighting with other overlays has been solved. Low alpha values look better. And you can now separately theme the major grid lines. There are new performance stats available in the text overlays. The status numbers in the header during operations no longer jump around as much and show more numbers when you're holding shift for precision mode. Quad view can now be resized by dragging the center point and it no longer shows duplicate overlays and widgets. You can now search in the add workspace menu. Editor size snapping while holding control is a bit nicer now, as is resizing editors overall. In the outliner, the number of items is now shown when dragging and dropping objects. The remap users command in the outliner now has a nice search menu. And these object data block menus now show the object's type icon. The hex code input in the color picker now supports autocomplete, so you can just type in a couple characters and it will fill out the rest for you. You can now use hover copy and paste to rename things in nested lists. The preferences editor now has a search box, so you can quickly find settings and keymap items. 3D mouse navigation has a new drone mode that won't change altitude at the same time as moving forwards or backwards. You can now update all of your extensions with one click and extensions that have updates now show the current and pending version number. You can now finally copy and paste nodes between different instances of Blender and when possible this also works between different node editor types. So, if you have math nodes or textures in geometry nodes, you can easily copy them into shaders or the compositor or vice versa. The swap node command, shift S, allows swapping between similar zones while keeping the sockets. Does the same for bundle nodes and it can now maintain object references. Node headers can now be made semi-transparent if you want. The node group interface list now supports selecting multiple items for dragging and dropping or deleting. Float sockets can now have the mass subtype. The node panel was cleaned up a bit and you can now use it to toggle muting and hiding options. Node groups with a period before their name are now hidden in search results and the add menu by default, but you can turn that off in preferences if you want to. On Linux, you can now open Blender without using window decorations using dash dash no window frame. As usual, the UI got a ton of little polish improvements, so I just talked about the bigger ones here, but there were over 90 changes that didn't even include the bug fixes. So, Blender 5.1 is looking better than ever. Asset libraries can now be individually disabled in preferences. The asset browser now uses fuzzy searching, so you can misspell things and still find what you're looking for. On Mac, the file browser now supports iCloud Drive. On Windows, user fonts are now shown alongside the system fonts and drives can now use different icons. Deleting linked data now supports redo and not just undo. A new image file format, AVIF, is now supported. It fully handles HDR data, has better compression than a PNG, and is already widely supported by most web browsers and image apps. Open EXR files can now use a new lossless encoding option called HTJ2K, high throughput JPEG 2000. It's great compression, but not yet widely supported by all other software. Saving JPEG 2000s themselves is now multi-threaded. Video encoding can now use a custom quality level and the audio bit rate can now be set up to 2048 kilobytes a second depending on the codec, whereas it used to be limited to 348. USD importing and exporting now the USD UI accessibility API and transparency and translucency for the USD preview surface. The exporter now writes index UVs that don't separate each face into different islands when importing into certain other apps, and there's a new get prim map API option for mapping between Blender objects and USD prims. The FBX exporter now exports shape key normals, which is great for importing objects with shape keys into Unity and Godot. glTF got four nice fixes. And that, along with hundreds of bug fixes, is what's new in Blender 5.1. You can download it today from blender.org, and don't forget to support the development fund while you're there to help make future updates even better. Thank you so much for watching. Have a great rest of your day, and as always, happy blending.