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Blender 5.0 Released with HDR Color Space, Much Faster Material Compilation
Blender, the popular 3D computer graphics software, released new major 5.0 version yesterday.
The new 5.0 release overhauled the color management pipeline with native wide-gamut and HDR color spaces support.
It can now display and export HDR and wide-gamut colors for both images and video. And, it added new ACES 1.3 and 2.0 views as alternative to AgX and Filmic, AgX HDR view, and Rec.2100-PQ and Rec.2100-HLG displays.
It’s now possible to use a wider gamut of colors for materials, lights and compositing, and to follow common ACES workflows, set a custom Working Space per file and Sequencer, and use the Convert Colorspace node in the Compositor.
The Sky Texture node now supports multiple scattering, while the old “Nishita” model is still available as “Single Scattering”. It can now generate a sunset scene instantly by animating only one parameter.
And it introduced new Radial Tiling node building block for creating shapes and tilings, including rounded corners. While, baking from meshes has been greatly improved with n-gon faces, baking Vector Displacement, as well as bake only to selected and active images etc features.
For circles, the release also introduced new unbiased null-scattering volume rendering algorithm and set it as default. There are as well a more accurate random walk subsurface scattering algorithm with multiple bounces, and the physically-based iridescense effects supported by metals.
Adaptive Subdivision is now considered stable, and, it features a new Object Space option to set edge length in object space instead of pixel size.
Other circles updates include new Linear 3D Curves, new Portal Depth light pass, new Render Time pass, better OptiX denoiser quality, new driver and hardware requirements, and more!
Material compilation is now much faster compare to the last 4.5 version though either OpenGL or Vulkan backend. Meaning that it has a faster startup and overall experience.
The Compositor in Blender 5.0 features a new asset shelf, filled with built-in effects to get from nothing to stunning in no time.
Grease Pencil objects now support motion blur, and, the number of motion blur steps can be adjusted for better quality.
Grease Pencil strokes can now have different corner types set per point: Flat, Sharp, and Round (default). And, Cyclical strokes now correctly connect start and end segments without gaps or overlaps.
Other changes in the release include:
- New modifier: Array, Scatter on Surface, Instance on Elements, Randomize Instances, Curve to Tube, and Geometry Input
- Overhauled UV Sync feature and enable it by default.
- Nodes from compositor now available in the Video Sequencer.
- Shading nodes now support Repeat Zones, just like Geometry Nodes.
- New and updated MatCaps that include optional specular light.
- And tons more other changes. See official release note for details.
Get Blender 5.0
The installer packages for Linux, Windows, macOS, as well as the source code are available to download at the link below:
For Ubuntu, the official snap package is available to install through either App Center or Ubuntu Software, though v5.0.0 is still in Beta channel at the moment of writing.
While Linux user may also choose the portable tarball (from download link above), decompress, then run the executable to launch the software. And, a community maintained Flatpak package. For beginners, see this step by step how to install guide.
