Blender 5.1 Released: What Is New and What Changed

A Release Built on Speed, Stability, and Polish

Rather than introducing a wave of brand-new systems, this release prioritizes quality-of-life enhancements, performance gains, and stability improvements across virtually every area of the software. Much of the groundwork was laid during another round of the Blender "Winter of Quality" initiative, which resulted in over 350 reported issues being identified and fixed. The result is a version of Blender that feels more refined, faster, and better at responding to what the community has been asking for.

Blender 5.1 libraries have also been updated to match the VFX Platform 2026 standard, which includes Python 3.13, OpenColorIO 2.5, OpenEXR 3.4, and OpenVDB 13.0. This makes the release a solid foundation for professional VFX and compositing pipelines.

Modeling and Mesh Tools

Snapping, Precision, and Edge Loop Selection

Several long-requested improvements have landed in the core modeling workflow. Snapping now supports face center targets, giving artists more control over where geometry lands during placement. When beveling, holding Control snaps to even increments, while Shift allows finer precision, a combination that speeds up clean hard-surface work considerably. Vertex slides also benefit from improved redo panel reliability, making iterative adjustments more dependable.

Edge loop selection has gained a redo panel, allowing artists to define exactly where a loop ends, whether at seams, sharp edges, or material boundaries. For boundary loops, there is now control over behavior at inner and outer corners as well as n-gons. These small additions add up to a noticeably smoother selection experience.

Faster Booleans and Curve Tools

The Exact Boolean solver has been made up to 35% faster for meshes with a high density of attributes, and the Manifold solver has also seen modest improvements. Curve fitting accuracy has improved for freehand Bezier drawing, and the Lasso, Box, and Circle selection tools are now available in Curves Sculpt mode. The UV editor gains a tile selection operator for UDIM workflows, along with a new edge opacity slider to complement the existing face opacity control.

Font Filling and Text Objects

Font filling for text objects has been significantly overhauled. The new fill algorithm is now the default for 3D text objects, producing correct results across a wider range of fonts. Filling is also up to five times faster, particularly for n-gons with many sides, making complex typographic work far more practical inside Blender.

Grease Pencil Gets a Major Overhaul

Native Hole Support

Blender's 2D animation toolset has received one of its most impactful upgrades in recent memory. Grease Pencil can now natively support holes in shapes, which was a longstanding limitation. This change means SVG and PDF files can be imported cleanly without visual artifacts, and the fill tool works correctly out of the box without requiring holdout materials as a workaround.

As part of this overhaul, whether a line is a fill or a stroke is now stored as an attribute of the line itself rather than a material property. This gives artists direct, flexible control over how each element behaves during drawing and editing.

Field Tools and File Compatibility

Grease Pencil fill tools have been revamped, giving artists a new set of field-based tools for creating fills when working with Grease Pencil objects. Existing blend files from previous versions are automatically converted to the new system, though some procedural setups using geometry nodes alongside Grease Pencil materials may require manual adjustment.

Geometry Nodes: Expanding Possibilities

The Bone Info Node and Procedural Rigging

A new Bone Info node in geometry nodes allows access to the transform data of any bone within an armature. Combined with the Attribute Constraint introduced in the previous release, artists can now rig geometry node setups and expose node-driven rigs simultaneously. This convergence points toward a future of more fully procedural rigging workflows inside Blender.

New Volume Grid System

Six new grid nodes expand the volume capabilities of geometry nodes, enabling the creation and manipulation of volume grids from scratch. This includes nodes for growing or shrinking active voxels within a grid, averaging voxel values in various ways, clipping a grid to a bounding box, and converting grids to points. These additions are particularly well-suited to simulation work.

String to Curves, Bundles, and Matrix Decomposition

The String to Curves node has been upgraded so that font and menu inputs are now proper sockets, making them usable as group inputs and significantly extending the node's utility for motion graphics workflows. A new Word Index output has also been added.

For bundle management, new Get Bundle Item and Store Bundle Item nodes allow artists to extract or modify a single socket from a bundle without separating and recombining the entire structure. Nested bundles can even be accessed using slash notation.

A new Matrix SVD node enables singular value decomposition of 3x3 matrices, with a key practical use case being the calculation of a minimum bounding box and its orientation for any set of components.

UV Nodes and Node Tool Improvements

The UV Unwrap node now supports minimum stretch unwrapping and a no-flip option, and the Pack UV Islands node can target a custom region. For developers building node tools, each tool now has its own registered operator, making Python integration and custom hotkey assignment straightforward.

Eevee and Cycles Rendering Updates

The New Shader Raycast Node

One of the most talked-about additions in Blender 5.1 is the new Shader Raycast node. This node allows rays to be cast against scene geometry directly from within a material, opening the door to a wide range of effects including custom subsurface scattering approximations, non-photorealistic outlines, fake shadows, and object blending. In Eevee, the raycast operates in screen space, while in Cycles it functions in world space, giving artists different characteristics to work with depending on the renderer.

Eevee Performance and Memory Improvements

Eevee has received targeted improvements in response to community feedback. Initial material compilation is now significantly faster thanks to pre-processing and partial parallelization, cutting wait times roughly in half in some cases. Texture memory usage has been reduced through texture pooling, which overlaps framebuffer and render textures at different points in a frame. This means larger scenes can be rendered on the same hardware without exceeding VRAM limits.

Planar reflection now supports glossy materials again, the Shader to RGB node works with transparency, and the Light Path node is once again functional inside world shaders. The lookdev HDRI can now be locked to act more like matcaps when in material preview mode, restoring behavior that was available in older versions. The maximum number of AOVs (Arbitrary Output Variables) for compositing has been raised to 128.

Cycles GPU Optimizations

For Cycles users, GPU performance has improved between 5% and 10% across a broad range of scenes. HIP RT hardware ray tracing is now enabled by default on AMD GPUs. Viewport navigation in Cycles preview mode also syncs more reliably with overlays, improving the interactive experience during lookdev.

Compositing and Video Sequence Editor

New Compositor Nodes and Workspace

The compositor has received a meaningful set of additions and optimizations. A new Mask to SDF node converts black and white masks into signed distance fields, enabling gradient-based effects and nearest-pixel lookups that are highly useful for compositing tasks. A new Sequencer Strip Info node lets artists build procedural compositor effects that reference frame data directly from video strips.

Several nodes have been added to match what is available in the shader and geometry node editors: the Index Switch, Radial Tiling, Boolean Input, Integer Input, and Vector Input nodes are all now present in the compositor. The Mix node now correctly mixes the alpha channel when blending colors, a behavior that has been extended across all node editor types.

On the performance side, the Group Input node has been optimized and can improve animation effect performance by around 30% in some cases. The Glare, Bidirectional Blur, Lens Distortion, Anti-Alias, Blur, and Vector Blur nodes are now between 20% and 100% faster compared to Blender 5.0. The default compositor workspace has been redesigned, featuring an Image Editor at the top and the node backdrop disabled by default.

Video Sequence Editor Improvements

The Video Sequence Editor has gained several notable updates. The Blade tool now supports a click-and-drag box gesture for quickly cutting sections with ripple behavior, with Shift held to keep gaps instead of rippling. The Speed Control strip can now use negative multiply values to reverse footage.

A new Gaussian Smooth F-Curve modifier enables non-destructive smoothing of animation curves. For sound work, audio strips now have non-destructive pitch and echo modifiers. Meta strips have gained a master volume setting, and strips that have been retimed now display a clock icon for easy identification.

Animation Tools

Shape Keys and Action Performance

One of the most impactful improvements in Blender 5.1 for animation-heavy projects is the performance of actions and shape keys. Depending on the file, artists can see between 4% and 304% improvement in frames per second, a substantial range that reflects how much room for optimization existed in complex rigs and character setups.

A new Apply to Basis operator for shape keys allows the deformations of a selected key to be applied and the key removed in a single step, streamlining a common cleanup task. A new Replace Action operator swaps out an action for all objects that share the same action, which is useful for managing shared animation data across a scene.

Graph Editor and Dope Sheet

The Graph Editor now includes a Smooth modifier for non-destructive curve smoothing, though it must sit first in the modifier stack to function correctly. In the Dope Sheet, interpolation lines are now color-coded to indicate the interpolation type, making it easier to read complex animation setups at a glance. The timeline display when subframes are enabled has also been visually improved, with cleaner playhead representation.

Sculpting and Texture Painting

New Brushes and Workflow Improvements

Sculpt mode has received a dedicated Blur brush for colors, addressing a gap in the color sculpting toolkit. Mask and smooth handling for face strips has been improved, and toggling between the Mask brush and Mask Eraser is now more accessible via keyboard shortcuts. Color sampling in any mode now supports click-and-drag to average colors across a painted area, which aids in blending.

In Vertex Paint mode, color sampling now reads the attribute color directly rather than the viewport color, avoiding unintended influence from view transforms. The Escape key can now cancel an active stroke while painting, and Undo in Edit Mode is now 20 to 30% faster overall.

UI and Viewport Improvements

Interface Polish

The 3D viewport's infinite grid has been cleaned up and now renders 85% faster, with better handling of Z-fighting and improved appearance at low alpha values. Major and minor grid lines can now be themed separately. Quad View can be resized by dragging its center point and no longer displays duplicate overlays or gizmos.

Several interface conveniences have been added or refined: the color picker hex input supports autocomplete, the Preferences editor now has a searchable key map, the hex autocomplete fills out from partial entries, and the Remap Users command in the Outliner now includes a search menu. The number of items being dragged and dropped is now shown inline.

Nodes and Cross-Instance Copy-Paste

One of the most practically useful changes in 5.1 is the ability to copy and paste nodes between separate instances of Blender. This also works across different node editor types where compatible, so math nodes or textures from Geometry Nodes can be pasted directly into the Shader Editor or Compositor. Node headers can be made semi-transparent, and the Swap Zones command can now maintain object references when swapping between similar node zone types.

Extensions and Platform-Specific Additions

The Extensions system now shows current and pending version numbers for available updates, and a single-click Update All button handles all outdated extensions at once. On macOS, the file browser now supports iCloud Drive. On Windows, user fonts appear alongside system fonts, and drives can use distinct icons. The 3D mouse navigation system has a new Drone mode that decouples forward and backward movement from altitude changes.

Asset Management and File Formats

Asset Library and Browser

Asset libraries can now be individually enabled or disabled in Preferences, giving teams more control over what is available in a given context. The Asset Browser now uses fuzzy searching, making it more forgiving of typos. Asset shelf thumbnail previews can be scaled down to 24 pixels, fitting more items per row in constrained layouts.

New and Updated File Format Support

Blender 5.1 adds support for the AVIF image format, which handles HDR data fully, compresses better than PNG, and enjoys wide browser and application support. For OpenEXR, a new lossless encoding option called HTJ2K (High Throughput JPEG 2000) is now available, offering strong compression ratios for high-quality output. Saving JPEG 2000 files is now multi-threaded.

Video encoding can use a custom quality level, and audio bitrate can now be set up to 2048 kilobits per second depending on the codec, compared to the previous cap of 348.

The USD importer and exporter now support the USD UI accessibility API, transparency, and translucency for the USD Preview Surface. The FBX exporter now exports shape key normals, which is particularly useful for importing character meshes with shape keys into game engines like Unity and Godot. GLTF received four notable fixes as well.

Stability, Bug Fixes, and What It All Means

Blender 5.1 is the product of a deliberate and methodical development cycle. The Winter of Quality initiative led directly to more than 350 issues being resolved, and developers also addressed technical debt and improved internal documentation. For users, this translates to a release that is meaningfully more stable than its predecessor, particularly in areas like Eevee rendering, sculpting, and animation playback.

The breadth of this release is impressive. From geometry nodes gaining procedural rigging tools to the compositor receiving a revamped default workspace, from Grease Pencil gaining native hole support to Cycles benefiting from hardware ray tracing improvements on AMD GPUs, Blender 5.1 touches nearly every major system in the application. Users working across any discipline of 3D, animation, compositing, or VFX will find something meaningful in this update.

Blender 5.1 is available now as a free download from blender.org.

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