5.1 — Blender

11 min read Original article ↗
Blender 5.1 splash artwork from "Singularity" by Blender Studio
Blender 5.1 splash artwork from “Singularity” by Blender Studio

Released March 17th, 2026

Watch the Recap Video

New features overview by Jonathan Lampel from CGCookie.

Raycast X-Ray demo by Cartesian Caramel.

RENDERING

El Rey Cast

The new Raycast node allows you to cast rays against scene geometry.

Similar to the existing Geometry Nodes node but now available for shaders in both Cycles and EEVEE.

This enables a wide range of effects, including NPR stylization integrated with scene shading. When using EEVEE, it is currently limited to screen-space tracing.

EEVEE & VIEWPORT

Quick Start

EEVEE materials now compile faster by precompiling GPU pipelines in parallel.

GPU shaders also compile more quickly across all platforms thanks to preprocessing of the shader sources.

  • Blender 5.1
  • Blender 5.0

  • Vulkan

  • OpenGL

  • Metal

  • 0
  • 5
  • 10
  • 15
  • 20
  • 25
  • 30
  • 35
  • 40
  • 45
  • 50
  • 55
  • Time to cold start Barbershop Interior scene. Lower is better.
  • Unit: seconds
  • Blender 5.1
  • Blender 5.0

  • Vulkan

  • OpenGL

  • 0
  • 50
  • 100
  • 150
  • 200
  • 250
  • 300
  • 350
  • 400
  • Memory used in Mr. Elephant scene. Lower is better.
  • Unit: MiB

Memory Savings

Memory is getting expensive these days, so it might as well multitask.

EEVEE now saves texture memory by overlapping framebuffer and render textures at different points within a frame.

MORE EEVEE & VIEWPORT

ANIMATION

PLAY FAST

Blender 5.1 delivers a major boost to animation playback performance.

Shape Keys

Shape Key evaluation has seen a significant performance boost since Blender 5.0, especially on high-poly meshes.

All tests are an average time per frame when playing back. The tests were run on a 12 core 24 thread CPU (AMD Ryzen 9 9900X) on Linux. For benchmarks on different systems see the daily benchmarks.

  • Blender 5.1
  • Blender 5.0

  • 24 Threads

  • 8 Threads

  • 4 Threads

  • 0
  • 20
  • 40
  • 60
  • 80
  • 100
  • 120
  • 140
  • 160
  • Frames per second (more is better)
  • Unit: fps
  • Blender 5.1
  • Blender 5.0

  • 4 Threads

  • 8 Threads

  • 24 Threads

  • 0
  • 10
  • 20
  • 30
  • 40
  • 50
  • 60
  • 70
  • 80
  • Frames per second (more is better)
  • Unit: fps

Actions

Actions now evaluate much faster now, especially on armatures with many bones keyed.

These tests were done with an armature of 2600 bones that are keyed for ~1000 frames.

Smooth Sailing

Meet “Smooth (Gaussian)“, a new F-curve modifier to reduce detail and noise in a curve, the same operation as the Smooth operator, but in a non-destructive way.

Be Precise

When “Show Subframes” is enabled, decimal values for frames will be displayed in the playhead.

Dope Sheet interpolation colors.

Color Match

Quickly see the interpolation type between keyframes at a glance.

Interpolation lines in the Dope Sheet are now colored to indicate their type, matching the theme colors used by the corresponding icons.

MORE ANIMATION

Stability is a feature.

It’s not just about shiny new tools. Reliability is a feature too.

Amount of high severity bugs since January 1st, 2026
Amount of high severity bugs since January 1st, 2026

Winter of Quality

During the past December-January, similar to last year, Blender developers focused on improving quality of the code base and overall stability through a coordinated effort called the “Winter of Quality.”

More than 350 reported issues were fixed. Additionally, developers worked on addressing technical debt, as well as improving documentation.

Issues Addressed per Module

COMPOSITOR ❤ SEQUENCER

Strip, tease

Unleash your creativity with node-based transition effects thanks to the new “Sequencer Strip Info” node.

Simple transition using the strip’s start and end frames to control the size of an ellipse mask.

Sequencer Strip Info node in Blender 5.1

Simple, yet powerful.

This new node provides timing and transform data such as frame range, position, rotation, and scale.

Note: Blender 5.1 computes Sequencer Compositor effects on the CPU. In the upcoming Blender 5.2 LTS, they run on the GPU.

Smooth
Dat
Form

The new “Mask to SDF” node lets you turn any image or shape into signed distance fields.

It’s time to revisit those masks.

MORE COMPOSITOR

EXPAND
YOUR BLENDER

The Blender Extensions platform keeps growing, with over 900 free add-ons and themes to customize your workflows.

You can also share your own add-ons and themes!

CYCLES

Faster All Over

  • Improved GPU rendering performance by up to 10% on various benchmark scenes.
  • CPU rendering performance on Windows up to 20% faster.
  • For AMD GPUs, hardware ray-tracing is now enabled by default through HIP RT.

Better Custom Normals

Cycles now uses per-corner normals instead of splitting geometry, improving consistency with Blender and fixing sharp-edge shading issues. Learn more.

Smoother Denoise

Albedo and normal denoising passes now use smooth transitions instead of hard cutoffs, reducing artifacts in both the passes and the final denoised render. Learn more.

Aligned Views

Cycles render results and Blender overlays now line up better when moving the camera. Learn more.

Not-so Normal Maps

Normal Map node now includes an option to apply the normal map to either the smooth undisplaced mesh or the displaced mesh. Learn more.

GREASE PENCIL

Filling good.

Blender 5.1 overhauls the fill workflow, making it easier to use while adding support for holes and operators to assist with selection and editing.

Free from Materials

Previously, materials determined whether strokes and fills were used. Now, you can decide as you draw.

Adding or removing strokes and fills is now handled by drawing tools and dedicated operators to select and edit, rather than materials.

Fills & Holes

Because fills are defined per point, joining them can generate holes, similar to how curve objects behave when curves are nested inside each other.

Two operators make this easy: Join Fills, Separate Fills.

Not So Primitives

The primitives drawing tool has also been updated to let you draw strokes, fill, or both.

Support All Over the Place

The new fills workflow is supported throughout Blender, from import and export to the internal operators familiar from working with curves and meshes.

  • Stroke -> Set Stroke Type: Similar to “Set Curve Type”, lets you define points as stroke, fill, or both.
  • New Select Fill operator to select all the stroke/points that are part of the same fill. Similar to Select Linked.
  • Select -> By Stroke Type
  • Trace Image now creates holes when needed.
  • SVG Importer, SVG Exporter, and PDF Exporter now handle fills with holes too.
  • When in Stroke Selection mode, selecting a stroke automatically selects the entire fill.
Set Stroke Type
Move to Layer menu now featuring Search.

Find What You’re Looking For

Dealing with too many layers? The Move to Layer menu now features a “Search…” entry to find what you’re looking for, faster.

Dantti's YouTube Channel

MORE GREASE PENCIL

Still from Agent 327: view of Amsterdam.

INDUSTRY READY

Several libraries in Blender 5.1 have been updated to align with the VFX Reference Platform 2026, making studio pipeline integration and maintenance easier.

Updated libraries include Python 3.13, OpenColorIO 2.5, OpenEXR 3.4, and OpenVDB 13.0, among others.

GEOMETRY NODES

Bonegiorno

Meet Bone Info, a new node that provides Geometry Nodes access to armature bone transforms, opening the door to rig-driven node setups and armature deformation.

Bone Info Node

Bare Bone

The Bone Info node reads a bone from an armature and outputs its Pose, Local Pose, Transform Pose, Rest Pose, and Rest Length.

Note: Watch out for dependency cycles! They may occur if the node reads one bone while another bone in the same armature depends on the modified object (e.g. through a Geometry Attribute constraint).

GEOMETRY NODES

Say More

Blender 5.1 improves text motion graphics with a better String to Curves node and improved text and curve rendering.

Fully customizable animation using Geometry Nodes and the improved String to Curves node.

More Than Words

The String to Curves node takes a leap in customization.

Every input is now an adjustable field, including Font, a new socket type in Blender 5.1.

The new Word output gives you even more control to level up your motion graphics.

The new Clip Grid node deactivates all voxels outside of a specific box. Great for slicing a volume.

UV Unwrap and Pack UV Islands nodes
UV Unwrap and Pack UV Islands nodes.

UV News

The UV Unwrap node now supports Minimum Stretch (SLIM), and a new “No Flip” setting.

The Pack UV Islands node now has inputs to define a custom pack region.

MORE GEOMETRY NODES

Get the Artwork

Blender splash artwork source files are available for you to play with!

Blender 5.1 splash artwork by Blender Studio
MODELING & TEXT

Next-Gen Text

3D Text now uses a new fill algorithm that improves rendering, correctly handling modern fonts with overlapping outlines.

This is the default for new objects, while the previous algorithm (Sweep Line) is still available for compatibility and performance.

MODELING

Find Your Center

A highly requested feature, snap to Face Center has been added to Blender 5.1.

It snaps the selection to the centerpoint of the face under the mouse cursor.

New Snap to Face Center combined with Align Rotation to Target.

Face Loop select delimit by seam, sharp edges, or materials.

MODELING

Set Your Limits

Loop and ring selection now support delimiters, giving you more control over where a selection stops.

  • Edge Ring selection can stop at:
    • Seams, sharp edges, and material boundaries.
    • Option to step over even-sided n-gons.
  • Face Loop selection can stop at:
    • Seams, sharp edges, and material boundaries.

Boundary Loop selection can stop at:

  • Inner corners: boundary vertices with more than three connected edges.
  • Outer corners.
  • Plus the existing n-gon stopping behavior.

These options are available in the Adjust Last Operation panel after performing a selection.

Loop Select Delimit
New Edge Loop selection delimit options.

New Corrective Flip Normals option in Apply Object Transform.

MODELING

Flip Out

A common workflow after mirroring an object is to apply its transforms, which can result in flipped normals. A new option now fixes the normals automatically and is enabled by default.

Find Corrective Flip Normals in the Adjust Last Operation panel after running Apply Object Transform.

MORE MODELING & UV

PLATFORMS

Windows

Apple

macOS

Linux

WAIT, THERE’S EVEN MORE

In memory of Germano Cavalcante

CREDITS

Blender is a community project.
Learn more on how you can contribute to Blender.

List of developers who contributed to Blender 5.1 and all-time contributors.

Splash artwork: CC-BY – Blender Studio

Huge thanks to everyone involved! 🧡

The Blender team. March 17th, 2026