Blender 5.0 Released, Adds ACES Color Management, Improved Geometry, & More

The free, open-source Blender project 3D software turns version 5.0, bringing support for massive geometry, ACES colour pipelines, and improved simulation & rendering features.

It's been a while since the community had a wholly new version of Blender to play with, Blender 4.0 was released in November 2023, but Blender 5.0 promises to be worth the wait with a whole slew of new features. Key highlights include full ACES coloACESr-management support, the newfound ability to handle extremely dense geometry, and some excellent advances in smoke & fire simulation with NanoVDB and GPU-denoiser quality improvements.

Living Color

Headline feature is the fact that Blender 5.0 introduces a completely overhauled color management pipeline that natively supports wide-gamut and HDR color spaces. The result is that artists can use ACEScg or Rec.2020 as a working space and export images and movies in HDR and wide-gamut formats. This is going to make Blender significantly easier to dovetail into modern film, TV, and VFX color pipelines and workflows.

Elsewhere, in rendering the Cycles engine gains a new “Render Time” pass for identifying slow-rendering parts of a scene, and a “Portal Depth” light pass, while denoiser quality (particularly for OptiX) has been improved.

Smoke and fire simulations now leverage NanoVDB for improved memory performance and ramped up quality in volumetric effects.

Better Geometry

Geometry workflows have been enhanced: Blender 5.0 now supports “massive buffers” in .blend files. These do exactly what they say on the tin, and allow the software to work with much denser geometry sets. The Geometry Nodes system has been extended with a volumetric grid (OpenVDB) type, SDF grids, and more advanced grid-based workflows.

In the UV editing domain, the sync-selection workflow has been overhauled so selecting a UV corner no longer forces selection of all connected corners, face selection works properly in sync mode, and new operators have been added for aligning islands, packing to custom regions, and moving selections by tile, grid or pixel steps.

The Video Sequencer and Compositor have been further integrated: the Compositor node tree now exists as a reusable data-block and can be applied directly to strips in the Sequencer; and a new asset shelf makes drag-and-drop node-group presets available for effects like vignette, grain and chromatic aberration.

UI & Compatibility

UI enhancements include a new storyboard start file, more consistent themes and widgets, improved panels and controls, and better discoverability of features for newer users.

As usual for a major version bump, there are some inetitable compatibility considerations. Blender 5.0 raises hardware expectations, drops support for older GPUs and platforms, and introduces Python API changes that will require many add-ons to be updated. Files saved in the 5.x format are not guaranteed to open in versions earlier than 4.5, so the developers recommend keeping 4.5 installed in parallel while pipelines and plug-ins catch up.

Pricing & Availability

Blender 5.0 is available for download now from https://www.blender.org/download/. Pricing is free as always.