A render to celebrate the release of Blender 5.0

 A major release (x.x to y.0) for Blender is a big deal!

I've been using Blender for 13 years, and I've only seen two major releases: 3.0 and 4.0.

Blender 3.0 (December 3, 2021)

Blender 3.0 key features (that impact me):

• Cycles X
• Asset Browser
• First geometry nodes

This was a real game-changer, but I was spending too much time gaming, so it didn't impact me very much. In fact, I didn't remember that splash screen. I do remember that Cycles X was a huge improvement. If you are going to make an improvement to a 3d application, you can't do better than make the render engine all-around better. I think that 3.0 would have been the most consequential release in Blender's history, except that late 2.x releases included changes that should have been reserved for a major release. Ton had made commitments about what the next major release would include and felt that moving to 3.0 without these promised features would have felt like cheating the community.

Blender 4.0 (October 16, 2023)

Blender 4.0 key features

• Light and Shadow linking
• Principled BSDF and AGF colour transform
• Geometry nodes improvements

Blender 4.0 felt incremental. Lots of minor improvements without a major new feature, although light and shadow linking had been a big ask from the community for a very long time because it's a standard feature in many other applications.

These summaries overlook some incredible developments in EEVEE, Grease Pencil, and the Compositor, because I haven't used them much myself.

Blender 5.0

Blender 5.0 is available in Beta, but for someone who uses a bucket-load of addons, Beta releases are not much fun. It could be, in fact, that I choose not to move over to the new release for a while, as my critical addons become compatible. True Sky is one such addon, and it's also getting a big update very soon, although apparently this isn't tied to the Blender 5.0 release.

Celebration

It doesn't seem right to create a Blender 5.0 celebration render while not using that version. But it is what it is. 

Idea: A space craft landing pod that has crashed into a forest and has been converted into a habitat. Portrait format, for a change.

Midjourney concept image 1

Midjourney concept image 2