Blender 5 Released Today

I may be jumping the gun here, but today is the scheduled day for Blender 5's release. It's a big deal! I have already pointed out that, in the thirteen years I've been using Blender, I've only witnessed versions 3.0 and 4.0. That's a slow climb! I guess the big 3D app players have long dropped traditional version numbering in favour of year-based names, so they can iterate without flying through all the numbers, or having people dwell too long on whether a release is full-fat, or a modest top-up.

Egg House 5

I could have changed and improved twenty things, but I just ran out of time. 

1. Composition and lighting tweaks, although they're not too bad, there is a lot of room for improvement.
2. My added dirt is subtle, which I am happy with, but the dirt maps could have better matched the shape of the egg house. Maybe streak lines coming down from the top and drop stains from some of the ports.
3. Some more clutter around the egg. I rendered with ivy, which looked fun and cool, but also broke up the egg shape a bit too much and wasn't at all plausible. Given that the full render took 5 hours, I only re-rendered the region with the ivy and placed it over a copy of the original render. This is a quick way to do spot fixes on mistakes in a still with a long render time.

Second ivy. The original was too sparse and just distracting.

I'll do another update later today about the status, so if Blender 5.0 isn't released, I'll issue a correction and look like a goober.

Also, there's another celebration. Addon developer True-VFX have its 7th birthday and will be releasing TrueSKY3. I will be having a play with it.