Blender 5.1 Support

[BrendanParmer]

Compositor

Added

• A new Mask To SDF node was to compute signed distance fields. (ee637f2098)
• The Index Switch node is now supported. (33d8d2b6f2)
• A new Sequencer Strip Info node was added. (a420f5974a)
• The Radial Tiling node is now supported. (722310342f)
• The Boolean, Integer, and Vector Input nodes are now supported. (32d6bfc11a)

Changed

• The Mix color mode of the Mix node now mixes the alpha as well. (2f745308ed)
• The Image and File Output nodes now read and write custom meta-data. (2dec178560)
• The Group node now perform implicit conversion for its inputs and outputs. (9aeb370ecc)
• The File Output node now allows specifying directories in item names. This was possible in older versions of Blender and the functionality is now restored. (e19dff1ef8)

EEVEE & Viewport

EEVEE

Shader Raycast Node

• The new shader raycast node allows casting rays against the scene geometry inside the material node tree. (f7f6bdac6e)

Other

• Added transparency evaluation for Shader To RGB node. (#149723)
• Added back support for the Light Path Node inside the world nodetree. (8bde4854bd)

Geometry Nodes

Volume Grids

• The new Cube Grid Topology node allows creating grids from scratch where all voxels within a cube are activated. This is typically used with the existing Field to Grid node to potentially initialize multiple grids with the same topology (620ecf1324).
• The new Grid Dilate & Erode node grows or shrinks the set of active voxels within a grid. It can be used to e.g. increase the size of the grid before advection (333b67cce0).
• The new Grid Mean and Grid Median nodes allow averaging values in a grid in different ways (74e74e4c36).
• The Set Grid Background node has a new option to update the inactive voxel values too (3ee26a95b3).
• The new Clip Grid node deactivates all voxels outside of a specific box in index space (6d95c9dd0f).
• The new Grid to Points node creates a point cloud which has a point for each active voxel and tile. This is useful for building custom debugging utilities for grids (19119231cd).

String to Curves

• The String to Curves node options have been promoted to input sockets (624f454e08).
• There is a new Font socket (624f454e08).
• Word index output in String to Curves node (dcef160d02).

Bundles

• There are new Get Bundle Item and Store Bundle Item nodes (b034159220). The allow accessing and overriding individual elements in a bundle. Previously, one had to explicitly separate a bundle and then construct it from scratch.

Bone Info

• The new Bone Info node allows accessing the pose of individual bones (5bf8fc30cc).

Node Tools

• A separate operator type is now registered for every node tool asset and local node tool. The operator idname can be customized in the "Options" popover (5411d2110c).

Miscellaneous

• The "Mix" color mode of the Mix node now mixes the alpha as well. (2f745308ed)
• The Pack UV Islands node now has inputs to define a custom pack region (PR#147757).
• The UV Unwrap node now supports the Minimum stretch (SLIM) unwrap option and has a "No Flip" parameter (a86c05e506).
• New Matrix SVD node for Singular Value Decomposition of 3x3 matrices (7dbea2c510).

Rendering

Shader Nodes

• Raycast node. (f7f6bdac6e)
• Normal Map option to switch between OpenGL and DirectX conventions. (PR#149200)
• Join Bundle node. (55d5438142)
• Vector Math node option for element-wise rounding. (3ac918debf)

User Interface

Editors

Node Editors

More

• Float sockets can now have a subtype of mass. (452d50a3d5)
• "Use Nodes" toggle removed for Light objects, they now always use nodes. (74c44d8cc7)