Two interesting bits of Blender news this week for those fond of this leading open-source 3D modeling software.
Blender 5.1 transitioned to its bug-fixing beta phase last week and runs that way through 11 March when the release candidate is expected. This is in aiming for the official Blender 5.1 release around 17 March. Prior to the beta milestone in shifting to bug-fixing-only development, Blender 5.1 did squeeze in its raycast nodes functionality.
This pull landed the initial implementation of Raycast Nodes for Blender. This is part of Blender’s ray queries support to access ray hit positions, accessing object data and primitive data. The raycast node traces a ray in the scene and reports information from the first surface it hits.
The raycast node implementation with the Cycles engine works with regular ray-tracing against scene geometry and in EEVEE works by ray-marching screen-space buffers.
The other new bit of Blender news is that the Blender release cycle is being evolved. Blender will still see three releases per year but there will be a larger gap between the releases on one side and then projects / special efforts on the other side. The plan is to still keep major releases every other year but with a special focus on building up all the major risks/breakages into a single release per year. With this evolution the hope is to ensure that the LTS release is the most stable one of that year.
The evolved Blender release cycle can be found via this Blender DevTalk thread. With this evolution there won’t be any impacts this year though due to timing in 2027 it will mean only two releases. In 2028 Blender 6.0 will then be released, Blender 6.1 as a regular release, and ending out 2028 with Blender 6.2 LTS.
