23 March 2026

Announcements Weekly Updates
1

23 March 2026
Notes for weekly communication of ongoing projects and modules.

Announcements

  • Blender 5.1 has been released on Tuesday. Check out the release notes.

Modules & Projects

New Features and Changes

This is a selection of changes that happened over the last week. For a full overview including fixes, code only changes and more visit projects.blender.org.

Anim

  • Explicit option to allow preroll (commit) - (Christoph Lendenfeld)

Assets

  • Restore previous asset Preferences panel name for compatibility (commit) - (Julian Eisel)

Attributes

  • Support rendering float4 data type (commit) - (Hans Goudey)

Color Management

  • Add camera input color spaces (commit) - (SivapriyaVenkateswarar)

Compositor

  • Port Input Object node (commit) - (Omar Emara)
  • Support creating new masks from Mask node (commit) - (quackarooni)

Core

  • Support optional symbol override to “datatoc” (commit) - (Campbell Barton)
  • Add very basic global/memfile undo ‘smoke tests’. (commit) - (Bastien Montagne)
  • Add a ‘all ids from main’ iterator, and expose it in RNA. (commit) - (Bastien Montagne)

Cycles

  • Support automatic differentiation of shader nodes in SVM (commit) - (Weizhen Huang)
  • Add inlining hint back on shader_setup_from_ray (commit) - (Xavier Hallade)

EEVEE

  • Port Shadow Page Mask shader to BSL (commit) - (Clément Foucault)

GHOST/Wayland

  • Support xdg-toplevel-icon-v1 for window icons (commit) - (Campbell Barton)
  • Treat icons size as logical pixels (commit) - (Campbell Barton)

GPU

  • Merge bsl shader C++ compilation units (commit) - (ClĂ©ment Foucault)
  • Shader Tool:
    • Rewrite semantic parser (commit) - (Clément Foucault)
    • Make sure struct are followed by semicolon (commit) - (ClĂ©ment Foucault)
    • Improve enum errors (commit) - (ClĂ©ment Foucault)
    • Improve static branch compiler error (commit) - (ClĂ©ment Foucault)
    • Add support for templated methods (commit) - (ClĂ©ment Foucault)
    • Allow pragmas on first line (commit) - (ClĂ©ment Foucault)
    • Remove need of create_info pragma in bsl files (commit) - (ClĂ©ment Foucault)
    • Add safeguard for invalid pipeline declaration (commit) - (ClĂ©ment Foucault)
    • Add support for templated method in templated types (commit) - (ClĂ©ment Foucault)
    • Make entry point function template compatible (commit) - (ClĂ©ment Foucault)

Grease Pencil

  • SVG and PDF Exporter support linejoin types (i.e. Corner types) (commit) - (Casey Bianco-Davis)
  • Use size of draw tool when invoking eraser temporarily (commit) - (Falk David)

ImBuf

  • Add file type metadata and capability flags (commit) - (Campbell Barton)

Mesh

  • Add operator to clear sculpt face sets (commit) - (Aryan Verma)
  • Simplify mesh_new_no_attributes (commit) - (Hans Goudey)
  • Optimize split edges vertex group handling (commit) - (Hans Goudey)

Modeling

  • Support “topology” symmetry for symmetry snap (commit) - (Campbell Barton)

Nodes

  • NoOp defaults for Math node when added through link drag search (commit) - (Habib Gahbiche)

Overlay

  • Cleanup and port anti-aliasing and xray-fade shaders to BSL (commit) - (Mark van de Ruit)

Sculpt

  • Improve color filter quick fill behavior (commit) - (Lavnish Pandey)
  • Add ‘Set Vertex Color’ entry into ‘Sculpt’ menu dropdown (commit) - (Sean Kim)

Shrinkwrap

  • Reduce threading threshold, use C++ API (commit) - (Hans Goudey)

UI

  • Add link button (commit) - (Guillermo Venegas)
  • Fix Vertical Jiggling of Category Tabs at Some Sizes (commit) - (Nazir Galimov)
  • Use different layout panel state storage per Collection Exporter (commit) - (Guillermo Venegas)
  • Paste hex code to color button (commit) - (Pratik Borhade)
  • Allow middle mouse button panning in menus/popups (commit) - (Guillermo Venegas)

glTF

  • Use inline material when possible (commit) - (Julien Duroure)
  • Manage KHR_* attributes in primitives (commit) - (Julien Duroure)
  • Point Cloud import (commit) - (Julien Duroure)

Weekly Reports

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