close
Skip to content

Blender 5.0: Rendering

Shader Nodes

Closures and Bundles

Like geometry nodes, shaders now support closures and bundles. (PR#141936)

A closure is a set of nodes that can be passed into a node group, and then evaluated one or more times. This makes it possible to perform (for example) blended box mapping, tiling and texture bombing with arbitrary procedural textures.

For more information, see the blog post.

External render engines can support these and other new features with minimal changes using the inline shader nodes API.

Repeat Zone

Like geometry nodes, repeat zones can be used to execute shader nodes multiple times. (PR#141936)

Currently, Cycles only supports a fixed number of iterations, and nodes will be duplicated for each iteration. This has significant compile and runtime overhead, and is planned to be improved in the future. EEVEE does support dynamic iteration counts.

Fractal with new repeat zone. File by Cartesian Caramel.

The Menu Switch node is support in shader nodes as well now (02bdc709c2). It behaves the same as in Geometry Nodes.

Sky Texture

New multiple scattering mode for more accurate results. (PR#140480)

BERJAYA

BERJAYA

Single and multiple scattering

Radial Tiling

The new Radial Tiling node is a building block for creating shapes and tilings, with rounded corners. (PR#127711)

BERJAYA
Procedural tile pattern, scene by KickAir 8p.

Voronoi Texture

Voronoi Texture nodes are now several times faster by using a faster hashing algorithm. However, this changes the resulting pattern (the node behaves the same, just the noise will be different compared to previous versions). The speedup is mostly visible in CPU based code paths, e.g. Cycles CPU or OSL, or when using Voronoi in Texture, Geometry nodes or CPU Compositor. (PR#139520)

Point Density Texture

The Point Density Texture node was removed. It is replaced by geometry nodes, which offers more efficient rendering as a sparse volume. There are some limitations, with less control over colors. This is planned to be restored by future improvements to volumes in geometry nodes. (PR#140292)

BERJAYA
Volume from mesh using geometry nodes

Baking

  • Improve Bake from Multires (PR#144935):
    • Supports n-gon faces.
    • Subdivision level and UV interpolation works exactly the same as Subdivision Surface and Multiresolution modifiers.
    • Issues with baking to the non-zero subdivision level have been resolved.
  • Support vector displacement baking from multires. (PR#145014)
  • Bake only to selected (and active) images, as opposed to all active images. (PR#137389)

Other

  • Many render passes were renamed to avoid obscure abbreviations. For example 'DiffCol' to 'Diffuse Color', 'IndexMA' to 'Material Index' and 'Z' to 'Depth'. (PR#141675, PR#142731)
  • "Use Nodes" in the shader editor was removed for Materials and Worlds. These now always use nodes. (PR#141278, PR#142342)
  • Light Linking can now be edited and overridden in library overrides (PR#147039, ead0af6ef7).
  • Material output nodes inside a node group no longer have priority over those outside a node group. This is more consistent with other node systems. (#150373)