Fixed: light groups missed light with Bidirectional and VCM. A light group pass showed only part of the light from its lights, caustics included, so the groups did not add up to the render. In my test with one spot light in a group, the group held 90% of the render with Bidirectional and 68% with VCM, and now it holds all of it.
Available for macOS, Windows and Linux.
×1.0.3 9 October 2026
Fixed: caustics missing from Bidirectional and VCM bakes with Clamp Indirect on. With Clamp Indirect set, these bakes lost most of the light that came through glass or water, so a caustic baked as a soft glow while the render showed its pattern. In my tests a bake now matches the render with the same settings.
Fixed: Photon Caustics ignored smooth shading and normal maps. Caustic light on a smooth-shaded object showed faint straight edges along its polygons, and a normal map on the lit surface had no effect on it. In my test with a normal-mapped floor under a glass ball, the caustic differed from Path Tracing by 27% and now by less than 1%.
Available for macOS, Windows and Linux.
×1.0.2 8 October 2026
Fixed: cutters with different object lists. With two cutters that cut different objects, cut faces came out dark, cut-away parts still cast shadows, and where the cutters overlapped (a copy of a cutter with its own list, for example) objects showed their insides. In my tests these cuts now match the same cuts made with Blender's Boolean modifier.
Fixed: dark floor inside a cut. A floor or other object left whole under a cut-open one got no sky light inside the cut and could render black there.
Fixed: crash with an emissive cutter. With Cap set to Cutter, a cutter with a pure Emission material crashed the render.
Fixed: dark area in an orthographic viewport with Bidirectional and VCM. The part of the scene nearest the view, often a half-circle of the floor, rendered dark. Renders through a camera came out right.
Available for macOS, Windows and Linux.
×1.0.1 8 October 2026
Cutaways in Solid mode. Solid mode now shows a cutaway as the render does: the cut-away part is gone, and closed objects get solid faces where they are cut, in the material set by Cap. Cutters draw as outlines, so they no longer cover the cut.
Object lists for cutters. Each cutter now lists the objects and collections it cuts or leaves whole, and every object shows which cutters cut it. Files from 1.0.0 cut as before.
Fixed: cut objects showed their insides where another object passed through them. With a beam through a wall, for example, the wall lost its cut face and the beam showed through, in renders and in the viewport. In my tests the cut now matches the same cut made with Blender's Boolean modifier.
Fixed: no glass caustics from small lamps with Bidirectional and VCM. Glass lit by a small area, point or spot light showed a plain shadow where its caustic should be, most of all with Clamp Indirect and Denoise on. In my test, a fluted glass under a 3 cm area light now shows its striped caustic in the same render time.
Available for macOS, Windows and Linux.
×1.0.0 8 October 2026
Render-time cutaways. Tick Cutter on any object to cut the scene open at render time, with solid faces where closed objects are cut and the geometry left as it is. In my tests the cut renders matched the same cuts made with Blender's Boolean modifier, with every sampling method on the CPU, Mac GPUs and NVIDIA GPUs.
Fixed: coloured liquid lost its caustic colour. Light through tinted liquid in a glass came out pale with Bidirectional and VCM, paler at higher Light Paths settings and larger image sizes, and with Photon Caustics most of it was missing. In my test with red and blue liquids, Photon Caustics, Bidirectional and VCM now give that light the same colour as Path Tracing.
Photon Caustics follows the Light Paths bounce limits. Photons now stop at the Max Bounces, Diffuse, Glossy and Transmission limits that Path Tracing uses, so Photon Caustics no longer has a Bounces setting of its own.
Fixed: shadow catchers stopped renders on NVIDIA. On NVIDIA cards, a scene with a shadow catcher stopped with an "Illegal address" error in every render method unless Path Guiding was on. It now renders, the same as on the CPU.
Fixed: glossy reflections of caustics too dark with Photon Caustics. On materials with a glossy layer over a diffuse base, such as the Principled BSDF, light that came through glass lost most of its glossy reflection, and the caustic itself came out a few percent too bright. In my test scene the reflection had 18% of its brightness and now matches Path Tracing.
Fixed: rough metal too dark with Photon Caustics. Light reflected by rough metal, and with Open Shading Language by any rough glossy surface, never lit other surfaces, so a room with rough metal walls rendered 20% too dark. It now comes within 1.5% of Path Tracing.
Fixed: Open Shading Language with Photon Caustics, Bidirectional and VCM on NVIDIA. With Open Shading Language turned on, Photon Caustics stopped with an error on NVIDIA cards, and Bidirectional and VCM rendered as Photon Caustics instead. All three now render with Open Shading Language on one or more NVIDIA cards and match the same render on the CPU.
Fixed: Bidirectional and VCM crashing with the CPU ticked beside a GPU. With the CPU ticked along with GPUs, these renders could crash or hang, about 3 in 10 VCM renders on two NVIDIA cards. They now finish.
Fixed: Bidirectional and VCM slow with the CPU ticked beside a GPU. With the CPU ticked along with a GPU, these renders took about 5 times longer than on the GPU alone in my test on an RTX 4090. They now render on the GPUs only and take the same time as with the CPU unticked.
Available for macOS, Windows and Linux.
×0.9.2 6 October 2026
Light shafts in water with VCM. Sun shafts under water now show with Vertex Merging, which used to render them as scattered speckle. Light that reaches fog through glass, like a gem's sparkle in a spotlight beam, also comes out cleaner.
New VCM default. With Vertex Merging on, Light Paths now starts at 0.5 instead of 1.0.
Available for macOS, Windows and Linux.
×0.9.1 6 October 2026
Sharp light shafts in water and fog. With Photon Caustics, sun shafts under water now render sharp instead of blurring into haze, and beams in fog come out cleaner, with no extra memory.
Fixed: crash with Path Guiding on the CPU. With Path Guiding on and the CPU ticked, alone or beside a GPU, Reblend could crash during a render or several frames into an animation.
Available for macOS, Windows and Linux.
×0.9.0 5 October 2026
Caustics in baked textures. Photon Caustics, Bidirectional and Vertex Merging now work when you bake a texture, where a bake used to show caustics as scattered fireflies. In my tests a baked caustic matches the render within its noise and stays the same from frame to frame when nothing in the scene moves.
Bidirectional and VCM on several GPUs. With more than one GPU ticked, Bidirectional and VCM used to switch off and the render fell back to Photon Caustics. They now render on every GPU: on two RTX 4090s my test scene rendered 1.7 times as fast with Bidirectional and 1.3 times as fast with VCM as on one.
Path Guiding, Bidirectional and VCM with the CPU and a GPU together. Path Guiding was greyed out with the CPU ticked beside a GPU, and Bidirectional and VCM switched off. All three now render with both.
Tempered and bottle glass. Seven new materials in the Reblend library. Tempered Glass and Tempered Low-iron Glass show the slight roller wave measured on real tempered panes in their reflections, and bottle glass comes in five measured colours: Clear, Green, Olive, Dark Olive and Amber.
Smudges and scratches on glass. Clear and tinted glass and clear plastics now have Smudges and Scratches sliders. Both are off by default, and at 0 the render and its time are unchanged.
Normal input on library materials. Every metal and glass material in the library now has a Normal input, so you can plug in a Bevel node to round its edges. With nothing plugged in, it renders exactly as before and no slower.
Fixed: Path Guiding froze Reblend with two GPUs. With two or more GPUs ticked in Preferences, turning on Path Guiding froze Reblend on Windows and stopped the render with an error on Linux, on both CUDA and OptiX. Guided renders now use every GPU you tick; two RTX 4090s rendered my test scene 1.5 times as fast as one.
Fixed: Bidirectional light passes did not add up to Combined. With Bidirectional and Vertex Merging, the Diffuse, Glossy and Transmission passes were missing light from caustics, in one test scene all of it. They now add up to Combined, which looks the same as before.
Available for macOS, Windows and Linux.
×0.8.0 5 October 2026
Bidirectional and VCM light fog and water. Light that scatters in fog and water now shows in Bidirectional and VCM, including light shafts under a water surface, which they did not render before. A spotlight beam in fog has 2 to 4 times less noise in the same time.A spotlight in fog with Bidirectional, before on the left, now on the right, in about the same render time.Under water with Bidirectional: before, the light shafts are missing; now they show.
VCM lights milk in a glass. Milk and other milky liquids in a glass render far more cleanly with VCM. A glass of milk in sunlight had about 15 times less noise than with Photon Caustics in the same time.A glass of milk in sunlight: Photon Caustics on the left, VCM on the right.
Fixed: milky liquid in nested glass rendered like water. A milk or subsurface liquid inside a glass looked like clear water when its Dielectric Priority was above 0. It now renders milky all the way through, within 0.1% of a reference render, and Automatic Priorities nest it in its glass.A milky liquid in a glass, Dielectric Priority 2: 0.7.5 on the left, 0.8.0 on the right.
Fixed: Photon Caustics too dark in milk. Milk and other dense liquids came out blotchy and at less than half their brightness with Photon Caustics. A glass of milk now comes within 6% of Path Tracing.
Fixed: Photon Caustics too dark in fog and water on Macs. On Mac GPUs, Photon Caustics could render fog and water far too dark, most often in the viewport and in short renders. An underwater scene came out at about a quarter of its brightness.
Available for macOS, Windows and Linux.
×0.7.5 3 October 2026
Fixed: Baryta looked different on Display P3 and Rec.2020. Colours and gradients on these displays drifted from the sRGB image, most visibly in saturated blues. They now keep the sRGB image's brightness and hues and add only the extra saturation the wider display can show. In a user's test scene, the worst 1% of pixels shifted hue by 7° between sRGB and Display P3 before, and by 0.6° now.
Available for macOS, Windows and Linux.
×0.7.4 1 October 2026
Glass, liquids and gems. 66 new materials in the Reblend library from measured optical data: clear, tinted and frosted glass, clear plastics, 23 cut gemstones, water and ice, drinks, milks and coffee, and white marble.
Fixed: crash with Photon Caustics. Rendering with Photon Caustics could crash at higher Photons values; a scene of cut gemstones crashed at Photons 4.
Available for macOS, Windows and Linux.
×0.7.3 30 September 2026
Fixed: Edge Wear weaker after reopening a file. On scaled objects, Edge Wear lost wear after the file was saved and opened again: on Suzanne scaled to 0.088, about half of it. Files saved with 0.7.2 are corrected when opened.
Fixed: knurl teeth too fine after reopening a file. On scaled objects, knurled materials came back with teeth too fine to see after the file was saved and opened again.
Knurled previews on a knob. The 25 knurled materials now preview on a 20 mm knob, so the five patterns can be told apart in the Asset Browser. All library previews use Baryta with the Smooth look.
Available for macOS, Windows and Linux.
×0.7.2 30 September 2026
Fixed: Edge Wear slow on dense meshes. The Edge Wear modifier took seconds on subdivided meshes and ran again on every move of the object. A 31,000-face mesh now updates in 0.6 s instead of 6.3 s and takes 31 MB instead of 2.1 GB, and moving, rotating or scaling the object no longer recomputes it.
Fixed: Edge Wear lines and cut-offs. Wear no longer draws lines across faces or stops at triangle boundaries, and the worn band no longer changes with the subdivision level. Materials placed with 0.7.1 need re-importing from the library to get this.
Fixed: knurl broke into patches on parts that are not cylinders. Each object now takes one tooth count from its own diameter; Knurl Diameter (mm) on the material overrides it.
Available for macOS, Windows and Linux.
×0.7.1 30 September 2026
Knurled metals. 25 new materials in the Reblend library: stainless steel, aluminium, brass, titanium and iron in the five knurl patterns of DIN 82.
Anodised aluminium. 26 new materials in 13 colours, bead-blasted and brushed; six of the colours are from measured anodised aluminium.
Edge Wear. Every material in the Reblend library now has Edge Wear, which wears exposed edges down to bare metal or to a polish. The Edge Wear modifier is also in Add Modifier › Edit.
Smudges on satin, brushed and bead-blasted metals, as on the polished ones.
Library folders by finish. The Reblend library is sorted by finish under Metals, with Anodised and Aged folders.
Available for macOS, Windows and Linux.
×0.7.0 29 September 2026
Baryta view transform included. Baryta is a view transform for product renders that are already correctly exposed. It holds hue, with strong contrast, deep blacks, bright highlights and fine gradation, so the render looks finished without a grading pass. Choose it in Render Properties > Color Management > View Transform: Baryta on the sRGB, Display P3 and Rec.2020 displays, Baryta HDR 1000 on Rec.2100-PQ and Rec.2100-HLG. Its looks are Low Key, High Key, Smooth and Matte.
Available for macOS, Windows and Linux.
×0.6.2 29 September 2026
Fixed: Subsurface scattering rendered too dark with Bidirectional. With Method set to Bidirectional, materials with subsurface scattering seen directly by the camera came out darker than with Path Tracing: 4% darker in my test scene, and 17% darker with Vertex Merging on. They now match Path Tracing.
Available for macOS, Windows and Linux.
×0.6.1 29 September 2026
Fixed: Brushed metals looked less brushed than measured. In the Reblend metals library, the 12 Brushed materials now stretch highlights 10 to 1, the most Blender's Metallic BSDF allows, instead of about 4 to 1. The measured brushed samples they follow reach 25 to 1 (steel) and 31 to 1 (aluminium).
Available for macOS, Windows and Linux.
×0.6.0 29 September 2026
Reblend metals library. A new Reblend library in the Asset Browser with 87 metal materials: 28 metals, from gold and silver to steels, aluminium, titanium and copper alloys, in polished, satin, brushed, bead-blasted, hammered and checker-plate finishes, plus anodised titanium, tarnished silver and copper, rusted iron, and copper and bronze patina. Use them from the Asset Browser like Blender's Essentials materials; each has sliders in the Material panel. Textures keep their real-world size on scaled objects.
Tarnished silver and copper in the Metallic BSDF. With Physical Conductor, the Metal menu has a new Tarnished group: silver in four stages and copper in three.
Available for macOS, Windows and Linux.
×0.5.5 28 September 2026
Less GPU memory for Photon Caustics on NVIDIA cards. In my tests on an NVIDIA A10G with Photon Caustics on, peak GPU memory fell from 3.6 GB to 2.5 GB on my pool test scene at 1080p, and from 8.2 GB to 5.7 GB on a glass lamp scene at 4K, with the same render times and images. CUDA and OptiX.
Available for macOS, Windows and Linux.
×0.5.4 28 September 2026
Photons per pixel. With Path Tracing and Photon Caustics, Photons is now set per pixel of the render, 2 by default, so a preview at 50% traces as many photons per pixel as the final render.
Less memory for many photons. With Photon Caustics at 4 million photons per photon map, my pool test scene at 960×540 peaked at 2,013 MB of GPU memory on an M1 Pro, 361 MB less than with 0.5.3.
Fixed: Filter Glossy looked adjustable with Bidirectional and VCM. It has no effect with those methods and is now greyed out.
Available for macOS, Windows and Linux.
×0.5.3 28 September 2026
Fixed: Bidirectional and VCM did not start on AMD cards. On AMD GPUs, with HIP RT on or off, the render stayed at "Loading render kernels". Confirmed working by an AMD user on the diamond caustics scene, with HIP RT 15% faster than without.
Available for macOS, Windows and Linux.
×0.5.2 28 September 2026
Faster Path Tracing on NVIDIA cards. In my tests on an NVIDIA L40S, 0.5.2 needs 8% less render time than 0.5.1 on Blender's BMW27 benchmark, 11% less on a small test scene with one lamp, and 4% less on the whisky-and-ice scene from the guide, with unchanged images. CUDA and OptiX. Apple silicon renders as before.
Available for macOS, Windows and Linux.
×0.5.1 25 September 2026
Fixed: running out of GPU memory in scenes with many glass or liquid objects inside each other. Examples are bubbles in a liquid, or ice in a drink, using Dielectric Priority or Automatic Priorities. A final render could stop with an "Insufficient Memory" error. In a customer scene with 346 bubbles, GPU memory on Apple M1 Pro fell from 5.9 GB to 4.1 GB, with the same image.
AMD graphics cards on Windows and Linux: Radeon RX 6000, 7000 and 9000 series, selected under Preferences › System › HIP. Not yet tested on an AMD card; if you have one, please try it and tell me what you see.
Available for macOS, Windows and Linux.
×0.5.0 25 September 2026
OSL cameras on Apple silicon GPUs. Supported custom cameras, including LensSim configurations, render on Metal with Path Tracing, Bidirectional, Vertex Merging and Photon Caustics.
Bidirectional and Vertex Merging with OSL cameras, on CPU, NVIDIA OptiX and Apple Metal. Which caustics show depends on the camera script and lens settings.
An example OSL camera with focal length, depth of field, distortion and tint is included for camera-script authors.
With an OSL camera, the GPU is not always faster than the CPU; it depends on the camera and the scene. Metal runs a subset of camera scripts and no OSL materials; use one render device. Details in camera compatibility.
Available for macOS, Windows and Linux.
×0.4.5 25 September 2026
Path Guiding switches off while Photon Caustics is on. Together they took longer without a cleaner image: in my Apple M1 Pro test of a room lit through a window with a glass sphere in the sunbeam, adding Path Guiding to Photon Caustics took 68% more time for 6% less noise. Photon Caustics alone is now faster at the same quality. For scenes without caustics, turn Photon Caustics off and Path Guiding on.
×0.4.4 24 September 2026
Fixed: photons on NVIDIA OptiX with Denoise on. In 0.4.3, with Denoise on, Photon Caustics, Photon Training and the Bidirectional method could stop with the error "Requested OptiX photon kernels are disabled or unsupported by this scene", and Bidirectional could hang. They work again with Denoise on.
Photon Caustics and Photon Training start much sooner the first time on NVIDIA OptiX. The first render that uses photons no longer waits minutes before it starts. In my Linux test on an RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell, the first Photon Caustics render from an empty cache took 5.4 seconds instead of 4 minutes 53 seconds.
Faster photon tracing on NVIDIA OptiX. In the same test, the time spent tracing photons fell by about 45%: 117 ms instead of 213 ms per render in a pool scene, 145 ms instead of 275 ms with photons through water, and 0.18 s instead of 0.29 s for Photon Training. Images match the previous version, and guided renders with Photon Training are as clean as before.
Faster volume caustics on Mac. On Apple M1 Pro, tracing photons through water took 21% less time. Other photon scenes trace at the same speed.
Available for macOS, Windows and Linux. OptiX timings were measured on Linux. Known issue: OptiX can crash on a scene with a shadow catcher; not fixed in this release.
×0.4.3 24 September 2026
Bidirectional rendering on NVIDIA OptiX starts much sooner the first time. The first renders on a machine, before anything is cached, prepare far faster and use much less memory. In my Linux test on an RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell, four renders from an empty cache took about 20 seconds instead of 13.5 minutes, and peak memory fell from about 14.5 GiB to 1.5 GiB. Later renders and images are unchanged. Scenes that use photons can still take longer to prepare the first time.
Less CPU load while Metal prepares to render. In my Apple M1 Pro test of Path Tracing without photons, the CPU work spent in the background preparing renders fell 54–57%, with unchanged images and render times. I have not measured a faster first render, or tested it on M5.
Available for macOS, Windows and Linux. OptiX timings were measured on Linux. Known issue: OptiX can crash on a scene with a shadow catcher; not fixed in this release.
×0.4.2 24 September 2026
Measured metal presets. The Metallic BSDF has a Metal dropdown in Physical Conductor mode with 28 presets from measured optical data and published color standards: gold from 24K to the 18K jewelry colors (ISO 8654 2N to 5N, and green gold), silver, platinum, palladium, rhodium, the common pure metals, brasses, bronzes, two stainless steels, titanium nitride and silicon. A preset fills IOR and Extinction, and the Base Color and Edge Tint used by F82 Tint, for the file's working color space. Edited values show as Custom.
Physical Conductor is the default for new Metallic BSDF nodes. Nodes in saved files keep their settings.
Faster rendering with HDRI and textured lighting. Scenes lit by an HDRI, by lights with something plugged into their color or strength (an image, a procedural texture, IES or Light Falloff), or by Principled BSDF emission render faster with the light tree on (the default). In my tests, 6 to 10% less render time on Apple M1 Pro and M5, with unchanged images. Lights with a single color and strength render as before.
New splash screen.
×0.4.1 23 September 2026
Automatic priorities for nested dielectrics. Overlapping glass, liquid and ice no longer need a priority set by hand: objects left at 0 are ordered by size, the smaller one higher, so the glass wall and the ice win over the liquid. On by default in Render Properties → Light Paths → Nested Dielectrics. Priorities set by hand still work and rank above the automatic ones. See the guide.
×0.4 22 September 2026
Based on Blender 5.2.2 LTS. First release for all three platforms: macOS DMG, Windows zip, Linux tarball.
Nested dielectrics. A Dielectric Priority per object (Object → Shading → Nested Dielectrics). Overlapping glass, liquid and ice render with one clean interface per boundary and the right ratio of IORs. See the guide.
Vertex Merging is an option under Bidirectional instead of a third method in the dropdown. Files saved with the old third entry open as Bidirectional with Vertex Merging on.
Windows and Linux builds. CPU, CUDA and OptiX.
New icon, splash and About box with the Reblend symbol.
Memory used by bidirectional light paths is released when the method is switched off, instead of staying allocated until Blender quits.
×0.3 21 September 2026
The first published builds, for macOS on Apple silicon. Bidirectional path tracing, vertex merging, photon caustics on surfaces and in volumes, and GPU path guiding, on Blender 5.2.2 LTS. 0.3.1 and 0.3.2 followed the same day with packaging fixes.
