Hey Reader,

We are back with a fresh dose of news, inspiration, and resources from the 3D world.

Today, we’ll start with what’s new in the latest Blender 5.1 release, and we’ll share our updated handy shortcut PDF.

Next, we’ll share the Top 100 animations montage from the Pwnisher’s Dream Sequence Challenge and we’ll end with news of the Flipped Normals Marketplace Closing Sale.

Let’s dive right in.

​Blender 5.1 Released - Let’s See What’s New​

The Blender 5.1 release is mostly focused on performance, stability, bug fixes, and quality-of-life improvements, but it comes with some new exciting features as well.

Here are a few of them we’ve found most interesting:

• The new Raycast Node - allowing access to ray tracing data directly in the shader. While this might sound technical, the possibilities it opens up are quite impressive (better depth maps for subsurface scattering, x-ray transparency, and object outlines). Just take a look at the demo file of the X-ray hand-made by Cartesian Caramel (you can download it from Blender’s official website)
• Grease Pencil now supports holes - so there’s no need to use holdouts as a workaround. There's also a whole new way of creating Grease Pencil’s objects, which now have Stroke, Fill, or Both settings you can choose from when drawing (instead of setting this up in Materials). This also improved the quality of SVG imported shapes.
• Snap to Face Centre - while this might seem like a small change, it has long been requested by the community. Technically, you could do that by using the 3D cursor, but it required a lot of clicks and was a pain to use in the long run.

Apart from these changes, the overall performance and speed were improved (especially for animation playback), which is always great to see.

If you want to learn more details about all the changes in this release, watch this video by Jonathan Lampel.

​Our Blender Hotkey Sheet Blender 5.1 Update​

It’s hard to keep up with all the changes in Blender, but we do our best to help you out by updating our handy PDF Hotkey sheet.

It comes in 2 versions - one for digital use and one for print (if you want to keep it on your desk at hand). It has a clickable menu for easy navigation, so you can jump straight to the shortcuts you’re looking for.

​Download the Blender 5.1 Hotkey Sheet PDF here​

​Pwnisher’s Dream Sequence Challenge Top 100 Montage​

Pwnisher’s challenges, which run twice a year, are always a big celebration of creativity and imagination. You can enjoy and appreciate it by watching this amazing montage of the Top 100 artists who joined the challenge.

The winner (although everyone who joined and had fun can feel like a winner) was Koala OK, with his stunning animation, which we mentioned in one of our previous newsletters.

Close behind him (in second place) was our Urban Monsters Challenge winner, Enes Aksakal (aka Mantaframe), with his Asian Robot Cook animation.

Many of the contenders were using Blender, and some of them share cool breakdowns of how they made their scenes. This was the case with the 3rd place winner, Ted Heemskerk, who made a funny and intense squirrels vs lumberjack clip (watch it here, including a breakdown).

​Flipped Normals Marketplace is Closing, Big Sale!​

Flipped Normals announced they’re closing their current marketplace (that hosted over 3000 creators’ products) to build a new, smaller platform with more focused, curated content.

As a way to say goodbye to all the platform users, they’re making a big Closing Sale (until March 31st). This is a chance to get many useful assets, courses, and resources at big discounts.

​Check out the products on sale here​

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That’s all for today. Have a great weekend, and until next time.

Jarosław, Zach & Alan (the CG Boost Newsletter Team)