Blender 5.0: Core

Increased Maximum Data-Blocks Name Length

The data-blocks can now have names up to 255 bytes (increased from previous limit of 63 bytes).

Some points to keep in mind when actually using longer names in Blender 5.0: * Compatibility with Blender 4.5: * Names will be truncated when opening such 5.0 blend-file in Blender 4.5. * Linking data-blocks with longer names is not supported at all in Blender 4.5. This also includes opening existing 5.0 blend-files linking such data-blocks. * Potential issues on Windows regarding file names. * Windows (NTFS) only supports up to 255 chars in its file names. This limit can now more easily be reached with longer data-block names, when they are used as part of a generated file name. While this issue already existed before, it may become more common and visible now.

blender/blender#137608, PR#137196, blender/blender@fdaaea632863

Large buffers in .blend files

The .blend file format has been changed to support larger buffers (59a759b98d). This is necessary to be able to store e.g. meshes with more than a few hundred million vertices. Note that there may still be other aspects of Blender that make it difficult with such large data-blocks.

This change affects the structure of the file header as well as the header of each block in the file. So any code that is parsing .blend files has to be updated. Checkout the following files for details: file header and block header.

Blender 4.5 LTS is able to load files stored in this new format, but older Blender versions are not.

Big Endian Support Removed

The support for building Blender on big endian systems, and opening blend-files created from such a build, has been removed. See the related announcement for details.