Hi everyone,
I’d like to introduce BIKINI, an unofficial portable Blender 5.3 build that tracks mainline and adds practical tools around Geometry Nodes, a GPU Texture Editor (Image Process) Editor, and node editor UX.
This is not affiliated with the Blender Foundation and is not an official signed build. Think of it as a personal/experimental branch: stay close to daily build, and ship things I actually want to use for geometry workflows, remeshing, sparse solves, and image-space node work.
Documentation & project links
- Docs site (EN/ZH): https://blueish0930.github.io/BIKINI/
- User Manual: https://blueish0930.github.io/BIKINI/manual.html
- Developer / release notes: https://blueish0930.github.io/BIKINI/changelog.html
- GitHub (portable builds / site): https://github.com/blueish0930/BIKINI
- Source (projects.blender.org): https://projects.blender.org/blueish/BIKINI
The docs site is structured similarly to official Blender docs: Manual for how to use features, Developer docs for module summaries and technical notes.
Goals
- Track Blender main / 5.3 as maintainable increments, not a dead fork.
- Center on Geometry Nodes: geometry ops, remesh/fracture, interactive select/edit, sparse linear algebra.
- Add GPU Texture Editor (Image Process) for image / raster / fluid-style node graphs (COP-like direction).
- Improve node editor UX and debugging while authoring complex graphs.
Geometry Nodes highlights
Roughly 30 custom / extended geometry-related nodes in the current docs list, including:
Graph wiring & utilities
- Named Portal / Store Named Portal (name-based geometry routing in a tree)
- Geometry Clip (plane clip with side selections)
- Debug, Time Shift, Enable Input / Enable Output
- Expression, Write at Index, Object Info extensions
Mesh processing
- Loop Subdivision
- Nearest Neighbors
- Select Elements / Edit Elements
- Heat Geodesic, Mesh Graph Coloring, Tangent Field
- Gradient / Divergence
- Curve Intersections, Delaunay 3D, RBF Interpolate
Remesh & fracture
- Instant Meshes (field-aligned remesh)
- QuadWild (QRemeshify-style remesh / field / layout stages)
- Triangle Remesh
- Voronoi Fracture
Linear Algebra
- Mesh Laplacian → Sparse Matrix Math → Linear Solver
(solveAx = b, factorizations, multiplies, partial eigenpairs, etc.)
GPU Texture Editor / Image Process
A separate image-process node graph (GTE) with roughly 17 image-oriented nodes in the docs, including:
- Point Stamp, Rasterize Geometry
- Sample at Pixel / Write at Pixel
- Normal ↔ Height, Paint, Histogram
- Bake Image / Image Output
- Fluid Simulation Input / Output zones
- SDF Shape, Fractal primitives
- Bridge into compositor / shader side (e.g. Image Socket, related shader nodes)
Node editor & UI quality-of-life
Examples from the current notes:
- Shake-to-detach links; multi-insert along a chain
- Hold U + drag to align nodes
- Ctrl/Alt + LMB on sockets to change type / shape
- Group interface tools (separators, messages, join-to-next-row, Ctrl+LMB rename)
- Menu multi-select
- Spreadsheet column sort
There is also extra editor work (e.g. Data-Block Reference Graph which let’s you see how a data block is been referenced by others).
How to try it (Windows)
- Download the ZIP from the GitHub repo.
- Extract the ZIP (do not copy only
blender.exe). - Run
blender.exe.
Status & feedback
This is actively evolving with mainline. Expect rough edges, incomplete areas, and WIP behavior in places.
I’d love feedback from Geometry Nodes users especially:
- Which nodes are most useful in real production graphs?
- What’s missing for your workflows?
- Image Process(Houdini COP-like ): which operations would you want next?
- Any crashes or bugs?
Happy to answer questions, take feature requests, and hear what breaks on your machine.
Thanks for reading — and thanks to everyone who builds tools and shares knowledge in this community.
Links again
Docs: https://blueish0930.github.io/BIKINI/
GitHub: https://github.com/blueish0930/BIKINI
tho? 