Bonsai v0.8.3 has been released with 770 new features and fixes. It's our built environment, help support Bonsai: 100% free and open source software that lets you author and document BIM data fully to ISO standards. It's built by the AEC community, for the AEC community. Get it today: https://bonsaibim.org/
These release notes are rather sparse due to the lack of time (working overtime and life), but rest assured a lot has gone into this release, in particular around bugfixing and polish. Thanks to your donations, we are able to be financially sustainable and development never stops :) Ignoring usability upgrades, bugfixes, optimisations, and minor features, the biggest new features of note are:
Blender 4.5 support!
bSDD support has been overhauled. bSDD now supports multiple dictionaries, toggling test and preview dictionaries, and using dictionaries both in classifications and properties with more sophisticated searching and property group-based navigation.
IFC5D has had a significant number of small improvements that have added up.
Openings and spatial elements now have array support.
Topology representation items are now editable again.
Python 3.9 support for all utilities.
IfcSQL is significantly more robust.
IfcApplications can now be managed in the interface. Orgs, people, and apps can be merged or purged.
A new special UI to generically edit any attribute pointing to an object.
Outside features, recently IfcOpenShell and Bonsai has been showcased at two events by a number of speakers: buildingSMART Australiasia XChange in Sydney and the Dutch Revit User Group. Ryan Schultz has also released his extensive library of Bonsai tutorials, Yassine Oualid has launched an online programming course focusing on IfcOpenShell called AECO.DEV, and Petru Conduraru is launching the BIMVoice Academy (note: URL available soon).
All changes
All changes can view the directly via the Git logs. A huge thanks to the growing volume of new contributors who are joining the team and changing the industry. You can too!
Credits for this release (in order of commits via git shortlog -sn --since "2025-04-16"):
513 Andrej730
62 Thomas Krijnen
43 Dion Moult
23 Ryan Schultz
23 falken10
19 Bruno Perdigão
18 Massimo Fabbro
15 Geert Hesselink
12 falken10vdl
10 Kristoffer Andersen
4 Stephen Boddy
3 Sayanjyoti Das
2 Bruno Postle
2 Cristian Ritter
2 Martin15135215
2 Orion Sehn
2 Piotr Smolira
2 Richard Brice
1 Esteban DUGUEPEROUX
1 FabioPiccinini
1 Gorgious56
1 Hannes
1 Iagoba Apellaniz
1 Josef Wienerroither
1 Sebastian Friston
1 c4rlosdias
1 carlopav
1 myoualid
1 sboddy
1 skemaikin
1 talukderpushpak2000
Donors since the last release:
FOSS-is-the-future
1ncognito
BIMvoice
CORE Digital Engineering
Cyril Waechter BIM Insight
Heinrich
PlaniBIM SA
Randolph
Incognito
Flurin Müller
Louis Trümpler
Matthew Fuller
OpeningDesign
Thomas Krijnen
carlopav
Alex
Lawrence Giroux
Ari Pikkarainen
Guest
Duarte Farrajota Ramos
Víctor Bertran
ppaawweeuu
Hannes Wörn
Losepacific
cvillagrasa
Owura_qu
Arjan
Dumitru Minciu
Frode Lund Tharaldsen
Hannes
KennethR
Rodas
StefStap
Sven Amiet
tlang
Jonny Knopp
Abdelhamid BELMAARIS
Bedrossian Ádám
Denis Pommier
Dmitriy Koptev
Fabian Emanuel Kitzberger
Henning M.
Leon ten Brinke
Martina
Matthieu
Mattijs
N1k0
Sam Morley
Udo
bimage
bitenergie
Hjalti
Abdelmalek HARRAG
Costantino Manes
Fernando M Jimena
Haritonov Alexander
Miguel Azenha
Verena Dannapfel
Alexander Kleemann
Alfred
Aslejo
Ben Petrie
Benjamin Smith
Benny
Betz
Bruno Perdigão
Carlos
Choong1219
Christian
Christoph Mellüh
Cristina
Dawid Fedko
Jean-Pascal
Krande
Mitch
Pedro Franco
Pius
Rafel Bayarre
Royner
Smiljan Tukic
Tim McGinley
casiovadal
Arun
Carlos Alexandre
Harris Karim
Louis
Mayday
bclmnt
Marco Andrade
Art
Balázs Révai
Madars Siksna
Valter
Артём
Amazing work, once again everyone involved!
It's still under work, as I'm adding the courses and the details about the platform, but this is going to be the link for now: BIMvoice Academy
I will publish a video with details about this, when I launch the following days.
Bonsai v0.8.4 has been released with 1111 new features and fixes. It's our built environment, help support Bonsai: 100% free and open source software that lets you author and document BIM data fully to ISO standards. It's built by the AEC community, for the AEC community. Get it today: https://bonsaibim.org/
Blender 5.0 support!
Blender 5.0, being a major release brings an insanely huge number of new features, but along with it, some necessary upgrades to ensure Bonsai compatibility. We're pleased to announce that Bonsai now supports Blender 5.0!
IfcTester website released to create and edit IDS files online
Ever wanted to edit or create IDS files? Thanks to the amazing work by Sayan Das during this year's GSoC, you can now do so with IfcTester.org. You can simply visit the website, open or create new IDS files, and also load IFC files directly in the browser (all client side, so it's never uploaded anywhere) and audit it live as you edit the IDS. This interface is also integrated into Bonsai, so you can launch a local IDS editor using this webapp and audit the actively loaded IFC in your Bonsai session.
RocksDB support for managing huge IFC models
A huge amount of work was done by Thomas Krijnen on supporting streaming and RocksDB to handle arbitrarily / infinitely large IFC models. When dealing with large models, there is a risk of running out of memory and taking a very long time to simply open the model. A new streaming parser lets you stream (i.e. with fixed memory usage) and convert an .ifc into a .rdb file (this is a reserialisation, not a conversion, so the IFC schema is preserved and no data is lost). The .rdb file may then be opened in a fraction of the time and a fraction of the memory usage (as in, 0.5% !!! of the SPF format). Yes, the green line really is that small in the chart below on a sample model.
Because this is relatively new, it still needs a lot more battle testing and experimenting to see how to best expose this to users, but this already has a number of usecases in business analytics where large companies regularly process and analyse large models.
Support for Conan is being worked on and probably coming in the next release cycle. There is also now an IfcOpenShell build for Linux ARM64. Due to Github phasing out an older Mac version, a large portion of the build systems needed upgrades. Shared libraries are also now available in IfcOpenShell, so DLLs are now available.
Pyodide wheels
When building webapps with IfcOpenShell, you can now easily use Pyodide and Micropip to import IfcOpenShell instead of self-hosting the package. See more instructions here.
Other significant improvements
Excluding the usual slew of bugfixes and UI improvements and small features, here are some more significant ones:
Snapping improvements, support for curve objects, and support for large number precision
Separate Z-up node in GLB
Xeokit JSON serialiser
Fix #7364: If you change the width/height of a drawing camera it doesn't scale the text decoration.
Fix section annotations squashed in section views
Fix critical crashes in MacOS
IfcTester supports IFC2X3 type element mappings and checking for USERDEFINED predefined types, and bugfixes related to prohibited specifications
Work schedules can now count inputs and outputs
Auto selection of elements to related tasks in work schedules
Optimisations in drawing activation and switching
Fix random crashes when editing text
Psets can now be edited for zones
New IfcPatch recipe to convert AGS to IFC for bore hole sampling
Lots of new patches and API functions related to alignment authoring
Change path of linked IFC without removing and reloading
All changes
All changes can view the directly via the Git logs. A huge thanks to the growing volume of new contributors who are joining the team and changing the industry. You can too!
Credits for this release (in order of commits via git shortlog -sn --since "2025-07-16"):
546 Andrej730
247 Thomas Krijnen
90 Dion Moult
48 Ryan Schultz
26 Richard Brice
24 Bruno Perdigão
16 krande
13 falken10vdl
12 dependabot[bot]
11 Massimo Fabbro
11 myoualid
11 Esteban DUGUEPEROUX
7 Christoph Mellüh
6 Sayan Jyoti Das
6 daniel-augusto
5 Bruno Postle
5 c-mellueh
4 Osyotr
3 Andrea Ghensi
2 Robin Quint
2 Stephen Boddy
2 carlopav
2 sboddy
2 smr
2 shmoody_y
1 Chris Mayo
1 Fernando Gussão Bellon
1 Kristoffer Andersen
1 Louis Casteleyn
1 Michael Godsven
1 Yan Peng
1 kaplus
1 nameloCmaS
Donors since the last release:
FOSS-is-the-future
(CLOSED - PAID OUT) - Visualize (Wall/Floor) Layers in BlenderBIM/FreeCAD
Cyril Waechter BIM Insight
Gortemaker Algra Feenstra
Opening Design LLC (OpeningDesign)
BIMvoice
1ncognito
PlaniBIM SA
Randolph
CORE Digital Engineering
Heinrich
Lawrence Giroux
Matthew Fuller
carlopav
Tomasz
Incognito
Marius Zumwald
Scott Lecher
Full infra (ifc4.3) geometry implementation
Louis Trümpler
Oke
Hannes Wörn
Ari Pikkarainen
E4tech Software SA
AECO DEV
Víctor Bertran
Losepacific
cvillagrasa
ppaawweeuu
Andyro
emiliano
StefStap
Sven Amiet
Haritonov Alexander
Duarte Farrajota Ramos
JONATHON BROUGHTON
Jocelin Birling
Tobias Jörn
Arjan
Frode Lund Tharaldsen
Hannes
Rodas
Guest
Jonny Knopp
Aether Engineering s.a.s. (Aether Engineering)
Dion Moult
Ivo Leeman
Mats Norén
KennethR
Dumitru Minciu
tlang
bitenergie
Bedrossian Ádám
Dmitriy Koptev
Henning M.
Leon ten Brinke
Mattijs
N1k0
Udo
bimage
Lukas Alberts
Thomas Krijnen
Vyer Technologies
Denis Pommier
Brendon Reid
Abdelhamid BELMAARIS
Alex
Fabian Emanuel Kitzberger
Hjalti
Smiljan Tukic
Abdelmalek HARRAG
André Bonfanti
BimETS
David Felix
Keith
Sam Morley
Arun
Marcos
Martina
Albert Ray Ratcliffe
Benjamin Smith
Choong1219
David B InfraBIM
Alexander Kleemann
Aslejo
Benny
Bruno Perdigão
Christian
Christoph Mellüh
Krande
Rafel Bayarre
Royner
Tim McGinley
bclmnt
casiovadal
Mitch
Matthieu
Mayday
Owura_qu
Valter
Apple M1 build server
Carlos
Dawid Fedko
Jean-Pascal
Pedro Franco
Madars Siksna
vdl
zoomer
Alfred
Louis
Cristina
Harris Karim
Omar Zerhouni
Marco Andrade
Betz
Marcin Boguslawski
Pius
Ben Petrie
Cintia
Manu Varkey
Carlos Alexandre
Miguel
Balázs Révai
Dirk Olbrich
GPM UNIVERSAL MX
Stephen Cremin
Lars
Anthony
Christopher
Costantino Manes
Fernando M Jimena
Francesc
Gaurav Rampal
Miguel Azenha
Verena Dannapfel
atomkarinca
jsoler
Cordero Architecture
Open Source Collective
Agents of Architecture
Ana Paula Bolognini
Emilio Tasso
Joern Rettweiler
Loïc
Marin Ljuban
Vinícius De Souza Lima
Alessandro
Antonio
Art
Enrico
Mario Turibio
Pascal Nicolas
Roel Vyvey
van duong
Артём
Dale
Bonsai v0.8.5 has been released with 962 new features and fixes. It's our built environment, help support Bonsai: 100% free and open source software that lets you author and document BIM data fully to ISO standards. It's built by the AEC community, for the AEC community. Get it today: https://bonsaibim.org/
This release is a little bit different to our usual releases. I'd best describe it as a pause for breath.
The world is changing. Software is changing. The definitions of hard, time consuming, or valuable in the virtual world are changing. The very definition of software freedom is being reframed in an entirely new context.
For those who want to delve deeper, the two main threads I'd advise is addressing core issues and contribution strategies. The Matrix chat has been bustling, so please join in and see what's happening ... because there is a lot happening!
A big driver for this release was the release of Blender 5.1. Due to upstream changes, we have to release alongside to keep support. There are also a lot of structural work happening in branches that sooner or later, need merging. For these reasons, this release is a "line in the sand" - a checkpoint before a big journey begins. If you want to delve into the unknown, I can only recommend joining the OSArch Matrix chat and checking out the unstable releases. As such, this release is a bit more under the hood than usual.
Onwards.
Blender 5.1 support
Blender 5.1 is out, and we now support it! This is a bigger deal than usual because we release with Python 3.13, not Python 3.11 any more.
BonsaiPR! A community driven build to stay ahead of the game
One of the biggest things to resolve was the increased pace of community contributions. There has been a lot of fantastic work done and we cannot keep up right now to merge it into the main branch of code. So introducing: BonsaiPR! BonsaiPR (Pull Request - the jargon when we propose a contribution), which contains all community contributions.
Note that community contributions piling up right now is because currently there is a lot of work being done on core features, but rest assured we expect to address them.
Bonsai upgrades
Parametric gizmo system — interactive dimension-line gizmos for editing doors, windows, stairs, railings, roofs; default parameters editable in preferences; bulk type reassignment dialog.
Search tool — new simplified search with suggestions, chained filters with set operations, JSON-backed filter queries, enum value suggestions.
Snap / polyline — major snap robustness work (wireframe BVH perf, x-ray refactor, partial-behind-camera, object-changing-mid-operator); Blender-native angle snap setting honoured in wall/profile/polyline tools.
Text / annotation — bulk text editing reimplemented via copy-attribute paradigm; signed-number formatting; sort/reverse/join format functions; newline handling in SVG text literals.
Drawings — section/elevation tag right-click opens drawing; remove coplanar same-material boundaries in SVG; annotation vertex-order preserved on subdivision; comma-separated stylesheet paths; imperial unit fixes for elevation/spatial decorators.
IfcOpenShell has always stood out has having an extensive authoring API. This was previously accessible as a Python library, but now these tools are wrapped in a command line interface. This is the bundled in an MCP server which allows users to just ... talk to AI and let the AI interrogate and edit the model.
In addition to authoring, there is a new tool called IfcQuery to "ask questions" about the model, and even render out simple visuals to "see" the model.
ifcquery — new CLI tool for IFC model interrogation (with contexts, materials, plot, render subcommands, --format ids, foreach chainable syntax).
ifcedit — new CLI wrapper for ifcopenshell.api mutation functions; composes with ifcquery for shell scripting.
ifcmcp (named ifcopenshell-mcp on PyPI) — new MCP server for IFC model querying and editing, with sse/streamable-http transports.
ifcchat — new AI chat interface with support for Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, and OpenRouter providers; token throttling and compaction; IFC4X3 default.
Plumbing and build changes
ifctester webapp — rewritten in TypeScript with biome lint; prohibited specifications surfaced more clearly; pyodide-based embed.
Pyodide WASM wheels — published via new CI workflow with release tags.
Windows ARM64 support for IfcOpenShell.
Visual Studio 2026 and CMake 4 support across build-deps.
Python 3.13 enabled for stable and daily Bonsai builds; Python 3.14 fixes landed.
Python 3.9 support dropped (EOL).
Rocky 9 switch for Linux builds; uv for recent Python.
Major CMake modernisation: exported IfcOpenShellConfig.cmake, proper find_package support, externalised serializer/mapping/IfcGeom configs, PUBLIC_HEADER installs, _d debug postfix on Windows, ccache as option, OCCT cmake config preferred over explicit vars.
Examples (IfcOpenHouse, IfcAdvancedHouse, IfcAlignment) build via the exported cmake package.
Dockerfile for Bonsai; AGENTS.md contributor guide; VS Code debug integration; maintenance/bleeding-edge install docs.
Critical bugfixes
Bugs ebb and flow, but those marked as critical severity have been targeted, and now only a handful remain. This is of particular interest to Mac users, who should now see a lot less crashy behaviour.
API / core
New APIs: structural.assign_product, structural.assign_to_building, geometry.add_topology_representation, geometry.clip_solid, geometry.clip_solid_bounded, geometry.copy_representation.
boundary.edit_attributes now accepts PhysicalOrVirtualBoundary / InternalOrExternalBoundary; assign_connection_geometry crash fixed.
Python validate.py gains --recursion-limit; Indeterminate propagation in rule engine; invalid entity-name parsing no longer terminates.
ifcclash advanced package with smart-group clash support.
Large BCF files now use Zip64.
All changes
All changes can view the directly via the Git logs. A huge thanks to the growing volume of new contributors who are joining the team and changing the industry. You can too!
Credits for this release (in order of commits via git shortlog -sn --since "2025-11-20"):
366 Andrej730
144 falken10vdl
102 Dion Moult
71 Ryan Schultz
65 Thomas Krijnen
51 dependabot[bot]
47 Bruno Postle
23 Esteban DUGUEPEROUX
17 Gorgious
12 geronimi73
11 Richard Brice
11 Sayan Jyoti Das
7 Bruno Perdigão
6 tsomanna_QCOM
5 José Aliste
5 Stephen Boddy
3 Sebastian Schilling
2 Christoph Mellüh
2 DesertSpringsCivil
2 Gorgious56
2 Massimo Fabbro
1 Ary Obenholzner
1 Diego Mateos
1 Dirk Olbrich
1 Esteban Dugueperoux
1 HugoBallee
1 Kristoffer Andersen
1 Parag Debnath
1 Pierre LeMoine
1 Vincent Cadoret
1 myoualid
1 ssg3d
Donors since the last release:
FOSS-is-the-future
Opening Design LLC (OpeningDesign)
CORE Digital Engineering
Randolph
BIMvoice
PlaniBIM SA
Cyril Waechter BIM Insight
Mats Norén
JONATHON BROUGHTON
Speckle
Vyer Technologies
Marius Zumwald
carlopav
1ncognito
Incognito
Guest
Louis Trümpler
Duarte Farrajota Ramos
Ari Pikkarainen
Matthew Fuller
bclmnt
Víctor Bertran
ppaawweeuu
Losepacific
Nigel
Hannes Wörn
cvillagrasa
Jordi Espada
On-Track - BIM Software and Consultancy
StefStap
Hannes
KennethR
Rodas
Frode Lund Tharaldsen
Sven Amiet
Arjan
Marin Ljuban
Anthony
Fabian Emanuel Kitzberger
Madars Siksna
Betz
Matthieu
Martina
Sam Morley
Denis Pommier
Udo
Henning M.
Bedrossian Ádám
Dmitriy Koptev
Abdelhamid BELMAARIS
Mattijs
Leon ten Brinke
Luc Van Lier
Cintia
Louis
bitenergie
N1k0
Hjalti
Andras
maxfb87
Costantino Manes
Michael Godsven
Mayday
Harris Karim
Aslejo
Pedro Franco
Mitch
Krande
Benjamin Smith
atomkarinca
Alfred
Carlos Alexandre
Ben Petrie
Pius
Smiljan Tukic
Jean-Pascal
Bruno Perdigão
Tim McGinley
Rafel Bayarre
Benny
Alexander Kleemann
Royner
casiovadal
Christoph Mellüh
Balázs Révai
Christian
Stuart
rtree
Choong1219
Deniz
Aero
bimage
Solararchitekt
Marco Andrade
HIDEKI
Levin
Cristina
Wojtek
IHADDADENE DJAMEL
Valter
Peter
bruno
Jaroslav Hlinka
Albert
Anônimo
Enzo Albuquerque
Congrats team for release and Blender 5.1 , So as you know my biggest wish is good MEP authoring tool in open source world so if is possible how to expose MEP connection point to MCP so we can use llm models as autorouter for generating pipes something like select all tubs and hot water storage tank and ask agents (“ connect all hot tubs hot water pipes to storage water pipe using plastic ppr pipes and use the shortest route “) if this is possible I don’t know , but how expose elements to MCP agents and llms
This release is a little bit different to our usual releases. I'd best describe it as a pause for breath.
Wow, a "Snow Leopard" release !
And as back then with OSX, again, I love all of those "no new features" of v0.8.5.
Especially the Parametric gizmo system.
When you use the daily builds, you easily forgot how Bonsai evolved. So for me each official release announcement by @Moult is a great opportunity to look back and realise what happened since.
And also thanks to @falken10vdl for the sync of .blend and .ifc !
This is a solid update—lots of meaningful improvements, especially around IFC workflows, auditing, and handling complex geometry like terrains and grids. The new IFCPatch tool and enhanced BIMTester features look particularly useful for real-world BIM cleanup and validation.
I’ve been exploring similar “practical tool” experiences in a different space with my own project: https://ti84calculatoronline.org/. While it’s focused on a TI-84-style graphing calculator, the idea is the same—making complex functionality accessible directly in the browser without extra setup.
From experience, features like your new search (with regex) and visual color coding are game-changers—just like how instant graphing and equation solving improves usability in calculators, these kinds of UI enhancements really reduce friction for users working with technical data.
Overall, this release feels like a big step toward making BlenderBIM more user-friendly while still keeping the power users covered. Looking forward to seeing how the partial write workflow evolves next 👍
Comments
Bonsai v0.8.3 has been released with 770 new features and fixes. It's our built environment, help support Bonsai: 100% free and open source software that lets you author and document BIM data fully to ISO standards. It's built by the AEC community, for the AEC community. Get it today: https://bonsaibim.org/
These release notes are rather sparse due to the lack of time (working overtime and life), but rest assured a lot has gone into this release, in particular around bugfixing and polish. Thanks to your donations, we are able to be financially sustainable and development never stops :) Ignoring usability upgrades, bugfixes, optimisations, and minor features, the biggest new features of note are:
Outside features, recently IfcOpenShell and Bonsai has been showcased at two events by a number of speakers: buildingSMART Australiasia XChange in Sydney and the Dutch Revit User Group. Ryan Schultz has also released his extensive library of Bonsai tutorials, Yassine Oualid has launched an online programming course focusing on IfcOpenShell called AECO.DEV, and Petru Conduraru is launching the BIMVoice Academy (note: URL available soon).
All changes
All changes can view the directly via the Git logs. A huge thanks to the growing volume of new contributors who are joining the team and changing the industry. You can too!
Credits for this release (in order of commits via
git shortlog -sn --since "2025-04-16"):Donors since the last release:
Amazing work, once again everyone involved!
It's still under work, as I'm adding the courses and the details about the platform, but this is going to be the link for now: BIMvoice Academy
I will publish a video with details about this, when I launch the following days.
Bonsai v0.8.4 has been released with 1111 new features and fixes. It's our built environment, help support Bonsai: 100% free and open source software that lets you author and document BIM data fully to ISO standards. It's built by the AEC community, for the AEC community. Get it today: https://bonsaibim.org/
Blender 5.0 support!
Blender 5.0, being a major release brings an insanely huge number of new features, but along with it, some necessary upgrades to ensure Bonsai compatibility. We're pleased to announce that Bonsai now supports Blender 5.0!
IfcTester website released to create and edit IDS files online
Ever wanted to edit or create IDS files? Thanks to the amazing work by Sayan Das during this year's GSoC, you can now do so with IfcTester.org. You can simply visit the website, open or create new IDS files, and also load IFC files directly in the browser (all client side, so it's never uploaded anywhere) and audit it live as you edit the IDS. This interface is also integrated into Bonsai, so you can launch a local IDS editor using this webapp and audit the actively loaded IFC in your Bonsai session.
RocksDB support for managing huge IFC models
A huge amount of work was done by Thomas Krijnen on supporting streaming and RocksDB to handle arbitrarily / infinitely large IFC models. When dealing with large models, there is a risk of running out of memory and taking a very long time to simply open the model. A new streaming parser lets you stream (i.e. with fixed memory usage) and convert an .ifc into a .rdb file (this is a reserialisation, not a conversion, so the IFC schema is preserved and no data is lost). The .rdb file may then be opened in a fraction of the time and a fraction of the memory usage (as in, 0.5% !!! of the SPF format). Yes, the green line really is that small in the chart below on a sample model.
Because this is relatively new, it still needs a lot more battle testing and experimenting to see how to best expose this to users, but this already has a number of usecases in business analytics where large companies regularly process and analyse large models.
For more information, check here and here.
Under the hood build upgrades
Support for Conan is being worked on and probably coming in the next release cycle. There is also now an IfcOpenShell build for Linux ARM64. Due to Github phasing out an older Mac version, a large portion of the build systems needed upgrades. Shared libraries are also now available in IfcOpenShell, so DLLs are now available.
Pyodide wheels
When building webapps with IfcOpenShell, you can now easily use Pyodide and Micropip to import IfcOpenShell instead of self-hosting the package. See more instructions here.
Other significant improvements
Excluding the usual slew of bugfixes and UI improvements and small features, here are some more significant ones:
All changes
All changes can view the directly via the Git logs. A huge thanks to the growing volume of new contributors who are joining the team and changing the industry. You can too!
Credits for this release (in order of commits via
git shortlog -sn --since "2025-07-16"):Donors since the last release:
Bonsai v0.8.5 has been released with 962 new features and fixes. It's our built environment, help support Bonsai: 100% free and open source software that lets you author and document BIM data fully to ISO standards. It's built by the AEC community, for the AEC community. Get it today: https://bonsaibim.org/
This release is a little bit different to our usual releases. I'd best describe it as a pause for breath.
The world is changing. Software is changing. The definitions of hard, time consuming, or valuable in the virtual world are changing. The very definition of software freedom is being reframed in an entirely new context.
For those who want to delve deeper, the two main threads I'd advise is addressing core issues and contribution strategies. The Matrix chat has been bustling, so please join in and see what's happening ... because there is a lot happening!
A big driver for this release was the release of Blender 5.1. Due to upstream changes, we have to release alongside to keep support. There are also a lot of structural work happening in branches that sooner or later, need merging. For these reasons, this release is a "line in the sand" - a checkpoint before a big journey begins. If you want to delve into the unknown, I can only recommend joining the OSArch Matrix chat and checking out the unstable releases. As such, this release is a bit more under the hood than usual.
Onwards.
Blender 5.1 support
Blender 5.1 is out, and we now support it! This is a bigger deal than usual because we release with Python 3.13, not Python 3.11 any more.
BonsaiPR! A community driven build to stay ahead of the game
One of the biggest things to resolve was the increased pace of community contributions. There has been a lot of fantastic work done and we cannot keep up right now to merge it into the main branch of code. So introducing: BonsaiPR! BonsaiPR (Pull Request - the jargon when we propose a contribution), which contains all community contributions.
Check it out here! https://docs.bonsaibim.org/guides/development/installation.html#bonsaipr-bleeding-edge-installation
Note that community contributions piling up right now is because currently there is a lot of work being done on core features, but rest assured we expect to address them.
Bonsai upgrades
FLOW_SEGMENT_U_SHAPEandFLOW_SEGMENT_RECTANGULAR_HOLLOW, polyline cable-segment port auto-connection.A ton of new CLI tools and AI integration
IfcOpenShell has always stood out has having an extensive authoring API. This was previously accessible as a Python library, but now these tools are wrapped in a command line interface. This is the bundled in an MCP server which allows users to just ... talk to AI and let the AI interrogate and edit the model.
In addition to authoring, there is a new tool called IfcQuery to "ask questions" about the model, and even render out simple visuals to "see" the model.
This has been packaged in the IfcOpenShell AI Chat website.
--format ids,foreachchainable syntax).ifcopenshell.apimutation functions; composes with ifcquery for shell scripting.ifcopenshell-mcpon PyPI) — new MCP server for IFC model querying and editing, with sse/streamable-http transports.Plumbing and build changes
uvfor recent Python.IfcOpenShellConfig.cmake, properfind_packagesupport, externalised serializer/mapping/IfcGeom configs,PUBLIC_HEADERinstalls,_ddebug postfix on Windows, ccache as option, OCCT cmake config preferred over explicit vars.Critical bugfixes
Bugs ebb and flow, but those marked as critical severity have been targeted, and now only a handful remain. This is of particular interest to Mac users, who should now see a lot less crashy behaviour.
API / core
structural.assign_product,structural.assign_to_building,geometry.add_topology_representation,geometry.clip_solid,geometry.clip_solid_bounded,geometry.copy_representation.boundary.edit_attributesnow acceptsPhysicalOrVirtualBoundary/InternalOrExternalBoundary;assign_connection_geometrycrash fixed.geometry.connect_pathgainsconnection_geometryparameter.control.assign_control— deprecatedrelated_objectarg removed.remove_deep→remove_deep2migrated across API.project.append_asset— material-set/layer dedup and orphan fixes.Geometry / IfcConvert
IfcSectionedSurface+IfcSectionedSolidHorizontalviaIfcAxis2PlacementLinearmapping;IfcOpenCrossProfileDefand sectioned-surface branching.--make-volumeoption for applyingBOPAlgo_MakerVolumeto non-manifold opening subtraction..jsonand.rdbserializer docs; default deflection tolerance raised for performance.IfcLinearPlacementfallback warning fix; simplifiedIfcAxis2PlacementLineardefaults (later reverted).validate.pygains--recursion-limit; Indeterminate propagation in rule engine; invalid entity-name parsing no longer terminates.ifcclashadvanced package with smart-group clash support.All changes
All changes can view the directly via the Git logs. A huge thanks to the growing volume of new contributors who are joining the team and changing the industry. You can too!
Credits for this release (in order of commits via
git shortlog -sn --since "2025-11-20"):Donors since the last release:
Congrats team for release and Blender 5.1 , So as you know my biggest wish is good MEP authoring tool in open source world so if is possible how to expose MEP connection point to MCP so we can use llm models as autorouter for generating pipes something like select all tubs and hot water storage tank and ask agents (“ connect all hot tubs hot water pipes to storage water pipe using plastic ppr pipes and use the shortest route “) if this is possible I don’t know , but how expose elements to MCP agents and llms
Congrats! Love the level of consistent development and suport for Bonsai!
Congrats !
Wow, a "Snow Leopard" release !
And as back then with OSX, again, I love all of those "no new features" of v0.8.5.
Especially the Parametric gizmo system.
When you use the daily builds, you easily forgot how Bonsai evolved. So for me each official release announcement by @Moult is a great opportunity to look back and realise what happened since.
And also thanks to @falken10vdl for the sync of .blend and .ifc !
This is a solid update—lots of meaningful improvements, especially around IFC workflows, auditing, and handling complex geometry like terrains and grids. The new IFCPatch tool and enhanced BIMTester features look particularly useful for real-world BIM cleanup and validation.
I’ve been exploring similar “practical tool” experiences in a different space with my own project: https://ti84calculatoronline.org/. While it’s focused on a TI-84-style graphing calculator, the idea is the same—making complex functionality accessible directly in the browser without extra setup.
From experience, features like your new search (with regex) and visual color coding are game-changers—just like how instant graphing and equation solving improves usability in calculators, these kinds of UI enhancements really reduce friction for users working with technical data.
Overall, this release feels like a big step toward making BlenderBIM more user-friendly while still keeping the power users covered. Looking forward to seeing how the partial write workflow evolves next 👍