The Blender Foundation has released the free 3D modeling package Blender 4.2, suitable for various tasks related to 3D modeling, 3D graphics, game development, simulation, rendering, compositing, motion tracking, sculpting, animation creation, and video editing. The code is distributed under the GPL license. Precompiled builds are available for Linux, Windows, and macOS. This release has achieved Long Term Support (LTS) status and will be supported until July 2026. LTS branches Blender 3.3 and 3.6 continue to be supported, with updates planned until September 2024 and June 2025, respectively.
Among the added improvements:
- The add-on and theme systems have been modernized and unified, transforming into a common extension concept. Extensions can now be easily installed from a disk, local repository, or from the website extensions.blender.org using Drag & Drop, and can be updated directly from the Blender interface (update checks in the repositories are performed on each launch).
- A new fully rewritten implementation of the EEVEE rendering engine has been included, which supports physically accurate real-time rendering and utilizes the GPU for visualization. The new version of the engine is being developed under the EEVEE Next project and is notable for its support of realistic rendering using global illumination (rendering considering indirect light, reflections, and refractions), displacement (deformation according to a texture map), improved SSS (Subsurface Scattering, simulating light scattering inside translucent materials), stable dithered volumetric effects during scene navigation, unlimited BSDF (Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Function) and light sources in the scene, and the application of motion blur effect in the viewport (simulating blur during fast object movements). EEVEE now allows for the automatic highlighting of intense light sources from the environment and processes them as sunlight, resulting in more realistic shadow rendering.
- The Cycles rendering system has undergone changes aimed at improving the quality and speed of rendering. A new Ray Portal BSDF node has been added for directing rays to a new location in the scene, which can be used, for example, for rendering portals. The Principled BSDF shader node now supports physically accurate thin-film interference effects, enabling realistic rendering of bubbles. The quality of noise reduction has been enhanced, and the capability to accelerate noise reduction operations using AMD GPUs on systems running Linux and Windows has been added.
- The automation capabilities for deploying and maintaining Blender builds in animation studios, as well as in isolated environments without access to the global network, have been expanded (scripts and add-ons can now be packaged as separate sets, and an '—offline-mode' flag is provided for offline execution).
- Built-in support for the PBR Neutral Tone Mapper specification published by the Khronos consortium has been integrated, allowing for photorealistic color rendering of assets.
- A new mode for quickly creating polygonal shapes has been introduced — in this mode, a new vertex is added to the polygon with each left mouse button click, and if the click coincides with the starting point, the shape closes. In sculpting mode, the stroke gesture for creating lines can now be used for trimming, forming face sets, and hiding, while the free selection gesture 'lasso' is used for hiding areas.
- A new type of sockets using matrices has been added, significantly simplifying transformations. Also, standard nodes for working with matrices have been introduced.
- The interactivity of the 'Node tools' toolkit has been enhanced, allowing for the expansion of Blender's basic capabilities and modification of existing tools using geometric nodes instead of Python scripts. The node system now utilizes viewport information and mouse position; a function has been added to apply the selected operator only after a mouse click. Optimization of geometric nodes has been conducted in relation to multithreading, speeding up node execution for scaling elements by 4-10 times and 10-20 times for UV surface sampling.
- The interface of the nonlinear video editor (Video Sequencer) has been improved. To achieve better separation, the corners of elements have been rounded, the spacing on the editing table has been increased, and the outlines of active and selected tracks have been thickened. To adjust the position of an element, simply hover the cursor over the edge of the track or area between tracks and drag the mouse while holding the left button. Elements linked to non-existent files are now highlighted in red with a special icon. Additional shadow settings for text in text tracks have been added.
- Compatibility with the CY2024 specification has been ensured, defining utilities and libraries for the VFX reference platform. Updated versions include Python 3.11, OpenEXR 3.2, OpenColorIO 2.3, and OpenSubdiv 3.6.
- Support for binding custom export handlers to each collection has been added, eliminating the need to select the format each time when re-exporting assets. For example, you can bind the glTF format for game assets or the USD format for studio work. Export settings are saved in .blend files and are not reset between sessions. The ability to import and export USD formats for hair models and import point clouds has been added. The mesh validation process during import has been accelerated by 3-2 times. Mesh validation is included when importing files in USD, OBJ, PLY, and STL formats. The ability to import multiple Alembic files at once has been introduced.
- Tools for creating portable installations have been added, which automatically capture settings to recreate the user environment. Settings are placed in the portable directory from which Blender attempts to transfer the configuration at startup.
- The post-processing system (Compositor) now supports GPU acceleration.
- The performance of the graphic editor has been significantly increased.
- The built-in text editor now features syntax highlighting for the GLSL shader language.
- The design of various dialogs has been optimized and the interface scaling improved.
- The execution of undo actions has been accelerated by 5 times.
- In user environments based on the Wayland protocol, the ability to copy and paste images from the clipboard has been implemented.
- On the Linux platform, support for registering and removing file associations has been provided, allowing the Blender application to be invoked when attempting to open various file types.
Source: opennet.ru
