The Blender Foundation has published a release of the free 3D modeling package Blender 3.1, suitable for a variety of 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. Ready builds are generated for Linux, Windows and macOS.
Among the added improvements in Blender 3.1:
- A backend has been implemented for the Cycles rendering system to speed up rendering using the Metal graphics API. The backend was developed by Apple to speed up Blender on Apple computers with AMD graphics cards or M1 ARM processors.
- Implemented the ability to render a Point Cloud object directly through the Cycles engine to create entities such as sand and spray. Point clouds can be generated by geometry nodes or imported from other programs. The memory efficiency of the Cycles rendering system has been significantly improved. A new node "Point Info" has been added, which allows accessing the data of individual points.
- Provided the use of the GPU to speed up the work of the modifier for piecewise construction of smooth surfaces (Subdivision).
- Significantly accelerated editing of polygonal meshes.
- Implemented indexing in the Asset Browser, which simplifies work with various additional objects, materials, and environment blocks.
- The image editor provides the ability to work with images of a very large size (for example, with a resolution of 52K).
- The speed of exporting files in .obj and .fbx formats has been increased by several orders of magnitude due to rewriting the code for exporting from Python to C ++. For example, if it used to take 20 minutes to export a large project to an Fbx file, now the export time has been reduced to 20 seconds.
- In the implementation of geometric nodes, memory consumption has been reduced (up to 20%), support for multithreading and calculation of node schemes has been improved.
- Added 19 new nodes for procedural modeling. Including added nodes for extrusion (Extrude), scaling elements (Scale Elements), reading fields from indexes (Field at Index) and accumulation fields (Accumulate Field). New mesh modeling tools are proposed.
- The graph editor offers new tools for animation.
- Improved user interface. The ability to automatically show a list of filtered nodes when dragging sockets with the mouse is provided, which allows you to see only those types of sockets that can be connected to. Support has been added to instances to define their own dynamic attributes. Implemented the ability to mark groups of nodes as plug-ins (Asset), as well as drag&drop moving from the browser of plug-ins to the nodes of geometry, shading and post-processing.
- New modifiers have been added to the Grease Pencil 2D drawing and animation system, which allows you to create sketches in 3D and then use them in a 3D environment as three-dimensional objects (a XNUMXD model is formed based on several flat sketches in different angles). The fill tool allows negative values ββfor a partial fill along a path to create fringed effects.
- Expanded capabilities of the non-linear video editor. Added support for moving data blocks and elements in drag&drop mode during preview.
- In the modeling interface, it is possible to give individual vertices an arbitrary sharpness.
- Added support for Pixar OpenSubdiv technology for modeling, rendering and exporting in Alembic and USD formats.
- The Copy Global Transform add-on is included to link the transformation of one object to another to ensure their cohesive animation.
Source: opennet.ru