The Blender Foundation has released Blender 3, a free 4.5D modeling package suitable for a variety of tasks related to 3D modeling, 3D graphics, computer game development, simulation, rendering, compositing, motion tracking, sculpting, animation, and video editing. The code is distributed under the GPL license. Ready-made builds are available for Linux, Windows, and macOS. The release has been granted the status of an extended support (LTS) release and will be supported until July 2027. The Blender 4.2 LTS branch also continues to be supported, with updates being generated until July 2026. Support for the Blender 3.6 LTS branch has been discontinued.
Improvements added include:
- The EEVEE rendering engine implements full support for the Vulkan rendering backend. Compared to the previous version, performance has been significantly improved when using Vulkan, and the functionality of the Vulkan backend has been brought to parity with the OpenGL-based backend (for example, support for OpenXR, Subdivision, and USD/Hydra has been added). For the correct operation of the Vulkan backend, it is recommended to use the latest versions of graphics drivers and Mesa. The OpenGL backend is still used by default.
- Texture loading has been more than doubled (from 5.7 seconds to 2.5 seconds) and startup time has been significantly reduced (from 7.2 seconds to 4 seconds). Multi-threaded shader compilation is enabled by default. A setting has been added to select the shader compilation method (multi-threaded or with a separate process).
- Added a new property, "Shadow Terminator Normal Offset", which allows you to offset rays from the surface to reduce the shadow terminator artifact on low-poly geometry.
- Implemented Reverse-Z algorithm to reduce artifacts in the depth buffer.
- Added support for moving operations of piecewise construction of smooth surfaces (Subdivision) to the GPU side.
- Added "--profile-gpu" option to save profiling data to profile.json file, including CPU and GPU load information.
- Modules for importing files in CSV, PLY, OpenVDB (.vdb), STL, Wavefront and TXT formats have been added to the tools for working with geometric nodes. To import a file, simply drag it with the mouse in drag&drop mode to the geometric node editor.
The node tools now have the ability to collapse panels. The geometry node editor now supports changing mesh normals. The Set Mesh Normal node has been added to set the normal. The Format String node is offered to substitute values into a string, and the Match String node is offered to match strings.
- The compositing system (Compositor) implements procedural nodes for creating textures, and also adds support for typical nodes such as Vector Math, Vector Rotate, Mix Vector, Math and Clamp. The ability to accelerate the noise removal operation using the GPU has been added.
- The Grease Pencil 2D drawing and animation system has been expanded to allow you to create 3D sketches and then use them in a 3D environment as XNUMXD objects (a XNUMXD model is formed from several flat sketches at different angles). Integration with the compositing system (Compositor) has been provided. A new rendering pass has been added that outputs visible Grease Pencil strokes and fills to a separate layer, which can be useful for isolating, enhancing, or applying effects to Grease Pencil elements during compositing. The ability to disable Grease Pencil rendering for each layer (View Layer) has been added using the Filter option. A new anti-aliasing method (SSAA) has been implemented, making lines smoother. Support for exporting animated SVG files has been added.
Added Node Tools that allow you to use nodes to create Grease Pencil objects. Added new nodes for filling with color, adjusting the depth and smoothing the strokes in Grease Pencil.
- The UV editor provides the ability to view the UV unfolding for the active or all selected objects, regardless of the current mode, including in the image editor. The visibility and transparency of the UV unfolding can be changed via the Overlays pop-up menu.
- A new object type, Point Cloud, has been added to represent a large number of individual points in 3D space. Each point in the point cloud can store additional attributes such as radius, position, and color. The new object is significantly more performant than regular meshes and can be used to visualize scanned 3D data and simulate particles.
- The intro is based on the new game DOGWALK by Blender Studio. The game is an interactive story (a child walks a dog through a winter forest and decorates a snowman with hidden objects) and was developed to hone the tools for using Blender as a platform for developing assets and game levels for the Godot engine.
- Sculpting, texturing, and vertex painting modes now allow you to randomize hue, saturation, and color value for both the entire stroke and individual brush strokes.
- The Sculpting mode for the Trim tool has a new Manifold solver, which is only used with unwrappable meshes. Manifold is faster than the Fast mode, which has now been renamed to Float. The new solver is based on the library of the same name, which is already used in the Boolean modifier and geometry nodes.
- The user interface has been further modernized. In the node editors, adding nodes to frames has been simplified (now it is enough to simply press the F key after selecting nodes).
- The Property Editor now provides the ability to hide unused tabs to reduce interface clutter (for example, in the video editing workspace, you can hide the Object and Shading tabs).
- The asset and file browsers now feature a horizontal list view mode to fit more content on the screen. Long labels are split into two lines, with the start and end of the label prioritized (so that the file extension remains visible).
- The asset browser has a Screenshot Capture mode for quick preview of edited assets, which does not require switching to rendering (to preview, simply select an area on the screen).
- The non-linear video editor (Video Sequencer) has improved content caching. HDR support has been implemented in the preview area.
- The table editor now allows you to arbitrarily change the order of columns and change their width.
- The ability to import multiple SVG files at once has been provided.
- Added the ability to customize the color of error, warning, and information messages.
- For Linux systems, large cursors have been added for high-pixel density monitors.
- Compliant with the CY2025 specification, which defines the VFX reference platform utilities and libraries.
- The add-ons catalog offers 497 free extensions and 128 themes.
Source: opennet.ru
