Blender Foundation has officially released Blender 3.5, the latest version of its well-know 3D creation program. Blender 3.5 has been in beta for quite a while and many of you may have worked with it, but still, the new announcement included several stunning features, all of which seem to be able to empower the creation progress to a large extent. Take a look at some of the features with XRender!
| Geometry Nodes Powered Grooming Tools
One of the major leap that can't be missed, should be the updating of Blender's hair grooming workflow. A series of functional updates have greatly improved the efficiency of artist hair production, including:
Having new hair assets available in the Essentials asset library to enrich the choice for 3d creator easily.
A total of 26 new hair were added in the asset library, and users may just drag and drop them to apply.
In addition, all the hair assets are all node-based. Which also means a large number of new hair nodes that "focuses on generating or editing curves, typically used for hair" for easy generation of various hairstyles procedurally based on the geometry node system now can be accessed at esae.
A total of six kinds of hair nodes were added in Blender 3.5, including deformation, generation, guides, read, utility and write. You may click here to check the whole list of the nodes updated in the new version.
Added support for Vector Displacement Map (VDM) brushes, previously only available in professional sculpting tools such as Mudbox and ZBrush;
As Blender describes, "this type of map provide an easy way to create complex shapes that can have overhangs in one brush dab", making it possible to create more complex forms with a single dab of the brush.
| Viewport Compositor Based on GPU
In the new version, Blender's real-time render engine, Eevee, gets a new GPU accelerated Viewport Compositor that is interactive. The new compositor now applies the result of the Compositor Editor Node tree directly to the 3D Viewport.
| More Light Chooses & Higher Render Efficiency
As for Blender's ray-tracing render engine, Cycles, a light tree now can be used to sample scenes with large numbers of lights and significantly reduces noise (although at the cost of a longer render time for each sample). According to Blender, "light tree sampling is enabled by default in new scenes. It can be disabled in the Sampling > Lights panel.
In addition, Spot lights support for non-uniform object scale, area lights with ellipse shape and spread have much reduced noise and Anisotropic BSDF with Beckmann roughness using isotropic sampling is fixed. You may click here to view more details about new features added for Cycles.
| What’s More
Blender 3.5 has brought up a huge amount of new features in various sections, you may click here to have an over of the highlights, or read the Blender 3.5 release note for more details.
Blender 3.5 is available for Windows 8.1+, macOS 10.13+ (macOS 11.0 on Apple Silicon Macs) and glibc 2.28 Linux, including Ubuntu 18.10+ and RHEL 8.0+ and CentOS and Rocky Linux equivalents. You may click here to download for free.
XRender | Fast · Affordable · Reliable
