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Blender Foundation has officially announced the release of Blender 3.3 LTS, the first long-term support release of the software's 3.X series. The newly-released version of the software brings a new hair grooming system, new nodes for creating and adjusting UV maps, improvements to Grease Pencil, and tons of smaller upgrades and enhancements designed to improve Blender workflows and pipelines.
The highlight of the update is the new hair grooming system that comes with Blender 3.3. Featuring a Sculpt mode, support for Geometry Nodes, and tons of auxiliary tools, such as Add/Delete, Density, Comb, Snake Hook, Pinch, Puff, Smooth, and Slide, the system brings never-before-seen control for grooming hair in Blender.
The new system features:
- Sculpt on top of curves deformed with Geometry Nodes
- Snap to the nearest or deformed mesh surface
- Supports EEVEE and Cycles
- Curves sculpt mode supports selecting control points or curves
- Spreadsheet Editor filter by selected Curves or Points
- Symmetry support in X, Y, Z axes
- Select Random, Select Endpoints, and Grow/Shrink selection operators
The software's Geometry Nodes toolset has got two new nodes that would definitely simplify your unwrapping workflow. Meet UV Unwrap and Pack UV Islands, two novel nodes that allow one to create and adjust UV maps procedurally using Geometry Nodes.
And here's a full list of new nodes:
- Shortest Edge Paths: Finds the best path along edges from every vertex to a set of end vertices.
- Edge Paths to Curves: This node generates a separate curve for every edge path from a set of start vertices.
- Edge Paths to Selection: Generates an edge selection that includes every edge that is part of an edge path.
- Volume Cube Primitive: Allows sampling a field in a dense bounding box to create an arbitrary volume grid.
- Points Primitive: Creates any number of point cloud points, with position and radius defined by fields.
- Mesh to Volume: Same functionality as the existing mesh modifier, now also available as a node.
- Instance Scale + Instance Rotation: These two new nodes provide access to instance transformations.
- Interpolate Domain: Allows evaluating a field on a different domain inside of another field, avoiding the need for a “Capture Attribute” node.
- Intersecting Edges: The Mesh Boolean node now has an output field that gives just the intersecting edges.
- UV Unwrap + Pack UV Islands: Nodes for creating or modifying UV Maps.
The software's Grease Pencil tool has also got lots of cool new features. The tool's Line Art modifier is now able to calculate accurate cast shadow and light/shadow separation line given a light source reference object, Dopesheet and Timeline editors now show Grease Pencil keyframes alongside other objects and properties, loading time for Line Art objects has been greatly reduced, and much more.
Blender 3.3 LTS takes a significant leap in usability around Library Overrides, the backbone of Blender production. The Outliner’s Library Overrides mode now displays all overridden properties in a hierarchy, using their labels and icons where applicable.
And here's the list of some of the smaller upgrades and improvements:
Animation & Rigging
- Custom Properties for Actions
- Improvements to NLA frame start/end sliders
VFX & Video
- Default to descending average sorting in Movie Clip Editor
- Improved playback of Variable Frame Rate files
- Smooth drawing in Mask Editor
- Mask spline visibility overlay
- Add mask blending factor for combined overlay
Core
- Faster JPEG preview thumbnails
- Font fallback support
- Duplicating objects is much faster
- Better EXR preview thumbnails
Video Sequencer
- New retiming system
- Add filter method to strip transform
- Delete Strip and Scene in one step
- Add API function to select displayed meta strip
- Add Scene and Strip at the same time in one action
Modeling
- New Shade Auto Smooth operator
- Nearest Face Snap mode
- Improvements to Surface Deform modifier
I/O
- USD: Export OpenVDB volumes
- Alembic: support for export presets
- glTF: Several improvements
- OBJ: Support “xyzrgb” and “MRGB” vertex colors
- STL: New experimental importer
- Massive performance gains importing large amounts of objects in USD, Alembic, and OBJ
Sculpt, Paint
- Sculpt Elastic Transform
- Improved sculpting performance in EEVEE
- Duplicate active Color Attribute
- Support packing UDIM texture sets
- Voxel Remesh constant size
- New icons for trimming tools
UV
- Unwrap only selected
- UV Select Similar
- New options in Average Island Scale
- Minimize Stretch will now unflip faces
- Improved constrain-to-image-bounds
User Interface
- Display Gizmos on transform
- Pin Scene to Workspace
- Keymap Editor: auto-complete paths
- Always visible scrollbars
- Windows: Dark mode support for title bar
- Windows: Precision touchpad support
And much, much more!
You can learn more about Blender 3.3 LTS here. Also, don't forget to join our Reddit page and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
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