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The highly-anticipated long-term support release brings Simulation Nodes, an upgraded UV Packing system, improved Cycles renderer, and more.
The Blender Foundation has officially released Blender 3.6 LTS, a highly-anticipated long-term support version of the company's open-source 3D software and the final LTS release of Blender's 3.x series.
Exiting beta, the application comes with Simulation Nodes, a long-awaited framework for setting up particle-based simulations, an upgraded UV Packing system, multiple performance improvements to Cycles and mesh editing, and many other new features and improvements.
The highlight of the release is, without a doubt, the introduction of Simulation Nodes, a support for simulations added to the software's Geometry Nodes toolset. Controlled via a new Simulation Nodes panel, the simulation results can be cached or baked to storage, visualized in the Timeline editor, and even interacted with in real-time.
The software's Cycles renderer has also been improved and now loads geometries and copies mesh attributes much faster. The Light Tree feature, introduced in Blender 3.5, is now faster as well thanks to multi-threading and instancing support.
Blender's UV packing engine has been greatly enhanced, featuring improved performance on large meshes and better support for non-square materials. The updated version of the engine introduces several new features, including:
- Shapeshift: Choose the final shape of the UV packing between Exact Shape (Concave), Convex Hull, or Bounding Box, giving layouts that use available space depending the geometry.
- Better Together: The new Merge Overlapped option makes overlapping islands stick together during UV packing.
- Bounding Experience: Pack To > Original Bounding Box allows islands to be packed back into the original bounding box of the selection.
Blender 3.6 LTS comes with a neat asset bundle, created by Blender Studio and the Blender community, with a collection of human base meshes ready to use for sculpting, animation, and texturing.
And here are some more of Blender 3.6 LTS' new features and improvements:
Modeling
- New Retopology overlay
I/O
- FBX: Faster import/export
- FBX: Export active color layer first
- New add-on: 3DS import/export
- New C++ based PLY importer/exporter
Performance
- Faster object linking and unlinking
- 25% less memory usage in large geometries
- Better performance when exiting edit mode
- 75% faster mesh conversion with multiple UV maps
- Up to 80% improvement in memory usage of face corner “split” normal calculation
- Extracting UV map data up to 3x faster
USD
- Curves/Hair export
- Path Mask import support for multiple primitive paths
- New “Prim Path” export option
- Set emissiveColor USD Preview Surface material input when exporting
- Author opacityThreshold USD Preview Surface material attribute when exporting
Grease Pencil
- New Weight Paint tools
User Interface
- Support for sub-types in float custom properties
- Quick tooltips for Properties Editor tabs
- Cancel drag & drop with Esc/RMB
- Highlight list elements on hover
- Widen search boxes when needed
- Increased length of Open Recent menu
Node Editor
- Custom subtypes for group sockets
- Support for smooth view
- Added shortcut to Online Manual in node’s context menu
Assets
- Show tooltips with full name and description
- Clear Asset now works for all selected assets
- Hide meta-data fields if asset is read-only
- New Relative Path option per asset library
You can find the full list of Blender 3.6 LTS' new features by clicking this link. Also, don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.