LogInAs we are just a few weeks away from the release candidate of Blender 4.2 LTS, The Blender Foundation invites users to try the Beta and help make the upcoming release rock-solid.
Earlier this month, The Blender Foundation shared a much-anticipated update on Blender 4.2, announcing that it has officially entered Beta and welcoming users to test it as much as possible and report any issues they find so everyone can enjoy a stable release scheduled to go live on July 16, 2024.
Developers can't cover all use cases that need to be tested, so this is where the power of the community comes in. Blender 4.2 is a major upgrade with loads of new features and improvements that require testing and The Blender Foundation provided a list of main areas that need to be focused on:
- EEVEE – known as EEVEE Next, a new render engine that replaces the old one and needs as much testing as possible. Open your old files and check that they render properly.
- Cycles – Ray Portals, Thin Film Interference, shader updates, denoising, sampling, and more. Open your old scenes and check if they still render the same.
- GPU-accelerated Compositor – a new performance setting that allows you to use the GPU to compute the compositing. You can find it under the Performance panel in Render Properties. In most cases, it should render faster and look fairly similar.
- Python API – try out the new methods, and commands, and see if the documentation about breaking changes regarding statically typed IDProperties, EEVEE, and others is clear.
Don't forget about Extensions, per-collection export, sculpt polyline tools, re-visited Shade Auto Smooth workflow, and so much more. The Blender Foundation also notes that hardware requirements have changed, so check the full list of compatibility changes for Blender 4.2 LTS and future releases.
Testing Blender 4.2 LTS Beta can be pretty straightforward:
- Download the latest Blender 4.2 LTS Beta
- Open your old scenes (backup first just in case)
- Check that everything looks and works fine
- In case you found a bug, report it within Blender by going to Help and Report a Bug.
Check out the original blog post for more details and download Blender 4.2 LTS Beta here. Also, don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Reddit, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.