Blender Foundation and the online developers community proudly present Blender 3.6 LTS!
The last long-term support release of the 3.x series.
Released June 27th, 2023
Show-off
See how the community is pushing the Freedom to Create.
Show & Tell
Round-up of what’s new, in detail.
ENTER THE SIMULATION
The Geometry Nodes project takes a leap with initial support for simulations.
TRY IT YOURSELF
Get the file used in this video to play with.
Download Demo File
GET IN THE ZONE
Simulation is defined by the “Simulation Zone”, connecting the Simulation Input and Output.
SIM IN
On the first frame, the inputs of the Simulation Input node are evaluated.
In later frames the inputs aren’t evaluated anymore, the node outputs the result of the previous frame.
SIM OUT
The Simulation Output node saves the state for the next frame.
BAKE N’ CACHE
KEEP CONTROL
Simulation results can be cached or baked to storage, this is controlled via a new “Simulation Nodes” panel in the physics tab in the Properties editor.
KEEP AN EYE
The baked or cached results can be visualized in the Timeline editor, together with other types of caches.
The color of the simulation cache matches the Simulation Zone in the nodes editor.
See the Manual
TIME TO PLAY
See your simulations in realtime.
Download 2D Smoke Puffs file
Simulations can be interacted with in realtime, simply hit play and move your objects around!
Download Jiggly Pudding file
MORE DEMO FILES
Index of Nearest
Mesh Fracturing
What the community is already making with Geometry Nodes
Guys I failed the Donut😔#geometrynodes pic.twitter.com/CpgQU2QzHa
— Xeofrios (@xeofrios) June 19, 2023
Added a bending constraint to the strings and meshed them 🙂#b3d #geometrynodes pic.twitter.com/rCS10wuPzO
— Sean (@seanterelle) May 24, 2023
Touching grass :)#blender #b3d #geometrynodes pic.twitter.com/h88p9m8pi6
— Shahzod Boyhonov 🔶️ (@specoolar) June 21, 2023
MORE GEOMETRY NODES
- New Index of Nearest node
- Several performance improvements
CYCLES
SYNC FAST
Loading large geometries into Cycles is much faster, meaning rendering can start more quickly after geometry changes or switching to rendered view.
Up to 60x Faster copying mesh attributes.
10x Faster loading curve objects.
9x Faster loading point clouds.
4-6x Faster loading large meshes.
The Light Tree feature introduced in Blender 3.5 is now much faster thanks to multi-threading and instancing support.
Up to 11x Faster Light Tree building thanks to multi-threading.
Tested on Apple M1.
Up to 190x Faster Light Tree building on a scene with many instances.
CYCLES
HARDWARE
RAY TRACING
Support for hardware ray-tracing acceleration has been added for AMD and Intel graphics cards.
Added experimental support for AMD hardware ray-tracing acceleration, usingHIP RT. This improves performance on RX 6000, RX 7000, W6000, and W7000 series GPUs.
Known limitations:
- Windows only, as HIP RT doesn’t support Linux yet.
- Degenerate triangles may cause crashes or poor performance.
- Shadows in hair are not rendering accurately.
Requires driver version22.40.51.06 for Blender 3.6, along with enabling HIP RT in Preferences > System.
- HIP Ray Tracing
- HIP
-
Pavillion
-
Secret Deer
- Sample rendering performance (higher is better)
Hardware ray-tracing acceleration for Intel® Arc™ and Data Center GPUs, usingEmbree 4.
Known limitations:
- During their first use with oneAPI device, Ambient Occlusion and Bevel nodes will trigger a GPU binaries recompilation that will use around 9GB of memory and take several minutes. Improvements on this may come from future GPU drivers.
- Blender 3.5.1
- Blender 3.6 LTS
-
Scanlands
-
Pavillion
- Render time in seconds (lower is better)
PLUS
- Reduced memory usage of volumes in Apple Silicon GPUs
- OSL: support for new standard microfacet closures from MaterialX
- Byte color attributes are now supported for point clouds and curves
- Improved Fresnel handling of the Glass BSDF
- Added support for Light Trees in AMD GPUs
It’s a keeper.
The LTS in Blender 3.6 LTS stands for “long-term support”, meaning it will get fixes for up to two years, until June 2025.
UV EDITING
TIME TO PACK
Packing UV islands has been greatly improved thanks to a new UV packing engine.
Dramatically improving performance on large meshes and improving support for non-square materials. On many real world cases, efficiency of the layout has also been increased.
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.
See the Manual
AND MORE
- Support for manual seams in UV Sphere/Cylinder Projection
- New select similar options: winding, and object
ASSET LIBRARIES
BUNDLE UP
Blender Studio and the Blender community put together an asset bundle with a collection of human base meshes ready to use for sculpting, animation, texturing, you name it.
HEAD START
The default cube is great, but it can be challenging if your goal is to sculpt a character. Worry no more, the Human Base Meshes bundle is here for you.
Featuring:
- Multi-resoluton levels for realistic assets
- Quad topology for multi-resolution sculpting
- UV maps (including UDIMs)
- Creased edges and Subdiv modifiers for planar assets
- Closed volumes for voxel remeshing
- Face sets
Drag, drop, go.
Download the bundle, add it to your Asset Libraries, and start drag and dropping from the Asset Browser into your scene.
Download Asset Bundle
MORE ANIMATION
- Alt+S for smoothing operators
- Alt+D for blending operators
- iTaSC IK solver supports keeping root bones
- Graph Editor improvements
- Fixed scroll when clicking search box in NLA/Graph Editor
- Ctrl+LMB to extend channel selections
- NLA editor improvements
- Graph Editor: Frame channels
- Display scene duration in the status bar
- Weight Paint: Extend paint mask selection
- Copy Global Transform add-on improvements
- Graph Editor settings moved to Preferences
- Head/Tail drawing of bone relationship lines
- Drivers: Introduce Context Properties
- Key menu cleaned up
- Gaussian Smooth Operator
- Graph Editor keyframing improved
- Dope Sheet improvements
Blender is and will
always be free, forever.
Releases are possible thanks to donations by the community.
Donate Monthly
Donate Once
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
- Better Subdivision Surface performance on large meshes with no loose vertices
- Up to 44% performance improvement in meshes with custom split normals data
Add-ons
- New: VDM Brush Baker
- Storypencil improvements
Library Overrides
- Major improvements to the resyncing process
Python API
- Custom Script Directories
- Improvements to Blender handlers
- Several changes to internal mesh format
- New utility to create links between virtual sockets
- FCurve key changes
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
- Fixed texture alpha on export
- Fixed duplicate shader nodes
Grease Pencil
- New Weight Paint tools
Sculpt
- Adjust Last Operation panel in Mesh/Color Filters
- Added trim orientation to Box Trim
- Transform, Trim, Project, Fairing, Filter operations in header menus
Viewport Compositor
- Support for more nodes and features
User Interface
- Support for sub-types in float custom properties
- Quick tooltips for Properties Editor tabs
- Highlight list elements on hover
- Widen search boxes when needed
- Increased length of Open Recent menu
- New emojis in fallback font
- Fixed Color Picker position
- Alt-click support to edit multiple string properties
- Better positioning of text in Measure/Ruler
- Quick Favorites: Support operator enums
- Many operator confirmations can be now be disabled
- Set Proportional Size in the Proportional Editing popover
EEVEE
- New: Transparent Pass
Node Editor
- Custom subtypes for group sockets
- Support for smooth view
- Added shortcut to Online Manual in node’s context menu
- Link-drag search can copy values of basic socket types
- Move data-block default values with link-drag search
Outliner
- Filter Grease Pencil objects
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
File Browser
- List mode items can now be dragged by the name
- New “External” context menu for performing operations outside Blender
Windows
- Auto-focus child windows on hover
- Copy/paste images in Image Editor
macOS
- Show recently opened/saved files in Dock context menu and App Expose
Text Object
- Double-click to select words
- Select text by click-drag
- “To Uppercase/Lowercase” support for more languages
- Operators to move cursor to top/bottom
Plus hundreds of bug fixes, code cleanups and refactors to make Blender more stable and easier to contribute to.
Blender splash artwork source files are available for you to play with, not only for Blender 3.6 but for previous versions as well.
Download Splash File (245MB)
CREDITS
List of developers that contributed to Blender 3.6 LTS
Splash artwork by Blender Studio
Features recap video by Jonathan Lampel from CG Cookie. Features reel video edited by Haru Legouge. Simulation Nodes video and demos by Simon Thommes. Jiggly Pudding simulation by Mingwei Lim. Index of Nearest simulation by Sean Christofferson. Assets bundle video by Julien Kaspar. Page layout and design by Pablo Vazquez. Additional help by Blender Studio, Blender Institute and the Blender community.
Huge thanks to everyone involved ❤️
The Blender team. June, 2023
