Blender Foundation has released the latest stable version of its 3.x series, the Blender 3.3 LTS (long term support). Highlights including a new hair grooming system, adding geometry nodes, more possibilities for grease pencil, improve rendering for both Cycles and Eevee and more. Scroll down to check out what's new in Blender 3.3 LTS with XRender!
| New Hair Grooming System
A total of nine new tools were added in sculpt mode for curves, allowing users to have unprecedented control for grooming hair.
You may give a watch of the new hair system presents by Andy Goralczyk from Blender Studio to get better understand of how to use it to improve your creation workflow via the demo above.
| Adding & Improving Geometry Nodes
Updates for Geometry Node in the new version not only includes more nodes with new features, but also improves performance for many existing nodes. Highlights including a new UV Unwrap node and a Pack UV Islands node. The former generates a UV map islands based on a selection of seam edges while the latter, which will "implicitly performs a Pack Islands operation" when UV Unwrap generated according to the release note, is for scaling and moving a UV map.
In addition, three new nodes, Shortest Edge Paths, Edge Paths to Curves and Edge Paths to Selection have been added to the new version, making it possible to create effects like mazes, lightning and growing vegetation easily. You may click here to check out some of the amazing results shared by artists in Blender community, together with tutorials on how to make good use of the nodes. In the meanwhile, performance for Curve nodes, Separate XYZ/Color nodes, UV Sphere and Capture Attribute also have been improved to varying degrees
| Line Art, Grease Pencil and Rendering
The Grease Pencil also gets significant improvements, with Grease Pencil keyframes now visible in the Dopesheet and Timeline. In addition, the Line Art modifier is now able to calculate accurate cast shadow and light or shadow separation line given a light source reference object.
In addition, support for Blender becomes one of the first DCC applications to officially support Intel's new Arc GPUs, and introduces support for GPU rendering on AMD Vega-generation GPUs on Linux as well as Windows.
Blender 3.3 is available for Windows 8.1+, macOS 10.13+ and Linux. You may check Blender Foundation's overview of the new features in Blender 3.3 here or learn more details about the update from the release note here. All version are free to download, you may get the latest version here or play around with the artwork shared by Piotr Krynski: Scans Island.
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