Blender Foundation and the online developers community are proud to present the first long-term support release of the 3.x series.
Released September 7th, 2022
HAIR
WE GO
The first milestone of the new hair grooming system has landed in Blender 3.3 LTS.
The most flexible system yet, featuring Sculpt mode and support for Geometry Nodes. The possibilities are endless.
SCULPT IT
The new Sculpt mode for curves gives you unprecedented control for grooming hair.
The list of tools includes:
Add/Delete, Density, Comb, Snake Hook
Pinch, Puff, Smooth, and Slide.
FEATURING
- Sculpt on top of curves deformed with Geometry Nodes
- Snap to 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
GEOMETRY NODES
PROCEDURAL
UV UNWRAPPING
The new UV Unwrap and Pack UV Islands nodes open the possibility of creating and adjusting UV maps procedurally using Geometry Nodes.
See Manual
PATH TO
SUCCESS
Three new Geometry Nodes have landed for path-finding across mesh edges.
Create impossible mazes, lightning, growing vegetation, and so much more.
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.
PLUS THESE NEW NODES AND GOODIES
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 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.
EVEN MORE GEOMETRY NODES
- UV Sphere 3.6x faster for high resolutions
- Separate XYZ and Separate Color over 20% faster
- Speed-up Capture Attribute if input is unused
- 3-10x performance improvements in Curve nodes
GREASE PENCIL LINE ART
LIGHT & SHADOW
CONTOUR
The Line Art modifier is now able to calculate accurate cast shadow and light/shadow separation line given a light source reference object.
Read More
INTERSECTION
PRIORITY
Specify different intersection priority levels for different objects, then intersection lines would be automatically selected with the object who has the higher intersection priority.
GREAT
SILHOUETTE
Draw silhouette around selected collection, or around individual objects in that collection. LineArt is also able to identify intersecting and overlapping silhouette geometries.
ANIMATION
GREASE PENCIL
EVERYWHERE
The Dopesheet and Timeline editors now show Grease Pencil keyframes alongside other objects and properties.
Visibility of all object types can be adjusted with filters. The Grease Pencil sub-mode is still available for a more focused experience.
- Blender 3.2
- Blender 3.3 LTS
- Loading time on Mr. Elephant demo scene.
- Unit: seconds
PERFORMANCE
FAST LINE ART
Loading time for Line Art objects has been greatly reduced, while calculation of the modifier is now multi-threaded leading to much improved performance.
AND MORE
- Ping Pong mode for Time Offset modifier
- New Sculpt Auto masking options
- Quickly name layers in Move to New Layer operator
- Press U in Sculpt mode to select Materials
- New Noise modifier option: Only Keyframes
See all Grease Pencil changes
CYCLES
INTEL
INSIDE
Support for rendering on the latest Intel GPUs has been added using oneAPI.
This requires an Intel® Arc™ GPU. The implementation is primarily focused on this architecture and future Intel GPUs.
Read More
CYCLES
AMD
VEGA
AMD GPU Rendering for Vega generation graphics cards has been enabled, on Windows and Linux. Both discrete GPUs and APUs are supported.
This includes GPUs such as Radeon VII, Radeon RX Vega Series and Radeon Pro WX 9100.
Read More
MORE ON RENDER
- Optimizations for Apple Silicon
- Reduced memory usage in OpenVDB volumes
- Use bones as camera Depth of Field target
- Faster OptiX Denoiser with multiple GPUs
- New Filmic sRGB Color Space
See all Render changes
PIPELINE
LIBRARY OVERRIDES
Blender 3.3 LTS takes a major leap in usability around Library Overrides, the backbone of a Blender production.
OUTLINER
IT’S IN THE
DETAILS
The Outliner’s Library Overrides mode now displays all overridden properties in hierarchy, using their labels and icons where applicable.
See and edit all overrides at a glance.
Blender 3.3
Quick Toggle Easily toggle between an editable and non-editable override with Shift+Click.
Quicker Access The new Library Override context menu in the Outliner, right at your fingertips.
MORE
- Support for overriding camera background images
- Improved performance of View Layer and Library Overrides display
- Recursive purge of orphaned items
- Better purge of isolated dependency islands
MOTION TRACKING
IMAGE
PLANE MARKER
Create or update an image from the pixels behind the plane marker.
This allows to create an unwarped texture from a billboard from footage, to allow external editing and re-projecting it back to the footage.
Read More
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
- See all improvements
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
Python API
- Support search in StringProperty
- Expose OpenXR user paths
- Improvements to clear() for actions and curves
- New properties in NLAStrip
- New possibilities in background and baking jobs
- See all changes
UV
- Unwrap only selected
- UV Select Similar
- New options in Average Island Scale
- Minimize Stretch will now unflip faces
- Improved constrain-to-image-bounds
- See all improvements
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
More
- Collection Instance Offset
- Support instanced collections in Make Instant Face
- Ctrl/Cmd+L in File Browser to edit path
- Fixed regression in Rigid Bodies effector forces
Read the full list of changes at wiki.blender.org
Blender splash artwork source files are available for you to play with, not only for Blender 3.3 version but for previous versions as well.
Download .blend File
CREDITS
List of developers that contributed to Blender 3.3 LTS
Splash artwork by Piotr Krynski
Labyrinth demo by Simon Thommes. Geometry Nodes UV Unwrap demo by Amal Kumar. Image Plane Marker demo by Sebastian Koenig. Line Art demo by Yiming Wu. Hair sculpt demo by Blender Studio. Page design and layout by Pablo Vazquez.
Additional help by Blender Institute and the Blender community.
Huge thanks to everyone involved ♥
Blender is and will always remain free, forever.
Releases are possible thanks to the members of the Development Fund.
Join today and help to ensure the future of Blender for $6/month
Join the Blender Development Fund ❤️
