Blender 2.83 LTS has been released! This milestone is the first ever long term support release of this free and open source 3D content creation suite.
The long term support Blender release will be supported for two years. This new direction will provide the performance and stability needed for major projects.
This new version comes with an array of over 1250 bugfixes.
Highlights of the Blender 2.83 LTS
There are a bunch of new features that come with this release. Most notably are the inclusion of VR support, OpenVDB import, OptiX viewport denoising and a powerful new physics-enabled Cloth Brush.
Blender now ships with some VR support: scene inspection. This allows users to artists to walk around their scenes in virtual reality directly within Blender.
This is done with the help of OpenXR, which is an OpenXR is an open, royalty-free standard for access to virtual reality and augmented reality platforms and devices.
OpenVDB files can now be imported and rendered with the new Volume object generated by Blender’s fluid simulation cache or even other software such as Houdini.
OpenVDB developed by DreamWorks Animation is an open source C++ software library comprising a novel hierarchical data structure and a large suite of tools for the efficient storage and manipulation of sparse volumetric data discretized on three-dimensional grids.
For those with NVIDIA graphics cards, Cycles now supports denoising inside the Blender viewport with NVIDIA OptiX AI-Accelerated Denoiser. This allows artists to preview fast and noise-free renders directly in the viewport.
With the Sculpt Cloth feature artists can sculpt realistic wrinkles which uses the built-in physics solver to automatically create natural-looking folds.
There are also improvements with the Grease Pencil 2D animation toolset which was rewritten from scratch and is much faster and comes with better integration with the rest of Blender.
Eevee, Blender’s real-time render engine has improved support for Hair Transparency, Shadow blend modes are now also supported.
With the Light Cache Update there are now no more seam artifacts and stretched texels. Compositing EEVEE renders is now much simpler thanks to individual passes, just like Cycles.
High Quality Normals are now supported and artists can now easily adjust the blur amount of the HDRI background in Material Preview.
As for Shader Nodes, the Wave Texture node gets new direction modes, a phase offset control and a roughness input. The White Noise Texture, Math and Vector Math nodes have been improved as well.
These are just a few of the highlights surrounding the new Blender 2.83 LTS release from a among a lot more including modifiers, video sequence editor, and performance boosts. You can download a copy of the software from the official Blender website here.
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