Cycles Render
Cycles Render

Several improvements for BVH like making it watertight, solving several precision issues and reducing noise

Optimizations: black world backgrounds are now removed from the shader graph, resulting in great speed improvements, many great memory optimizations

Nodes: new Pointiness attribute for the Geometry node, control texture space of one object by another

Read more
User Interface
User Interface

New Viewport Compositing brings Ambient Occlusion and Depth of Field right into the Viewport!

View-depth can now be picked using an Eyedropper

Outliner: orphaned Datablocks Mode was added for datablock management, now allows deleting of entire object hierachies, drag & drop objects to groups.

The Node Editor can now show text-blocks in frames

Customizable camera safe areas

Read more
Modeling
Modeling

Support for Custom Normals was added, and transferring data layers between meshes is now possible thanks to a new Mesh Data Transfer operator and modifier.

Tools:

  • UV handling for Edge/ Vertex Slide was improved
  • new inverse-square blending for proportional-edit-mode
  • “Fit Camera View” now works for orthographic cameras as well
  • new “Split Concave Faces” tool to ensure a convex geometry was added
Read more
Sculpting/Painting
Sculpting/Painting

Brushes/Strokes:

  • Improvements to rake and random mapping
  • Line strokes now support constrains to 45 degree increments

Texture Painting:

  • Support for dithering for painting on byte images
  • A new tool “Cavity Mask” was added that creates masks based on mesh cavities or hills
Read more
Animation
Animation

Grease Pencil:

  • New Editing tools like copy & paste strokes, duplicating active layer, …
  • Enable eraser on the fly while drawing with “Continuous Drawing”
  • Various UI tweaks such as color swatches for Stroke and Fill colors
  • Grease Pencil data layers are now shown in the Outliner

Other:

  • Improvements to the action management to reduce the cases where unused actions are deleted
  • Pasting keyframes can now be done flipped
  • Using a new “Follow” option, the animation editors can now follow the time indicator
Read more
More Features
More Features
  • .blend Files & Libraries: generation and saving of previews for materials, textures, lamps, world and images datablocks.
  • Viewport: Background images can now be rotated and flipped.
  • Compositing: Plane Track Deform, Multilayer EXR nodes improved; memory usage optimization.
  • Sequencer: Slip tool, Setting proxies improved; preview individual strips (feature back from Blender 2.4x)
  • Blender Internal: Added gamma node support
  • Motion Tracking: Added operator to filter tracks based on how smooth their motion is
  • Freestyle: Great memory consumption optimization in stroke rendering
  • Game Engine:
    Physics: The first contact point of colliding can now be accessed from Python and usability improvements
    Path Following: New option “Lock Z Velocity” to avoid micro-jumping
  • Many  small improvements
Read more
Add-Ons
Add-Ons
  • A new Auto Tile Size Add-on helps setting up the fastest tile size for Cycles rendering
  • Import images as planes now works for Cycles as well
  • POV-Ray Renderer now supports volumetric rendering
  • FBX and OBJ now support custom normals import
  • New Python API functions
Read more
Feature Videos
Feature Videos

For a visual demonstration of some of the new features in this release, check out the feature videos created during the development of this release.

Read more
Bug Fixes

In addition to the new features, hundreds of bugs that existed in previous releases have been fixed.

Read more
Stay up-to-date

Follow the official hashtag for Blender stuff on social media #b3d

Blender Development Fund

The donation program to support maintaining and improving Blender, for everyone. Become a member for as little as €5 per month.