Power Your Pipeline

The second update of the Blender 2.80 milestone release is here!

With again over a thousand fixes and several important updates that were planned for the 2.8 series. In this release you will find UDIM and USD support, MantaFlow fluids and smoke simulation, AI denoising, Grease Pencil improvements, and much more!

February 14, 2020

A number of critical fixes were done as part of the corrective release 2.82a. Make sure you update for a rock solid 2.82! Released on March 12th, 2020.


Physics Reborn

Blender’s simulations got a major bump with a brand new physically-based liquid/gas simulation system using Mantaflow and improvements in cloth physics.

Light Your Fire

The new Mantaflow system allows you to create mind-blowing fire and smoke simulations.

Read more
FLIP Out

Create lifelike liquids with a new FLIP solver.

Read more

Simulate balloons and cushions with ease.

Make cloth behave like a soft body.

UDIM

The popular tiled-based UV mapping system is now fully integrated in Blender’s pipeline.

Read more
Pixar USD Export
Blender now supports Pixar’s very own open source Universal Scene Description.

USD files can contain complex layering, overriding, and references to other files. Blender’s USD Exporter takes a much simpler approach.

Read more

Node Improvements

Random Per Island

Geometry node now has a Random Per Island option, to randomize textures or colors for different components within a mesh.

Math

Math node has new operations: trunc, snap, wrap, compare, pingpong, sign, radians, degrees, cosh, sinh, tanh, exp, smoothmin and inversesqrt.

Map Range

New interpolation modes: Linear, Stepped Linear, Smoothstep and Smootherstep.

Noise & Wave

Distortion was improved to distort uniformly in all directions, instead of only diagonally.

Custom Shader AOVs

A new AOV Output node can be put anywhere in your shader node tree and will be exposed as a custom render pass.

And even more:

Denoising

  • The Albedo pass was improved to work better with the OpenImageDenoise compositor node. Read more.
  • The Normal pass was changed to output in camera space to work better with the OptiX denoiser. Read more.

Faster Rendering on Windows

BVH build time on Windows has been significantly reduced by using a better memory allocator, making it similar to Linux and macOS performance. Read more.

AI Denoiser
Cycles now supports the AI-Accelerated Denoiser from OptiX, for NVIDIA RTX graphics cards.

  • Supports multiple GPUs.
  • Impressive results with low samples.
  • Built into Blender’s view layer system.

This AI-Accelerated Denoiser was contributed by NVIDIA.

Read more
10 Samples. No denoise. 10 Samples. No denoise.
10 Samples. AI Denoise. 10 Samples. AI Denoise.
EEVEE

Many improvements such as better group node sockets, normal mapping for non-mesh objects, performance and quality of render passes.

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Preview Passes in the Viewport

Just like in Cycles, you can now pick which pass to see while in Rendered shading mode.

Combined

Ambient Occlusion, Normal, Mist, Subsurface Direct and Subsurface Color are supported, with more passes coming in Blender 2.83!

Ambient Occlusion

Ambient Occlusion, Normal, Mist, Subsurface Direct and Subsurface Color are supported, with more passes coming in Blender 2.83!

Normal

Ambient Occlusion, Normal, Mist, Subsurface Direct and Subsurface Color are supported, with more passes coming in Blender 2.83!

Mist

Ambient Occlusion, Normal, Mist, Subsurface Direct and Subsurface Color are supported, with more passes coming in Blender 2.83!

Volumetrics + Transparency

Transparent materials now blend properly with volumetrics.

Before Before
After After
Beyond Sculpting

After the ground-breaking 2.81 sculpt updates, new features keep pouring in.

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IK segments property to control how many IK bones are going to be created for posing. Hold Ctrl to twist the deformation.

Slides the topology of the mesh in the direction of the stroke while trying to preserve the volume.

Scrapes the mesh with two planes at the same time, producing a sharp edge between them.

Dash ratio and dash samples brush properties to create dashed strokes.

Even more:

  • Mask Slice operator: removes the masked vertices from the mesh, with options to fill the produced holes or creating a new mesh object with the removed vertices.
  • The symmetrize operator can now run with Dyntopo disabled.
  • The sample detail size operator now works with the voxel remesher. It sets the voxel size to a value that produces a mesh with an approximate detail resolution to the area that was sampled.

Plus more improvements that don’t even fit here, check them out.

Grease Pencil

Many changes in the user interface, dopesheet updates, new tools and modifiers.

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Multiple Strokes Modifier
Multiple Strokes Modifier

Automatically generate multiple strokes around the originals.

Polyline Tool
Polyline Tool

Draw polygon shapes with this new dedicated tool.

Dopesheet Improvements
Dopesheet Improvements

Quick access to Opacity, Blend and Onion skinning in the channels.

New Eyedropper Tool
New Eyedropper Tool

Easily create materials on the fly with this new tool.

Custom Bevel Profiles

The bevel tool and modifier now have the ability use modified profiles beyond the existing super-ellipse control.

Once the “Custom Profile” option is checked, the profile can be changed with the curve widget which is sampled with the number of segments from the bevel.

Read more
User Interface

The user interface and user experience keeps getting polished in 2.82; with improvements to the tool system and layout tweaks for consistency.

Read more
Fallback Tools
Fallback Tools

Now, when you have a tool active, you can still easily box, lasso or circle select when you click and drag outside the gizmo.

UV Gizmos
UV Gizmos

The UV Editor now supports gizmos for the transform tools, just like the 3D View.

VFX Reference Platform

Blender is committed to adhere with the VFX Reference Platform. This helps pipelines that depends on different software to have a common set of libraries they are all compatible with.

Read more
Compatibility
  • Loading fluid simulations from previous versions is only partially possible. Read more .
  • Due to changes in the Noise and Wave shader nodes, their pattern can look slightly different.Read more.
  • EEVEE: A fix in how transparent materials react to volumetrics will make them look different (as in, properly lit), there is no workaround other than to tweak the affected materials. Read more.
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