Meet the first ever Blender long-term support release.
With over 1250 bugfixes, and further critical fixes due throughout the next two years as part of the Long Term Support program, Blender 2.83 LTS provides the performance and stability needed for major projects. New features include VR support, OpenVDB import, OptiX viewport denoising and a powerful new physics-enabled Cloth Brush.
June 3, 2020
SPEAK VOLUMES
OpenVDB files can now be imported and rendered with the new Volume object. Files may be generated by Blender’s fluid simulation cache or even other software.
VIRTUAL REALITY
Powered by OpenXR, Blender now ships with the first milestone in VR support: scene inspection. Walk around your scenes in virtual reality directly within Blender!
OptiX VIEWPORT DENOISER
Cycles now supports denoising inside the Blender viewport with NVIDIA OptiX™ AI-Accelerated Denoiser
as well as in final renders. Preview your rendered scene at full visual fidelity, without noise.
Simply turn it on and enjoy fast and noise-free renders in the viewport.
SCULPT CLOTH
Physics simulation under your brush. Sculpt realistic wrinkles with the new Cloth Brush. Its built-in physics solver automatically creates natural-looking folds.
7 Deformation Modes · Radial & Planar fall-off · Pin Vertices by Masking
The mass and the damping properties of the simulation are settings of the brush. Two additional controllers limit the influence and falloff of the simulation.
Masked vertices act as pinned during the simulation, and the gravity is applied directly in the solver.
This brush includes seven deformation modes with radial and plane falloff types.
MESH FILTERS AND BRUSH IMPROVEMENTS
The new Sharpen mode in Mesh Filter pinches the edges while smoothing flat surfaces automatically.
This new brush (also available as Mesh Filter) removes the surface while preserving the volume of the object usin the HC algorithm from “Improved Laplacian Smoothing of Noisy Surface Meshes”. The smooth result an be controlled by tweaing the original shape preservation, displacement and iteration count.
The Clay brush also got improvements and a new option to choose the brush tip between circle and square.
The Layer Brush was completely redesigned. Gone are the artifacts when alternating between adding and subtracting or when modifying the same area multiple times. It features a preview of the Layer height in the cursor, Multires support for Persistent Base and much better masking support.
SCULPT FACE SETS
Keep complex meshes organized as you work. The new Face Sets system lets you control the visibility of individual parts of a mesh, or automatically mask parts of its surface for sculpting.
Create Face Sets based on edit mode selection, loose mesh islands, materials, normals, seams, and more.
Easily smooth the boundary of Face Sets with a mesh filter.
The Pose Brush can snap the rotation origin points to the boundaries of the Face Sets.
GREASE PENCIL REIMAGINED
Rewritten from scratch, the Grease Pencil 2D animation toolset is now much faster – and much better integrated with the rest of Blender.
VERTEX PAINT
The same workflow you know for meshes is now available for Grease Pencil objects!
Making stroke colors no longer limited to a single material, now each point has its own color giving you unlimited artistic freedom.
BETTER THAN EVER
The new system allows you to combine masks, adding a lot of flexibility and it also looks much better thanks to the new draw-engine.
The effect modifiers have been rewritten to improve quality and speed, while adding new functions to make them more flexible.
No more jagged lines when drawing with fast gestures!
Smooth lines even in tightest strokes.
FASTER THAN EVER
Frame rates are now 2x higher when working on files with large numbers of Grease Pencil strokes, and strokes are smoother when painting quickly.
EEVEE
Blender’s real-time render engine continues to evolve
Compositing EEVEE renders is now much simpler thanks to individual passes, just like Cycles.
Reflection Probes are now stored in cubemap arrays instead of octahedron maps arrays, what does it mean? No more seam artifacts and stretched texels!
Hair geometry now supports blending with alpha hash and alpha clip mode. Shadow blend modes are now also supported.
This new option helps to avoid textures looking weird due to low resolution normal issues on dense meshes.
Easily adjust the blur amount of the HDRI background in Material Preview.
UPDATED SHADER NODES
The Wave Texture node gets new direction modes, a phase offset control and a roughness input, and the White Noise Texture, Math and Vector Math nodes have been improved. Read more.
The new Angle slider lets you easily rotate the vectors. Try this example .blend file!
Go crazy with your setups.
Increase the detail in Noise textures with the new Roughness setting.
Vectors can now wrap around for easy tiling.
Control the direction of the lines in the Wave node.
The White Noise node now has a color output!
PERFORMANCE BOOSTS
MARVELOUS MODIFIERS
Many of Blender’s modifiers have been updated with powerful new features.
Corrective Smooth’s new Scale parameter provides accurate deformations when scaling the root bone of a character rig.
Ocean’s new spectral modes help mimic shallow water as well as deep seas.
Remesh gets a new Voxel mode, matching the Voxel Remesh operator.
Solidify now plays nicer with Bevel modifiers. Control the Bevel weight of the resulting mesh!
Surface Deform now works from a specified vertex group, and gets a new Strength control.
The Warp modifier can now use armature bones as From and To targets.
VIDEO SEQUENCER
Blender’s video editor continues to see improvements in its user interface, a toolbar to improve user experience and performance.
THIS ONE IS A KEEPER
Blender 2.83 is the very first long-term release
Two years of support. Ideal for long projects. Read more.
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!
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is now deprecated. It has been renamed to doc_url
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