artwork by Ian Hubert

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

File by JangaFX

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.

OpenVDB

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!

OpenXR
artwork by dedouze

OptiX VIEWPORT DENOISER

NVIDIA RTX It's On

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.

Without Denoiser
With NVIDIA OptiX™ AI-Accelerated Denoiser
artwork by Alex Treviño

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

Cloth Brush Settings 2.83
Cloth brush settings

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.

Read more…

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.

…and even more!

  • VFX Match Viewport and Render
  • Pixel Perfect Blend Modes
  • New Alpha Control for Stroke/Fill Colors

EEVEE

Blender’s real-time render engine continues to evolve

Render Passes
Render Passes

Compositing EEVEE renders is now much simpler thanks to individual passes, just like Cycles.

Light Cache Update
Light Cache Update

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 Transparency
Hair Transparency

Hair geometry now supports blending with alpha hash and alpha clip mode. Shadow blend modes are now also supported.

High Quality Normals
High Quality Normals

This new option helps to avoid textures looking weird due to low resolution normal issues on dense meshes.

Adjust HDRI Blur in Material Preview
Adjust HDRI Blur in Material Preview

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.

White Noise Color

The White Noise node now has a color output!

PERFORMANCE BOOSTS

Undo speed compared to Blender 2.82

  • Undo is now much faster in Object and Pose Mode
  • In Sculpt mode, the new Delay Viewport Updates option improves performance when navigating high-poly meshes
  • Self-collision in cloth simulations is up to 5x faster
  • Fluid simulations with Effector objects now bake faster
  • Loading times for particle and mesh files in fluid sims has been reduced.

MARVELOUS MODIFIERS

Many of Blender’s modifiers have been updated with powerful new features.

Corrective Smooth

Corrective Smooth’s new Scale parameter provides accurate deformations when scaling the root bone of a character rig.

Ocean Modifier

Ocean’s new spectral modes help mimic shallow water as well as deep seas.

Remesh

Remesh gets a new Voxel mode, matching the Voxel Remesh operator.

Solidify

Solidify now plays nicer with Bevel modifiers. Control the Bevel weight of the resulting mesh!

Surface Deform

Surface Deform now works from a specified vertex group, and gets a new Strength control.

Warp

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.

  • New Disk Cache
  • Opacity and Audio Preview on Strips
  • Slimmer Handles on Strips
  • Color Sample as Tool
  • Select Handles with Box Selection
  • Blade Tool
  • Adjust Last Operation Panel

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!


Compatibility Notes

Python API – Add-ons

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