The Freedom to Create

artwork by Daniel Bystedt

Building on the success of the 2.8x series, Blender 2.90 continues to polish the user experience, introducing improvements to EEVEE, Cycles, sculpt, VR, animation, modeling, UV editing and so much more.

Released August 31st, 2020

Download the Splash Fox .blend file!

 

THE SKY IS NOT THE LIMIT

Meet Nishita, a physically based texture built-in Cycles.

Download this file and play!

GET IN MOTION

Motion blur in EEVEE has been completely rewritten from scratch, adding support for mesh deformation, hair, and sub-frame accumulation for better precision.

FASTER MOTION BLUR

Intel Embree is now used for ray tracing on the CPU. This significantly improves Cycles performance in scenes with motion blur.

Scenes with high geometric complexity also benefit on average.

Cycles Intel Embree

DENOISE EVERYWHERE

Blender 2.81 introduced Intel OpenImageDenoise in the compositor, in 2.90 you can use this denoiser interactively in the 3D viewport as well as for final renders.

Simply select OpenImageDenoise from the new Denoising panel.

It Won’t
Be Back

The new shadow terminator offset setting helps you to avoid shading artifacts with smooth normals on low-poly meshes.

Farewell blotchy shading!

Shadow Terminator 0.0 Shadow Terminator 0.0
Shadow Terminator 0.1 Shadow Terminator 0.1

RENDER MORE

NVIDIA RTX It's On

  • NVLink support for CUDA and OptiX. When enabled in the Cycles device preferences, GPUs connected with an NVLink bridge will share memory to support rendering bigger scenes.
  • OptiX is now available on all NVIDIA GPUs that support it, which is Maxwell or higher (GeForce 700, 800, 900, 1000 series).

MULTIRESOLUTION

It is now possible to select the subdivision level to sculpt on and switch between levels, with displacement information smoothly propagated between them.

UNSUBDIVIDE & REBUILD

The Multires Modifier can now rebuild lower subdivisions levels and extract its displacement. This can be used to import models from any subdivision based sculting software and rebuild all subdivisions levels to be editable inside the modifier. Read more.

Unsubdivide different meshes with triangles, ngons and non-manifold geometry.
All subdivision modes available in Multires
All subdivision modes available in Multires.

SUBDIVISION MODES

Multires can now create smooth, linear and simple subdivisions. This means that any subdivision type can be created at any time without changing the subdivision type of the modifier. Read more.

CLOTH FILTER

Simulate cloth on your mesh using four types of simulation.

Use Face Sets to limit the simulations.

BETTER POSE BRUSH

Next to Rotate/Twist, two new deformation modes were added to the pose brush!

SCALE /TRANSLATE

Quickly scale or translate your model without leaving Sculpt mode.

SQUASH & STRETCH

Scale the mesh while preserving volume or a Squash or Stretch effect.

THERE’S MORE

Topology Slide/Relax

The Topology Slide/Relax mode now has two more deformation modes for Slide: Pinch and Expand.

Clay Strips

Clay strips now has more predictable pressure/size and pressure/strength curves. Its deformation algorithm was modified to prevent geometry artifacts in large deformations.

Automasking

The Automasking system was redesigned, so brush will not have and start delay when automasking options are enabled in a high poly mesh.

Pen Pressure

Pen pressure modulation is now supported for the hardness property. The modulation can be inverted for achieving higher hardness with lower pressure.

Boundary

Now mesh boundaries are properly detected by the automasking system in both meshes and Multires levels. This means that the smooth brush does not longer automasks boundary vertices by default and its meshes and multires behavior now matches.

Face Set FK mode

The Pose Brush now has a Face Set FK mode, which deforms the mesh using the Face Sets to simulate an FK rig.

STEP UP YOUR MODELS

EXTRUDE MANIFOLD

This smart new tool automatically splits and removes adjacent faces when extruding inwards.

EDGE & VERTEX SLIDE SNAP

All the snapping options are now available while using edge or vertex slide!

BEVEL IMPROVEMENTS

Custom Profile Bezier Curves

The custom profile for the bevel modifier and tool now supports bezier curve handle types.

New Absolute Mode

The bevel tool and modifier have a new ‘Absolute’ mode for interpreting the ‘amount’ value. This mode is like Percent, but measures absolute distance along adjacent edges instead of a percentage.

Better Material/UV Split

The bevel tool and modifier use a new method to decide which material and UV values to use for the center polygons in odd-segment bevels. It should give more consistency in different parts of the model compared to the seemingly random choice made up til now.

KEEP YOUR NORMALS

Mesh normals are now properly preserved when using rip, delete, disolve, and knife tools.

Blender 2.83

Blender 2.90

The glTF exporter has also been updated to properly export these normals.

EVEN MORE

OCEAN SPRAY

The ocean modifier now generates maps for spray direction!

Read more

BETTER UV

Automatically adjust UV and Vertex Colors while editing your mesh.

Find the new Correct Face Attributes and Keep Connected under the Options popover.

Hold down Ctrl and select UV components with left mouse to select the shortest path between the UV components.

Grid type selection if you activate fill region or use Ctrl-Shift-LeftMouse when selecting UV components.

Separates UV components (vertices, edges, faces) from connected components. The operator is run by pressing the V hotkey. The components are ripped in the direction of the mouse pointer position.

OPENVDB FLUIDS

Smoke and liquids data will now be cached into a single .vdb cache file per frame. Read more.

CLOTH PRESSURE GRADIENT

Apply a pressure gradient emulating the weight of contained or surrounding fluid.

Read more

LOOKING GOOD

Blender 2.90 continues to refine the user interface principles established in 2.8x

NEW SEARCH

Ever wondered in which menu to find a certain operator? Wonder no more! The new search menu shows you that and more:

  • See the menu and its hotkey
  • Add the operator to Quick Favorites
  • Easily assign a new shortcut
  • Link to the Manual and Python API reference

EASY READING

Columns now feature headings! Combined with left-aligned checkboxes resulting in a more readable layout that takes even less space.

UI Checkboxes Alignment

Checkboxes can be aligned inline with labels and other widgets for a more compact layout.

MODIFIERS REDONE

Modifiers and other stacks now support drag and drop for reordering. Their layouts were completely rewritten to make use of subpanels and the current user interface guidelines.

  • Shift+D to Duplicate
  • Ctrl+A to Apply Modifier
  • X to Delete
  • A to toggle open/collapse panel
  • New Move to First and Move to Last buttons

This change also applies to Grease Pencil modifiers, visual effects, object and bone constraints.

STATS YOU WANT

Statistics 3D Viewport

Scene statistics are now available as an overlay in the 3D Viewport!

Statistics Status Bar

Customize the status bar to toggle individual stats, including the new Video Memory details.

MUCHO MORE

NUKE DISTORTION

This new lens distortion model allows you to solve motion in Blender and do compositing in Nuke or Natron.

Read the full list of changes at wiki.blender.org

Credits

List of developers that contributed to Blender 2.90.

Artwork

Blender 2.90 Splash by Daniel Bystedt, EEVEE Motion Blur by Juan Carlos Montes, Nishita Sky by Andy Goralczyk, normals preservation demo by Jason Lim, Ocean Spray by Dyzinliz, OpenVDB rain by Crossmind Studio, UV Correct Face Attributes demo by Simon Thommes, Nuke Distortion sample by Sean Kennedy, Cloth Avocados by Zuggamasta.

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