Better in every way.

Blender 3.5 splash by Nicole Morena

Blender Foundation and the online developers community proudly present Blender 3.5!

Featuring a viewport compositor, vector displacement sculpting, built-in hair assets, many lights sampling for Cycles, and so much more.

Released March 29th, 2023


HAIR

THERE

EVERYWHERE

The curves-based hair system first introduced in Blender 3.3 takes a major leap in this release.

Procedural Fur

KEEP WATCHING

Follow the full step-by-step tutorial.

Creating and grooming fancy hairdos is easier than ever.

Any kind of hair, fur, or grass is possible. Powered by the flexibility of Geometry Nodes.

With great power comes great complex-ability, so Blender now includes hair assets to make your life easier.

POWER WITHIN

For the first time ever, Blender ships with built-in assets!

The Essentials asset library comes with 26 Hair assets split into categories: Deformation, Generation, Guides, Utility, Read, and Write.

Simply drag and drop from the Asset Browser onto your setups.

What can they do? A video and link to the manual is worth a thousand words.

GENERATION

GENERATE
HAIR CURVES

Generates new hair curves on a surface mesh from scratch at point locations.

If creating curves that depend on existing curves is desired, use Interpolate Hair Curves.

GENERATION

INTERPOLATE
HAIR CURVES

Interpolates existing guide curves on a surface mesh.

The Duplicate Hair Curves node is a similar option with simpler behavior that may offer better performance.

GENERATION

DUPLICATE
HAIR CURVES

Duplicates hair curves a certain number of times within a radius.


UTILITY

ATTACH
HAIR CURVES
TO SURFACE

Attaches hair curves to a surface mesh, with options for snapping, alignment, and blend along curve.


GUIDES

CLUMP
HAIR CURVES

Clumps together existing hair curves using guide curves.

GUIDES

CURL
HAIR CURVES

Deforms existing hair curves into curls using guide curves.

GUIDES

BRAID
HAIR CURVES

Deforms existing hair curves into braids using guide curves.


DEFORMATION

FRIZZ
HAIR CURVES

Deforms hair curves using a random vector per point to frizz them.

DEFORMATION

SMOOTH
HAIR CURVES

Smoothes the shape of hair curves.

DEFORMATION

ROLL
HAIR CURVES

Rolls up hair curves starting from their tips.

and many more!

EVEN MORE NODES & PHYSICS

Sculpt VDM
SCULPT

VECTOR
DISPLACEMENT
MAPS

Support for Vector Displacement Maps (VDM) brushes has been added to the Draw brush in sculpt mode.

This type of map provide an easy way to create complex shapes that can have overhangs in one brush dab.

For the best results, VDM textures should be in OpenEXR format, with Color Clamping disabled.

VDM Examples
Snails Dream by Pablo Vazquez
COMPOSITOR

WHAT YOU COMP
IS WHAT YOU GET

A new GPU-based compositor backend takes
the 3D Viewport to the next level.

You’ll never see the viewport the same.

A VIEWPORT EXPERIENCE
NEVER SEEN BEFORE

Overlays are drawn on top of the compositing result, allowing you to see and interact with your mesh and other objects.

Modeling while compositing is on? Sure thing!

Viewport Compositor Off Viewport Compositor Off
Viewport Compositor On Viewport Compositor On

Note: this is considered the first milestone of a large project. View Layer passes and some nodes are not supported yet, further work is planned for future releases.

macOS

POWER METAL

On macOS, the 3D Viewport now makes native use of Metal, leading to massive performance improvements for animation playback and EEVEE rendering.

EEVEE real-time interactive viewport performance.

  • Metal
  • OpenGL
  • Wanderer
  • Tree Creature
  • frames per second (higher is better)
    Mac Studio M1 Ultra @ 3840×2160

Scene export (shaders pre-compiled)

  • Metal
  • OpenGL
  • Wanderer
  • Tree Creature
  • milliseconds (less is better)
    Mac Studio M1 Ultra @ 3840×2160
CYCLES

LIGHT UP

Cycles can now use a light tree to more effectively sample scenes with many lights. Get nicer results, faster.

Light Tree Off Light Tree Off
Light Tree On Light Tree On

Both renders took the same amount of time. With the light tree turned on the noise is significantly reduced, at the cost of a somewhat longer render time per sample.

Best Practices

Light tree works best in scenes with physically correct lighting.

Avoid custom falloff or ray visibility tricks, these may interfere with heuristics used in the light tree.

Tweak It

The Multiple Importance Sample toggle in Materials has been replaced by a new Emission Sampling setting.

By default it’s set to Auto. For single sided emitters or closed meshes setting this to Front can help to reduce noise.

Different Results?

It’s most likely caused by light clamping. Clamping is a biased method that depends on the sampling strategy.

Generally if the light tree works well, there will be less clamping and the render will be closer to the unbiased result.

FLEXIBLE
SPOTS

Spot lights now support non-uniform object scale,
matching how EEVEE renders them as well.

Disk-shaped area light
(16 samples per pixel)

AREA
SPREAD

The spread property in Cycles area lights mimics a gridded softbox in real life, but it could be noisy to render when the area light was Disk or Ellipse shaped.

In Blender 3.5 the result is significantly less noisy. Smooth renders no matter the shape!

Additionally, the Anisotropic BSDF with Beckmann roughness using isotropic sampling has been improved.

Before Before
After After

PLUS

ANIMATION

EXTREME
POSES

The Pose Library got improved with new options and shortcuts to speed up your worfklow.

While blending a pose:

  • Hold Ctrl to flip the pose.
  • Press E to “exaggerate”, go beyond 100%!
  • Drag to the left to substract a pose.
ANIMATION

EASY
EASING

The new Ease operator in the Graph Editor helps you align keys on an exponential curve, useful for quickly making an easing transition on multiple keys.

MORE ANIMATION

GREASE PENCIL

NATURAL
BEAUTY

The new Natural Drawing Speed timing mode in the Build modifier replays strokes using the speed of the stylus when it was performed, giving it a more natural feel.

MORE GREASE PENCIL

Pixar USD
USD

COMPRESS
TO IMPRESS

Blender 3.5 adds support for importing and exporting USDZ files.

A .usdz file is a zip archive that can contain images, audio, and other .usd files for convenient sharing.

MORE USD

Charge Open Movie

INDUSTRY READY

Blender 3.5 is fully aligned with the VFX Reference Platform 2023, making it easier to integrate in studio pipelines.

Sprite Fright
Blender 3.5 Splash by Nicole Morena

GET THE ARTWORK

Blender splash artwork source files are available for you to play with, not only for Blender 3.5 but for previous versions as well.

Blender 3.5 splash by Nicole Morena
Blender 3.5 splash by Nicole Morena

CREDITS

List of developers that contributed to Blender 3.5

Splash artwork by Nicole Morena

Animal fur demo and explanation videos by Simon Thommes. Hair styles and VDM demos by Daniel Bystedt. Cycles many lights example by Amazon Lumberyard. Viewport Compositor artwork, page layout and design by Pablo Vazquez. Additional help by Blender Studio, Blender Institute and the Blender community.

Huge thanks to everyone involved ♥