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.
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
- New Image Info node
- New Image input node
- New Blur Attribute node
- Store Named Attribute node can now store 2D vector attributes
- New mirror extension type for Image Texture
- Field utility nodes have been renamed
- Improved modifier user interface
- New Move to Nodes operator
- Drag & drop node group assets in the viewport
- New Interpolate Curves node
- Trim Curves now has selection input
- Faster procedural changes
- Hold Alt to disable automatically attaching nodes
- New Edges to Face Groups node
- UV map output in mesh primitive nodes
- Split Edges is now over 2x faster
- Faster display of many geometries instances
- Improved context menu in Node Editor
- Copy & Paste nodes at mouse position
- Reorganized Geometry Nodes add menu
- Hold Alt to swap node links while connecting them
- 25% faster cloth simulation using self-collision
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.
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!
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.
Scene export (shaders pre-compiled)
CYCLES
LIGHT UP
Cycles can now use a light tree to more effectively sample scenes with many lights. Get nicer results, faster.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
- Improved Propagate Pose operator
- New “Select Linked Vertices” in Weight Paint mode
- Pin Dope Sheet channels
- Sub-frame jumping to next/prev keyframes
- Fixed Invert Vertex Group toggle in Armature modifier
- Motion Paths can be set to update a custom range
- Add F-Curve modifiers to multiple channels at once
- Pre-3.0 Pose Library system has been sunsetted
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
- Sculpt Auto-masking moved to Global setting
- Offset Modifier improvements
- New auto-masking pie menu (Shift+Alt+A)
- Copy & Paste now works in multiframe mode
- Vertex Opacity available under Overlays in Sculpt mode
- Interpolate Sequence operator improvements
- New option to show the brush size in Draw tool cursor
- Fixed radial control display size
- New layer menu [Y] now highlights name field
- Material popover now display Fill color for Fill materials
MORE USD
INDUSTRY READY
Blender 3.5 is fully aligned with the VFX Reference Platform 2023, making it easier to integrate in studio pipelines.
BUT WAIT, THERE’S EVEN MORE
- New filtering mode Nearest (3×3)
- Copy drivers when duplicating/pasting strips
- VSE: New “Update Scene Strip Frame Range” operator
- Require glibc 2.28, including Ubuntu 18.10, Fedora 29, Debian 10 (Buster), RHEL 8 and derivatives CentOS, Rocky Linux, Alma Linux
Plus hundreds of bug fixes, code cleanups and refactors to make Blender more stable and easier to contribute to.
On April 25th 2023, Blender 3.5.1 was released containing 59 bug fixes and improvements over the initial release.
Blender is and will
always be free, forever.
Releases are possible thanks to the members of the Development Fund.
Help ensure the future of Blender for $6/month
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.
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 ♥