The 3D CGI tool, Blender, has just had its version 3.5 release and is now ready for download on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Steam. One of the main new features in this update is the inclusion of the Essentials asset library which comes with 26 hair assets that you can manipulate in many ways to create unique characters more easily. If you’re creating animals or scenery, the hair assets will also suffice for the creation of fur and grass.
With Blender 3.5 users also get a new GPU-based compositor backend that improves the 3D Viewport. Apparently, you’ll now be able to continue doing modelling while compositing is on, however, View Layer passes and some nodes aren’t supported yet but work is planned to add these too, in future releases.
If you’re on a supported Mac computer, the 3D Viewport will take advantage of macOS’s Metal API which enables low-overhead hardware-accelerated graphics. Metal should enable “massive performance improvements” for animation playback and EEVEE rendering.
Other enhancements in Blender 3.5 are as follows:
UV Editing
- UV Copy & Paste between meshes
- Improvements to Constrain to Image Bounds in Shear Operator
- Better handling of poles in Sphere/Cylinder Projection
- Support for Fan or Pinch UVs
- Several fixes
Core
- Added support for boolean custom properties
Video Sequencer
- New filtering mode Nearest (3×3)
- Copy drivers when duplicating/pasting strips
- VSE: New “Update Scene Strip Frame Range” operator
Motion Tracking
- New workflow for optical center
Linux
- Require glibc 2.28, including Ubuntu 18.10, Fedora 29, Debian 10 (Buster), RHEL 8 and derivatives CentOS, Rocky Linux, Alma Linux
User Interface
- Font previews for Korean, Japanese, Simplified & Traditional Chinese
- Cancel Viewport orbit/pan/zoom with RMB
- Fix UI freeze with linked material previews
- Fix menus alignment with mixed icons
Assets
- New asset library “All”
- Improved Asset Libraries list
- Set a default Import Method in Preferences
macOS
- Minimum macOS version is now 10.15 Catalina
- Removed user notifications
Python API
- New bundled libraries
- Breaking changes
- Order and time modifiers
- Internal Mesh Format updates
OBJ I/O
- Added “Split by Objects” and “Split by Groups” import settings
- Import polylines with more than 2 vertices
- Exporting is now up to 1.6x faster
Add-ons
- glTF: Several Import & Export improvements
- Rigify: Generate Action Constraint layers
- Storypencil: Several improvements
- Sun Position: Analemmas & Surface display
Modeling
- Flip Quad Tessellation
- New Set Attribute operator
- Faster editing when using modifiers
Sculpt
- “Extrude Mode” for Box Trim tool
- “Extrude Mode” for Lasso Trim tool
To learn more, head on over to the Blender 3.5 webpage which has an overview of the best features, videos, and links to the download.