The Blender Foundation have announced the release of Blender 3.6 LTS, the last long-term support release of the 3.x series. This update introduces several significant improvements:
- The Geometry Nodes project now supports simulations, with new “Simulation Input” and “Simulation Output” nodes to handle the state of each frame. Simulations can be cached or baked to storage, and results visualized in the Timeline editor.
- This version of Blender includes several performance enhancements, including faster loading of large geometries into Cycles, and more efficient copying of mesh attributes and loading of curve objects, point clouds, and large meshes.
- Support for hardware ray-tracing acceleration has been added for AMD and Intel graphics cards. There are some known limitations, and it is currently only available on Windows.
- A new UV packing engine has improved the packing of UV islands, with increased performance on large meshes and better support for non-square materials.
- Blender Studio and the community have created an asset bundle with a collection of human base meshes ready to use for sculpting, animation, texturing, etc.
- A new space transformation, “Parent Space,” allows users to move child objects using the coordinates of their parent.
Many more improvements are included. Read more on the Blender blog.
