Blender 3 released

The Blender Foundation has announced that Blender 3.0 is has been officially released. New features include:

• Cycles GPU kernels have been rewritten for better performance, rendering between 2x and 8x faster in real-world scenes.
• More responsive viewports.
• Upgraded OpenImageDenoise.
• A new option to improve shadow termination on low-poly meshes. 
• A completely rewritten shadow catcher with indirect and environment light support, an option for lights to be included or excluded, and a new shadow catcher pass. 
• Subsurface scattering now supports anisotropy and index of refraction for Random Walk.
• A new asset browser that supports drag and drop for Materials, Objects, and World datablocks.
• Extended geometry nodes support with a re-imagined method for designing node groups, a new attribute system, around 100 new nodes for interaction with curves, text data, instances, and more.
• Updated UI.
• Support for thumbnails in the video sequencer as well as the ability to transform strips
• New VR controller features including the ability to visualize controllers and the ability to navigate one’s way through a scene in VR using controller inputs.
• A new pose library, integrated with the new asset browser
• New modifiers in Grease Pencil plus a polished drawing experience, and Line Art performance improvements.
• Improve file save and load times. 
• Support for importing USD files and improved Alembic support.
• Plus much much more.

To see a detailed list of what’s new, visit the Blender website.