The Blender Foundation has released Blender 4.2 LTS. This long-term support release brings improvements to the EEVEE and Cycles render engines, a revamped extensions system, and improved tools for modeling, animation, and video editing.
EEVEE, Blender’s real-time render engine, has been completely rewritten to support global illumination, displacement, improved subsurface scattering, and viewport motion blur. A new lighting feature automatically extracts intense lights from the world environment and treat them as suns, while the addition of real displacement allows for geometric surface details.
Cycles, the physically-based render engine, has also received an upgrade for better visual quality and faster rendering. The new Ray Portal BSDF transports rays to another location in the scene, and the Principled BSDF now supports thin film interference effects. Improved volume light sampling delivers smoother results with less noise.
Blender 4.2 LTS introduces a unified extensions system, making it easier to discover, install, and update add-ons and themes directly within the application. The new extensions.blender.org website serves as a hub for community-made, free, and open-source extensions.
Other notable improvements include a new Polyline tool for creating polygonal shapes, a Matrix socket type for working with transformations using nodes, and significant updates to the Video Sequencer for faster editing and improved performance.
Blender 4.2 LTS aligns with the VFX Reference Platform 2024, making it easier to integrate into studio pipelines. It also introduces portable configuration, allowing users to bring their settings with them.
To learn more, visit the Blender website.
features-riched update , especially the extensions , hopefully blender will be more less deepened on add ons.
depended*
dependent* 🙂
Disappointed by Blender evolution overall path. They want to make it a mini-Houdini so ease of use which was never good but they were serious making an effort in 2.8 just stagnated. Other areas too: sculpt, motion graphics, painting, texturing, simulation all require other apps, plugins with still obnoxious things like the “fake user”.
I’m finding 4.2 much easier to use. Discoverability is much better than in the past. Having plugins and add-ons is hardly a dig against the software since most 3d programs need external tools to make them better. So far Blender keeps getting better with each release.
We are a ~30 people studio, about 10/12 Blender artists in some shape or form, getting people up to speed with blender takes us about 2 weeks, same that it used to take us in Max. It covers everything that it should very well, if we need to sculpt something for which is not well suited we go to zbrush, for texturing we go to Substance, for FX we go to Houdini, in exactly the same way we do it if using Maya or Max, so with real business experience of 13+ years of getting teams up to speed in different packages with people leaving and new people coming and a lot of resources spent in licenses for packages that seem to be really stagnant year after year but are still mandatory to run a business I can frankly say that I have no idea what you are talking about 🙂
@animatect : i don’t think anyone is debating that Blender can be learned easily by people who have years of experience with high end 3D software. You are just confirming what LL1 is saying.
Blender is a nightmare of a learning curve for beginners or less experienced people, unlike other software ( even Houdini is more beginner-friendly than Blender). The UI is still a mess. Tools and behaviors in places that are just not very logical . Convoluted workflows constantly relying on keystroke combinations, etc…
@Someone I really fail to see what you are saying, I can tell you from our hands on experience this is not the case, I’m a Houdini User myself but back in the day built our pipeline in Max, even developed and sold plugins for it, keystroke combinations are a thing of the past in blender, I started implementing it on 2.8 and things make sense, shortcuts are contextual but do what you expect them to do in different contexts, I really fail to see how I confirmed what was stated but if this is what you are taking from what I said that is ok 🙂 .
I’m not here to defend blender, more so, I really don’t think it needs defending, the clear bias for new hires (~22 24 yrs old) at the studio is Blender so I think the future is bright for that software which for the CGI community is a good thing.
Back in the day, when I was diving into 3ds Max, Blender seemed like a total head-scratcher. That whole “right-click” thing? Weird. But then Blender 2.8 dropped, and it was a game changer. The fresh UI got me curious, so I decided to take it for a spin.
Nowadays, I’m switching some process to Blender. Sure, I miss some Max features, but overall, it’s a solid 3D software. most 3D software out there needs a bunch of plugins to really shine. But let’s talk about Blender. It’s like this superhero for broke artists-free, no strings attached. You don’t have to dip your toes into the murky waters of piracy. Plus, Blender covers all the bases: modeling, sculpting, shading, animation, rendering, and compositing (I know it have many flaws, but a truly inspired artist can shine with a pencil and a sheet of paper).
After using 3dsmax forever, there are workflows I’m use to from max that don’t apply in Blender. Now with this release it looks like it’ll be possible to write custom modifiers that work like their 3dsmax counterpart. I’m starting to dig into it some more but it looks very promising.
I am not saying it is not powerful. But the ease of use is subpar and functionalities are being put into nodes and everything else except render is not moving much.
Blender’s fundemental problem has been and will always be (unless a mircale reveses it) the User interface, yes it lacks some vital features coming from Max, but that aweful interface prevents users from switching to Blender from Max. If only they listened to some users back in the day and changed the damn interface to something closer to an industry standard!
since 2.8 the UI is excellent, very responsive and easily customized
Blender gets more and more advanced, but the basics are never improved.
Still no shortcut to group geo inside a transform like ctrl+G in Maya.
Still no option to have Y up axis.
Still no outliner that starts simply at the root /
Still no shader assignment based on rules
Still no nodal render management
Still no layer for sculpting
Still no fing tabs to stack the interface panels
Still no history in modeling, even for primitive creation
Still no shortcut to preview Catmull clark
Still crappy UV tools
Still crappy paint tools
Still no element dynamic highlight in edit mode
That is an issue with most resources being put into “everything nodes” they seem to not understand that most people don’t want or can deal with a mini-Houdini.
Most of your list is not a big deal for me to be honest. I mean, y up or z up doesn’t matter. If your working with other software, the axis gets changed on export or import. The UV tools are pretty good I’ve found and there’s plenty of add-ons that add more functionality. The paint tools are crappy compared to what? Max? You seem to be trying to use Blender like its another software instead of treating it as its own. It like trying to use mudbox’s approach to sculpting when working in z-brush and complaining that it should be more like mudbox.
If they are not a big deal to fix, then fix them..!
For me, the worst is the outliner that doesn’t start at the root.
You create a cube, instead of being “‘/cube”, like a real professional would expect
it’s “Scene Collection/Collection/Cube”…
Disgusting path: 2 subfolder by default, bad use of uppercases, spaces in the names !! all the worst in one.
Such amateurs.
This path makes sense since you can work with different collections and even different scenes too. Scenes is in fact the root. The concept is different, but not wrong.
If you think they are broken then put in a bug report or feature request. That’s the beauty of Blender development. Every release there’s a ton of fixes that come from the community.