Blender 3.6 Splash
The release of the new version of «Blender 3.6» which is an extended support time version (LTS) and will be supported until June 2025. The new version stands out for integrating the initial support for simulations, as well as new features, bug fixes and more.
For those of you who are new to Blender, you should know that it is suitable for solving various tasks related to 3D modeling, 3D graphics, game development, simulation, rendering, compositing, motion tracking, sculpting, animation creation, and video editing.
Main news in Blender 3.6
In this new version of Blender 3.6 that is presented, one of the main novelties is initial support for simulation, in which the result of processing one frame affects the next frame, which can be used, for example, to simulate physical processes by acting on an object.
The simulation is based on the use of geometric nodes and is determined by the input and output state (the input state node is executed for the first frame and the output state is saved for the next frame). Simulation results can be cached or stored for later display on the timeline, along with other types of cached data.
Another change that stands out in this new version is the Cycles renderer which significantly sped up object loading large geometrics, resulting in a reduced delay before starting to render after changing geometry or switching to rendered content view mode.
In addition to this, also in Cycles numerous optimizations have been made, eg up to 60x faster mesh attribute copy, 10x faster curve object load, 9x faster point cloud load, 4-6x faster large mesh load.
At UV Editor, a new UV packaging engine has been implemented, which has significantly improved the packaging of the UV islands, in addition to the fact that UV map data extraction is now up to three times faster and mesh conversion is 75% faster with multiple UV maps.
The performance of the mechanism Light Tree used in Cycles has been optimized to improve the efficiency of noise suppression when processing scenes with a large number of light sources. Thanks to the transition to multi-threading, Light Tree's assembly time has been reduced by up to 11 times. For scenes with a large number of instances, when building a Light Tree, the speedup is up to 190 times.
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- Added Light Tree support for systems with AMD GPUs.
- Added VDM Brush Baker plugin to create brushes with a vector displacement map.
- Object attach and detach operations have been sped up.
Reduced memory consumption by 25% when working with large geometries. - Up to 44% performance improvement for meshes with custom split normals.
- The animation tools offer a new space transformation that allows you to move child objects using the coordinates of the parent object.
- Added a plugin to import and export 3DS (Autodesk 3ds Max) files.
- Implemented support for hardware accelerated ray tracing to some GPUs
- Embree 4 is used for acceleration on Intel cards and HIP RT is used on AMD cards
- Significantly speeded up work with large meshes and improved support for non-square materials.
- Added option to merge overlapping islands during unwrapping.
- A collection of human body meshes has been prepared for the asset library, which can be used for sculpting, animating, and texture mapping.
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about this new release, you can consult the details In the following link.
How to install Blender 3.6 in Ubuntu and derivatives?
For those who are interested in being able to install this new version of Blender, they will be able to do it from its Snap package.
For the installation, it is enough to have the Snap support in the system and in a terminal type the command:
sudo snap install blender --classic