Blender continues its relentless march forward with the release of Blender 4.2 LTS, marking a significant milestone in the 4.x series. This Long Term Support release, the first in the 4.x family, promises two years of dedicated support and stability. From GPU-accelerated compositing to enhanced real-time rendering in EEVEE, this release sets a new standard for what we can expect from the world’s leading open creation suite.

As the second Blender release of 2024, it not only consolidates the groundbreaking features introduced in 4.0 and refined in 4.1 but also brings a slew of improvements and optimizations that once again pushes the boundaries of what Blender can do, and how good it can do it.

Here’s a look at the key features (and then some) that stood out to us. I highly recommended checking out the release notes and the release overview for a full picture of all the awesome new features available now at our fingertips!

1. EEVEE is dead: Long Live EEVEE Next!

EEVEE, Blender’s real-time render engine, has undergone a complete rewrite, removing long-standing limitations and paving the way for future enhancements:

• Global Illumination now uses screen space ray tracing for every BSDF, with no limit on the number of BSDFs.
• Virtual Shadow Maps provide plausible soft shadows without the need for shadow jittering.
• Subsurface Scattering has been reimplemented, supporting any number of BSSRDF nodes with arbitrary radii.
• A new Thickness output allows for better modeling of Refraction, Subsurface Scattering, and Translucency.
• Shader Displacement is now possible with Eevee!
• HDRIs and World shaders now light the scene in EEVEE by extracting the brightest spot and using it as a sun light!
• Much better volume rendering
• And much more

These changes bring EEVEE closer to the quality of offline renderers while maintaining its real-time performance. The re-write also sets the stage for further improvements down the line, much like what Cycles X meant for cycles, accelerating its development afterward. Here is a post by Pablo Vazquez on what to expect when using the new Eevee, as well as a useful migration guide to find your bearings within the new engine.

2. Compositor: GPU Acceleration Takes Center Stage

The Blender Compositor’s GPU rewrite has finally been completed, a Herculean feat lead by Blender developer Omar Emara. This means that both the viewport compositor and final compositing setups can be GPU accelerated, marking a massive boost in performance, while still matching the CPU compositor backend.

New Features and Improvements

• Execution Time Overlay: Display each node’s last execution time, similar to what we had in the Geometry Nodes Editor, for better debugging
• Legacy Cryptomatte Node now supported in the Viewport Compositor
• New Bloom Mode in Glare Node: Faster computation with a smoother falloff.
• Fast Gaussian Blur for Viewport Compositor: Improved performance and quality.
• Tons of per-node performance improvements, as well as a rewrite of the CPU backend making it much faster
• And much more

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JdSsuLgizM&pp=ygUaYmxlbmRlciA0LjIgR1BVIGNvbXBvc2l0b3I%3D

These improvements mean faster iteration times and a more responsive compositing experience, especially for complex scenes.

3. Cycles: Ray Portals and Thin Film Interference

Cycles continues to push the boundaries of photorealism, with a powerful set of new shaders and features:

• The new Ray Portal BSDF allows for advanced lighting techniques and visual effects.

• Thin Film Interference support in the Principled BSDF enables the creation of realistic soap bubbles and other iridescent materials.

• Blue noise dithered sampling improves the visual quality of renders, especially at low sample counts.

4. Color Management: Khronos PBR Neutral View Transform

Color Management gets a significant upgrade in Blender 4.2 LTS with the introduction of the Khronos PBR Neutral view transform, joining the existing Standard and AgX view transforms, offering more flexibility in achieving desired visual outputs.:

• This new tone mapper is specifically designed for PBR color accuracy, ensuring that sRGB colors in the output render match the input sRGB base colors in materials as faithfully as possible under gray-scale lighting.
• It’s particularly beneficial for product photography use cases, where scenes are well-exposed and HDR color values are mostly restricted to small specular highlights.
• The Khronos PBR Neutral view transform provides a more accurate representation of materials, especially in situations where color fidelity is crucial.

5. Geometry Nodes: Performance Boost and New Matrix Socket

Geometry Nodes users have grown accustomed to major upgrades to their toolset each release, and this one is no exception, with the addition of new nodes, a new socket, and performance improvements across the board:

• The Scale Elements node is now 4-10x faster.
• The Sample UV Surface node is 10-20x faster on large meshes.
• A new matrix socket type and corresponding nodes open up new possibilities for complex transformations.

6. Animation and Rigging: Quality of Life Improvements

Animators and riggers haven’t been left out, with several useful additions:

• Motion paths now use the Vertex theme color for better visibility.
• Custom bone shapes can now have specified wire widths.

• The Graph Editor has received significant performance improvements, especially when moving keys in heavy scenes.

7. Add-ons are now Extensions!

Blender 4.2 LTS introduces a game-changing feature for developers and power users alike: the new Extensions system. This overhaul in how Blender handles add-ons and external content promises to revolutionize the way we customize and extend Blender’s functionality:

• Extensions now encompass add-ons, themes, and potentially any other content that can extend Blender’s native functionality, including key maps and assets.
• The new system allows for better management and organization of extensions, making it easier for users to keep track of their customizations.
• For developers, this system provides a more structured approach to creating and distributing add-ons, potentially opening up new avenues for both free and commercial extensions.
• The Extensions system also introduces the concept of a System repository, allowing for easier distribution of a set of extensions in controlled environments or offline scenarios.

But wait: there’s more…

Once again, Blender’s updates are too numerous to count, but here are some more new features to get you psyched for this new release!

Import & Export: Enhanced Interoperability

• Collection Exporters allow for easy re-exporting of assets to multiple file formats
•  Work on USD continued, with import and export options having been expanded, and added support for hair curves and point clouds.
• The glTF importer and exporter have received numerous improvements and bug fixes.

Video Sequence Editor: Performance Boost and UI Overhaul

The Video Sequence Editor (VSE) in Blender 4.2 LTS receives a significant upgrade, focusing on both performance and user experience:

• Performance Improvements:
  • Timeline user interface repaints are now 3-4 times faster for complex timelines.
  • Effects have seen dramatic speed increases: Glow is 6-10x faster, Wipe is 6-20x faster, Gamma Cross is 4x faster, Gaussian Blur is 1.5x faster, and Solid Color is 2x faster.
  • Luma Waveform display calculation is 8-15x faster.
• User Interface Enhancements:
  • Strips in the timeline have received a visual overhaul, with rounded corners and thicker outlines for active/selected strips.
  • New cache line overlay provides better visibility of cached areas.
  • Waveforms are now displayed at half-size by default for space efficiency.
  • The overlays popover has been reorganized for clarity.
• New Features:
  • Text Strips now have new options for shadow placement, blur level, and text outline.
  • Multiple files can be added at once using drag and drop from external file browsers.

Additional Rendering Enhancements

• Motion Blur settings are now shared between Cycles and EEVEE, streamlining the workflow between the two render engines.
• GPU-accelerated OpenImageDenoise updated to version 2.3, allowing better quality and performance.
• Screen space motion paths have been added to the animation toolkit, a long-standing community request.

AND MUCH MORE:

Check out the official 4.2 overview over on the Blender.org website, Pablo Vazquez always goes above and beyond with the design to show what the latest Blender has to offer. Now, time to download Blender 4.2 and put all of these new features to the test. Happy Blending!