Update Alert! Blender 2.82 is Released!

New features include improvements in various aspects, from sculpting to texturing. Also, the support of RTX on rendering and USD on pipeline are going to boost your productivity to the next level! Here are the details for the 5 groundbreaking new features, and what they mean to CG artists.

1. New Fluids Simulation System

Blender is a popular open-sourced software for production and animation artists, but not a perfect choice for hardcore simulations. The new fluids simulation system - Mantaflow - is going to change that.

Mantaflow is the new physically-based fluid simulation framework in Blender for gas (smoke & fire) and liquid simulations. It completely replaces the existing fluid simulation systems and changes the way you work with fluids.

2. Cloth Simulation

In cloth simulation, internal air pressure and internal cloth springs are both supported now, which means simulating balloons, cushions and soft bodies will be much easier. What’s more, it is likely that future releases will enable Blender artists to do fully procedural workflow like Houdini.

(Left: Internal air pressure; Right: Internal cloth springs)

3. UDIM Support

The UDIM UV layout format was initiated by Weta Digital to handle the high-resolution textures more efficiently. Now it is widely used in the VFX pipelines.

The new support for UDIM in Blender facilitates assets exchanging with applications like Substance Painter, Maya and Houdini. Moreover, UDIM is implemented across all of the key toolsets, which means to display UDIMs in the Image and UV Editors, to paint onto UDIMs in the Image Editor and 3D viewport, and to render scenes that use them in both Cycles and Eevee, are now possible.

4. Pixar USD Export

Blender now supports exporting files in Pixar’s open-source Universal Scene Description format.

(Image via Google)

Universal Scene Description (USD) files can contain complex layering, overriding, and references to other files. Blender’s USD Exporter takes a much simpler approach. When exporting, all visible, supported objects in the scene are exported, optionally limited by their selection state. Blender does not (yet) support exporting invisible objects, USD layers, variants, skeletal animation, etc.

5. Cycles Improvements

The updated Blender now supports custom render passes, adding in the Shader AOVs (Arbitrary Output Variables) panes in the view layer settings, with a name and data type. The output of any component of a shader graph will be shown in the custom render passes. That helps artists to debug shading problems in a scene.

For artists who work in production, another change to Cycles in Blender 2.82 is supporting the AI-accelerated Denoiser from OptiX, from NVIDIA RTX graphics cards.

(Image via blendernation.com)

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For more update details, please check the Release Notes by Blender:

https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.82