In nuce: The Blender Foundation recently released version 3.3 LTS of the open-source 3D software Blender. The most exciting new features include: a new grooming system (e.g. for facial hair), new UV unwrapping nodes, integration of the Grease Pencil 2D animation toolset with Dope Sheet and the timeline – and also support for Arc GPUs. Smaller innovations relate to 3D modelling, scultping, painting and texturing – in addition to the usual improvements in terms of performance.
The most important new functions: Our colleagues at cgchannel.com have worked their way through five of the most important new functions in Blender 3.3. Below is an outline of the five flagship features – boiled down to three functions.
- Curve-based grooming toolset: Behind the Curve Sculpt Mode is the ability to model hair and fur – with the help of 11 different brushes. Hair variants can also be combined and their density and surface texture can be customised. The grooming toolset is the first large-scale extension for the Geomtry Nodes system. The hairy new feature is also supported in the Blenders render engines Cycles, Eevee and Workbench. In the video below, Andy Goralczyk, Artistic Director at the Blender Institute, takes us through the grooming toolset. The blog post The Future of Hair Grooming by Dalai Felinto, Development Coordinator at Blender, explains the new grooming toolset in detail.
- Procedural UV workflows and motion graphics – with geometry nodes: The UV workflows work via UV unwrap and pack UV island nodes. Other new nodes in Blender 3.3: Point Nodes, with which users generate point clouds, or Volume Cube to create volume grids – in addition to other new nodes for path finding via mesh edges. The three new nodes relating to pathfinding via mesh edges are particularly useful if the aim of an artist is to create unusual motion graphics.
- GPU rendering with Cycles with Arc and AMD GPUs: Blender 3.3 now also supports Intel’s new Arc graphics processors – on both Windows and Linux operating systems. Arc support is the first step – the graphics cards of the Arc Pro A series are still to be delivered, and the drivers for these are about to leave the beta phase. AMD users can look forward to support for Vega and Vega II GPUs – also under Windows and Linux. Blender 3.3 now also supports older AMD graphics cards. CGChannel cites the Radeon Pro WX 9100 and Radeon Pro VII as examples.
Click further: everything about Blender 3.3 LTS: on blender.org and the release note. To download Blender 3.3 LTS. Digital Production last reported on Blender 3.3 on 1 August 2022 , when the latest version of the open source 3D software entered the beta phase. Before that, Blender 3.2.1 was worth a report on 11 July 2022 . Version 3.2.1 tended to be a cosmetic correction.
The Future of Hair Grooming in Blender
