Blender 3.0 is finally released as the new era for the popular 2D and 3D animation creation software.
The app UI layout has been improved with updated theme. Panels now have customizable rounded corners. Corner action zones now allow joining any neighbors. New “Close Area” option in the context menu, and many more UI tweaks.
The release has between 2x and 8x faster GPU rendering performance due to kernel rewritten. Loading and saving compressed .blend file is magnitudes faster via the Zstandard algorithm. Thanks to new scheduling and display algorithms, it’s more responsive when moving around the 3D viewport feels, even when Overlays turned on.
Blender 3.0 introduced asset browser, that includes materials, objects, and world data-blocks with drag & drop support. User may use asset libraries, tags, catalogs to manage assets. Also, custom asset thumbnails and Python API are supported.
Other features in Blender 3.0 including:
- Text Nodes.
- New pose library.
- New ‘Fields‘ concept to build node groups.
- Completely shadow catcher rewritten.
- Update OpenImageDenoise to v1.4.
- Thumbnail preview support for Video sequencer.
- New option to reduce shadow artifacts.
- Transform strips in preview region, just like in 3D viewport
- Time-based rendering limit.
- Brand new set of VR controller-based functionality
- Around 100 new nodes for interaction with curves, text data, instances, and more.
- And much more …
How to Get Blender 3.0:
Blender provides official Linux packages via portable tarball and universal Snap package. As well, there’s Flatpak package by community that works on most Linux.
Option 1: Download the tarball from its website, extract and run the executable to launch the software:
Option 2: Install the official Snap app that works on most Linux. Ubuntu user may install it directly from Ubuntu Software.
Option 3: Get Blender via the community Flatpak package.
Some Linux (e.g., Arch Linux) may update the software package in coming days. And, there are unofficial PPAs that may maintain the packages as choices for Ubuntu users.