The Blender foundation announced the 3.1 release of its popular 3D creation software on Wednesday. See what’s new in it!
What’s New in Blender 3.1:
Thanks to Apple, Cycles now has new Metal GPU backend which renders much faster than before. Currently, it works on Apple M1 computers running macOS 12.2+, or Apple computers with AMD graphics cards running macOS 12.3+.
Geometry Nodes got a big performance improvements. Many nodes are now multi-threaded and use less memory.
The Subdivision modifier also has GPU acceleration support, so 3D Viewport playback is much faster! As well, this release now exports OBJ and FBX files much faster too.
Other changes in Blender 3.1 include:
- New Point Cloud object can be rendered directly with Cycles to create sand, water splashes, particles or even motion graphics.
- 19 new nodes for the ever-growing procedural system , including mesh modeling tools, access to time, advanced Fields control.
- Drag, drop, and search to get a list of automatically filtered nodes.
- Instances can now also have their own dynamic attributes!
- Mark Node Groups as Asset, drag & drop from the Asset Browser into Shading, Geometry Nodes, or Compositor.
- Extrude node finally made into Blender.
- Mark individual vertices as arbitrarily sharp to create interesting shapes more efficiently.
- Support for Pixar OpenSubDiv for modeling, rendering, Alembic and USD import/export.
- Copy Global Transform add-on makes it possible to copy the world-space transform of the active object/bone, and paste it onto any object/bone.
- The Fill tool now allows negative values, creating a contract effect for styles where an outline is needed.
- The Image Editor can now handle much larger images for preview and for editing.
Blender 3.1 Video:
Get Blender 3.1:
For more about the new release, see HERE. And download the official packages from the link below:
Ubuntu may just search for and install it from Ubuntu Software as it’s available as Snap package. It’s also available as universal Flatpak package.
For those don’t like the Snap and Flatpak, download the Linux tarball from the previous link button, extract and click run the executable file will launch the program.
