The popular 3D creation software Blender 3.3 is out today as a new LTS release! Meaning it has 2 year support until September 2024.
The release features a new hair grooming system. Which, includes new Curves Sculpt Mode with various brushes, such as Add/Delete, Density, Comb, Snake Hook, Pinch, Puff, Smooth, and Slide. Not only for hair grooming, but also can be used with all kinds of curves.
It also supports sculpting on curves deformed Geometry Nodes, as well as EEVEE and Cycles
Blender 3.3 also introduced 3 new Geometry Nodes for path-finding across mesh edges. They are Shortest Edge Paths, Edge Paths to Curves, and Edge Paths to Selection.
Intel Arc GPU is supported in this release with oneAPI. And, it also enabled AMD GPU Rendering for Vega generation graphics cards, such as Radeon VII, Radeon RX Vega Series and Radeon Pro WX 9100.
Other changes in this release include:
- Line Art modifier support calculating accurate cast shadow and light/shadow separation line given a light source reference object.
- Faster loading for Line Art objects due to multi-threaded calculation support.
- New UV Unwrap and Pack UV Islands nodes to create and adjust UV maps using Geometry Nodes.
- Optimizations for Apple Silicon
- Reduced memory usage in OpenVDB volumes
- New “Image from Plane Marker” operator, which creates or updates image data-block from pixels which the plane marker “sees”
For more about Blender 3.3 LTS, see the official release note.
Get Blender 3.3 LTS:
Blender website provides the official binary packages for Windows, MacOS, and Linux users:
Ubuntu user can directly search for and install it from Ubuntu Software, since it’s available as Snap package that runs in sandbox. An universal Flatpak package is also available though not updated at the moment.
For Linux users do not like the sandboxing applications, grab the 195MB “blender-3.3.0-linux-x64-tar.xz” tarball from the link above, extract, and run the executable file to launch the program without installing.