Blender, the popular free open-source 3D animation creation software, released the new major 3.5 version today!
The new release came with great improvements on the hair system. It now has built-in hair asset library with 26 hair assets. Which is easy to use by simply drag and dropping from the asset browser onto your setups.
It also made easy to do many actions to hair curves on a surface mesh, including:
- generate new hair curves
- interpolates existing guide curves
- attach hair curves
- duplicate hair curves a certain number of times
- clump together existing hair curves
- deforms existing hair curves into curls/braids
- deform hair curve using random vector per point
- smooth the shape of hair curves
- roll up, trim, rotate, straighten, and many other actions to hair curves.
Blender 3.5 also added support for Vector Displacement Maps (VDM in short) brushes to the Draw brush in sculpt mode. Which provides an easy way to create complex shapes. For the best results, VDM textures should be in OpenEXR format, with Color Clamping disabled.
The release also features a new GPU-based 3D viewport compositor. It makes use of Metal in macOS with great improvements for animation playback and EEVEE rendering.
Other changes in Blender 3.5 include:
- Many lights sampling for Cycles for nicers and faster results.
- Spot lights now support non-uniform object scale, matching how EEVEE renders them as well.
- New options and shortcuts introduced for Pose Library
- New Ease operator in the Graph Editor
- Import/Export USDZ files.
- New Natural Drawing Speed timing mode in the Build modifier
For more about Blender 3.5, see the official release note.
How to Get Blender 3.5
Ubuntu user can directly search for and install Blender as Snap package from Ubuntu Software.
Fedora 38 (with 3rd repository enabled) and Linux Mint can install Blender as Flatpak directly from either Gnome Software or Software Manager.
For Arch Linux, just wait, your system developer team will build the latest release and publish it in the system repository.
For Windows, macOS, and portable Linux tarball, go and download in Blender website: