A sizeable update to the open source 3D graphics suite Blender is available to download.
Blender 3.1 is performance-packed follow up to the incredibly well-received Blender 3.0 release that squeaked out at the end of last year.
As I’m not someone who knows how to use Blender —boy do I wish I was that talented— I’m not the best person to walk you through what’s changed. But do you know who is? The Blender team themselves.
Yes, to help demonstrate what’s changed (and how the changes improve things) the Blender team has put together a fabulous five minute video that flits through all of the salient new details:
Don’t have time to watch the video? No worries! Take a look at the official release notes for Blender 3.1. Blender has once-again produced a comprehensive one-stop mini-site that lavishly explains the biggest improvements with plenty of pretty pictures and animated GIFs.
Blender 3.1 is said to make a “major leap in performance” thanks, in part, to a new Metal GPU backend contributed by Apple to support their M1 chips and AMD graphics cards
Other changes spotlighted by Blender:
- GPU acceleration for Subdivision modifier
- Faster mesh editing
- Asset Browser indexing
- Image Editor support for large images
- Improved speed of .obj and .fbx export
- Better multi-threading & reduced memory usage in Geometry Nodes
Plus new animation tools, UI tweaks, an updated video sequencer editor, and tons of bug fixes and performance tune-ups.
Interested in going hands on?
Blender is free, open source software available for Windows, macOS and Linux. You can download the latest release from the official Blender website.