This release has a lot of contributions from the community of contributors and developers at Blender.org to support demos, publish bug fixes and more than 4,700 individuals and companies participated in the Blender Development Fund.
Since the 2.8 release in 2018, Blender has undergone a complete transformation. This open-source software has become a prominent topic of discussion within the online community.
The development of the real-time render engine EEVEE, which was pioneering and efficient at the time it was released, plus a powerful sculpting engine, made Blender a game-changer. This led to giants in game development, hardware, and graphics publicly backing Blender’s finances.
The CG community was buzzing about an open-source tool that could supersede many of the limitations of Autodesk Maya, while being much cheaper, constantly updated, and attentive to user feedback. In 2019, version 2.8 was released, and artists and designers worldwide quickly embraced this new tool. Blender became a popular choice for small and medium studios.
While comparing the two tools for CG rendering might seem like a contest, it’s really just part of the 3D software ecosystem (Digital Content Creation – DCC). The outstanding creativity of free, open-source software, with its extensive features, enables artists to create artworks of similar quality as with expensive, paid software.
Key Updates in Version 2.9
The critical updates contribute to the stability and popularity of Blender within the CG design tools community.
- Open VDB – import/export support: This volumetric database, developed by Dreamworks, enhances the performance and productivity for artists who work with volumetric-based effects like smoke, flares, clouds, and water. It also includes 4D displacement, depending on the artist’s imagination. Blender 2.9 supports Open VDB for water simulation, and you can simulate each frame to create a.VDB file.
- Open Image Denoise: Intel’s tool helps denoise images. Just like Nvidia’s OptiX Denoise on GPU, Blender Open Image Denoise is now available on Intel CPUs.
- Intel Embree support in the rendering engine: This important feature significantly speeds up commercial renderings running on Intel CPU cores, making render times shorter and helping artists/designers focus on creating more.
- UVs are now finer, easier to make, and more user-friendly, and they also treat the mesh even while unwrapping the UVs.
- Ocean Spray: This effect creates a sprayed sea surface with data channels to create the spray, which will help Blender particle easily read the signal to create effects like sponges rising from sea wave surface.
- Blender 2.81 introduces the Cloth Filter brush, an interesting update that brings more creative possibilities. Less engineering is needed in the artifact process.
- Blender 3D Sculpture ability is also upgraded with an internal feature called Multi-Resolution Sculpture. This feature allows you to create without having to learn too many techniques.
- Sculpture 3D adds Un-Subdivide and Rebuild features: These two features help reduce the grid of a working object.
- Motion Blur in EEVEE: This is done by object deformation during animation.
- Rendering on multichannel NVIDIA cards: With NVIDIA Link, the more GPUs used result in faster GPU rendering, which is great.
- Sky Texture support: Blender calls this the Nishita sky, which is already available in many popular rendering tools. It varies in use and technology, however. The goal is to produce time-changing light like the real sun, based on the distribution of the atmosphere.
- Simulation fabric – cloth has been improved, which boosts productivity.
- Smart Extrude: This extrude does not change or destroy the object topology.
- Other features include edge snap, point, and edge slide, which support architects, engineers, and architectural visualizers.
- Supports distort lens effects for compositing on Nuke or Natron compositing software.
- Shadow terminator 0.1: This eliminates the jagged edges on an object when the light hits shadows.
- Convert Mesh models to Grease Pencil: This feature makes 2D creation easier and faster when you have to design and create Grease Pencil to Mesh and vice versa.
- Add information displayed on the Viewport HUD (this feature is quite common in 3D software).
- Improved Search function and an interface that is easier to read.
See Also:
- Microsoft joins the Blender Development Fund
- The causes and solution of Blender crash