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The Blender 2.90 free and open-source 3D creation software is now available for download and it’s a major update that digital artists and designers have been expecting for so long.
Highlights of Blender 2.90 include initial Wayland support, new physically based texture called Nishita for simulating the colors of the sky, completely revamped motion blur in EEVEE with support for mesh deformation and hair for better precision, and faster motion blur via Intel Embree for ray tracing on the CPU.
There’s also a new shadow terminator offset setting that provides smooth shadows without shading artifacts, a new denoiser that can be used interactively in the 3D viewport, and NVLink support for NVIDIA CUDA and OptiX.
The software now lets users simulate cloth using four types of simulation, as well as an FK rig using the new Face Set FK mode in the Pose brush, which also comes with two new deformation modes, namely Scale/Translate and Squash & Stretch. The Topology Slide/Relax mode also features two new deformation modes, Pinch and Expand.
On top of that, Blender 2.90 brings support for pen pressure modulation for the hardness property, more predictable pressure/size and pressure/strength curves for Clay Strips, a redesigned Automasking system, which now correctly detects mesh boundaries in both meshes and Multires levels.
But wait, there’s more! Blender can now automatically adjust UV and Vertex Colors during mesh editing, lets users choose a subdivision level to sculpt on, as well as to switch between levels, and caches liquids and smoke data into a single .vdb file per frame for improved performance.
The user interface also comes with some much-needed changes, including a new search functionality, headings for columns, drag and drop support for reordering modifiers and other stacks, easier resizing of areas, support for bold and italic style fonts, and much more that can be viewed in the release notes.
You can download Blender 2.90 right now from the official website.
Last updated 3 years ago
