Blender 3.2 Enables AMD GPU Rendering on Linux, Adds New Rendering Features

Blender 3.2

The Blender Foundation announced today the release and general availability of Blender 3.2 as the second point release in the major Blender 3.x series of this open-source, free, and cross-platform 3D modeling software.

Blender 3.2 is here only three months after Blender 3.1 and introduces new rendering features like a new type of Cycles render pass consisting only of the lighting from a subset of light sources, the ability to use light groups to modify the color and/or intensity of light sources in the compositor without re-rendering.

In addition, Blender 3.2 adds many other goodies to the Cycles feature, including support for selective rendering of caustics in shadows of refractive objects, which is based on the “Manifold Next Event Estimation” method, support for motion blur, which can be used for gas simulations and imported OpenVDB volumes, support for different color management for Render and Viewport, and support for adaptive sampling with scrambling distance.

There’s also a big new feature for Linux users in Blender 3.2, namely AMD GPU rendering support for RDNA and RDNA2 family of AMD Radeon graphics cards, including the Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 series, as well as Radeon Pro W6000 series. This feature requires the AMD Radeon 22.10 graphics driver to be installed on your GNU/Linux distribution.

New painting tools are present as well in this release, such as new settings for greater customization of the new paint brush, including density, flow, shape, and wet mixing, a new high-performance Smear brush, a new Mask by Color tool for creating masks on-the-fly, as well as a new Color Filter tool to apply various effects on unmasked areas.

Among other noteworthy changes, Blender now preserves all color attributes when using the voxel remesher, color attribute painting is now supported across masking, auto-masking, and face sets, a new node is available to help you create new geometry with the specified elements, you can now add collection assets as instances or real objects, it’s now possible to quickly add, tweak, and delete control points, and you can now organize your edits through channels names.

Last but not least, Blender 3.2 adds support for custom keyboard shortcuts to the “Insert Keyframe” menu, support for Woff and Woff2 fonts, support for HTC Vive Focus 3 controllers, support for WebP images, as well as many performance improvements, bug fixes, and other changes.

You can download Blender 3.2 right now from the official website as a binary file that doesn’t require any installation on the local disk. To get a visual overview of the new features and improvements implemented in Blender 3.2, check out the video below!

Last updated 2 years ago

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