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Blender 3.5 open-source and free 3D graphics software has been released today as a major update that introduces several exciting new features and enhancements for digital graphic artists and designers.
Highlights of the Blender 3.5 release include support for Vector Displacement Map (VDM) brushes for the Draw brush, a new Extrude Mode for the Trim tools, light sampling support for Cycles to more effectively sample scenes with many lights, as well as Open Shading Language (OSL) support for OptiX.
The most anticipated UV feature in this release is UV Copy and UV Paste. the UV Copy feature lets you select connected faces for low poly modeling and game assets to make a copy of the UVs in a separate clipboard, while the UV Paste feature lets you select different faces that have the same topology and paste the UVs over.
It also supports non-uniform object scales for spot lights, improves adaptive sampling for overexposed scenes to reduce render time, improves GPU rendering performance on Apple devices, adds “Select Linked Vertices” to weight the paint mode, and makes it easier to add F-Curve modifiers to multiple channels.
The Pose Library has been updated during this cycle to offer you a more unified experience of the other asset types, it’s now possible to subtract a pose asset while blending, you can now flip the pose while blending by keeping the Ctrl key pressed, and blending can now also exaggerate a pose by pressing the E key.
The Graph Editor received a new “Ease” operator for aligning keys on an exponential curve, the Propagate Pose Operator has been updated with various improvements to its functionality, and a new Viewport Compositor shading option was added in the 3D Viewport.
Among other noteworthy changes, the Sculpt auto-masking feature was moved to the Global settings, there’s a new Auto-masking pie menu that you can access via Shift+Alt+A, copy/paste now works in multiframe mode, the Vertex Opacity parameter is now visible in the Overlay panel in Sculpt mode, and there’s a new option to display the brush size in the Draw tool cursor.
On top of that, Blender 3.5 updates the radial control to display the correct size when resizing the brush size, adds support in the material popover to show Fill color for Fill materials, and introduces a Natural Drawing Speed mode in the Build Modifier timing property for replaying drawings using the recorded speed of the stylus.
Blender 3.5 is available for download right now from here as a universal binary package that you can run on virtually any GNU/Linux distribution without installing anything on your personal computer. The source tarball is also available for download from the project’s GitHub page.
Last updated 2 months ago