Blender 4.2 LTS Released: A New Benchmark for 3D Art and Gaming Graphics
Brook.X
The Blender Foundation today has launched Blender 4.2 LTS, a new long-term support version that will offer two years of support, ensuring users can continuously use this LTS version and receive security updates until July 2026.
Interested users can download the latest version here: https://www.blender.org/download/ *Supports Windows, Linux, macOS, and more
Next-Generation Rendering Engine - EEVEE:
This completely rewritten rendering engine supports global illumination, displacement, enhanced Subsurface Scattering (SSS), motion blur, and more.
EEVEE can automatically extract bright lights from the environment and treat them as sunlight, improving lighting quality and casting realistic shadows.
The real displacement feature introduced with EEVEE improves game quality by combining real displacement and bump mapping for finer detail.
Superior Subsurface Scattering (SSS) now addresses the issue of subsurface energy leaking between objects, always calculates subsurface translucency, and related options have been removed.
GPU/CPU New Features and Improvements:
This update introduces GPU-accelerated compositing for final renders, default GPU acceleration on AMD GPUs for Linux and Windows systems, a rewritten rendering compositor CPU backend for enhanced performance, and more.
User Interface Improvements:
- Added new "Copy Driver to Selected" option to the right-click menu, allowing the copying of an attribute's driver to the same attribute across all selected items.
- Support for horizontal rules in vertical layouts and vertical rules in horizontal layouts.
- Optimized font shader.
- Improved square color picker for widescreen displays.
- Enhanced status bar keyboard mapping display.
- Improved size confirmation dialogues, and more.
Blender 4.2 LTS represents a significant version update, and the information mentioned above only scratches the surface of what's new. Users of the software are encouraged to read the complete release notes at: https://www.blender.org/download/releases/4-2/