From game devs to movies and all sorts, Blender is a truly incredible bit of free and open source tech and it has evolved a lot with Blender 4.2 out now.
One of the biggies from this release is the next generation of their rendering engine, EEVEE. They said it has been completely "rewritten from scratch to allow global illumination, displacement, better SSS, viewport motion blur, and so much more" so it's more feature-filled than ever. Cycles also got a huge upgrade to make renders look better and render even faster.
Need to extend Blender? Add-ons and Themes have been overhauled into a new Extensions system, allowing you to update them from inside Blender which sounds useful. Plus check out the new Extensions site.
Another fun one is Blender has become more portable than ever before. Now you can just take your entire config with you, as long as you have a folder named "portable" next to where you run Blender, it will load settings from there first.
For those who want a quick round-up:
![YouTube Thumbnail](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/cache/youtube_thumbs/98f5521e396919bd5b0478c2080a5a81.jpg)
Direct Link
And if you've got a little more time for the deep-dive:
![YouTube Thumbnail](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/cache/youtube_thumbs/96ad3a25a294e30a116b8bacac77759b.jpg)
Direct Link
Or just go and read the changes on the Blender website.
If you're a Blender user, let us know what you're up to with it in the comments, and what you think of the 4.2 release.
Been looking forward to this new version of Eevee for a while. It's a complete rewrite and the new version removes so many of the limitations that Eevee used to have. It reduces the gap between Cycles and Eevee down to something so narrow.
HUGE update.
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