Model, Make and Bake in Blender: Blender 3D 2.81 is Released

After the successful launch of Blender 2.80 which has now catapulted Blender 3D in Industry adoption and has Industry behemoths have shown interest in this free and open source 3D modeling, animation, rendering, compositing, video editing, sculpting software. Blender Foundation has now announced the next major release called Blender 2.81.

The new iteration provides much anticipated new features, some of which are listed below:

1. Sculpt mode reloaded: Sculpt mode has seen major revamp taking it much closer to its commercial counterpart like ZBrush. This mode alone requires a separate article and we have already covered the same here. The Sculpt mode now has new cursur akin to zbrush, dynamic mesh preview support, new masking features, a much anticipated and our favorite brush – pose brush which now lets sculpt mode to be an independent tool to showcase art without going to the nitty gritty of retopo and bones. Translate, rotate, scale can be done in sculpt mode alone.
2. Remeshing: Blender 2.81 now ships with two new ways to remesh your models, a fast one based on volumes and another one preserving quads
3. Support for Nvidia RTX raytracing: Blender now supports Nvidia’s Optix Library to accelerate ray tracing using RTX.
4. Support for Intel Open Image Denoise: As already reported, A new Denoise node was added in the compositor, to denoise renders using Intel Open Denoise Library. This is much faster and accurate the previous denoise implementation and can cut render times by 90%.
5. Cycles Render improvement: Blender own unbiased ray traced rendering engine has new and improved nodes, a new denoiser, adaptive subdivision stitching, custom HDRI picking from the viewport, NVIDIA RTX support and optimization Etc.
6. Preview Passes in the Viewport: Diffuse, Glossy, AO and Normal gets separate passes right inside viewport with both cycles and Eevee support.
7. Massive improvements on Shader nodes for Cycles & EEVEE
8. Eevee Improvement: The realtime rendering engine which first reared its head in Blender 2.80 has new improvements including
   • Soft Shadows have been completely rewritten to be easier to setup, look and match Cycles better.
   • Volumetrics are now faster to compute on modern GPUs.
   • Bump mapping gives more accurate results closer to Cycles.
   • Support for instanced lights and shadow casters.
   • Contact shadows now follow the light shape.
   • Sun lights now have their clip distances automatically computed.
   • Holdout is now supported with both opaque and semi transparent surfaces.
   • Transparency handling has been reworked and now supports the same BSDF combinations as Cycles.
9. Grease Pencil: The next major update arrives in Grease Pencil which now has New brushes, improved stroke quality, new tools and performance improvements. Isometric guides are also in tow making blender a serious 2D animation platform.
10. File Browser: This is now more modern with a floating window, new icons, vertical list view, etc.
11. Outliner is more improved: Replacing layer system in blender 2.80, Outliner gets even more user friendly. Selection is no longer async with viewport, drag and drop works better, box select works, filter option etc.

There are just tons more improvement which is beyond the scope of this article and can be seen in the release notes by blender foundation.

Look at all the changes and download new blender here.

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Abhishek

Abhishek is a Finance Professional and has worked in multiple MNCs. However, he is also an avid tech reader and tinkerer with over 20 years of experience. His passions include 3D animation and drawing Illustrations. His creations can be viewed at www.artstation.com/abhifx

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