Blender 4.5 LTS is out: check out its 5 key features
The splash screen artwork for Blender 4.5: an image from Dogwalk, the Blender Studio’s new game, aimed at forging a pipeline between Blender and open-source game engine Godot.
The Blender Foundation has released Blender 4.5, the next version of the open-source 3D software for VFX, animation, game development and visualization.
As the latest Long-Term Support (LTS) release, Blender 4.5 will continue to receive critical fixes for the next two years, providing more security for studios using it on major projects.
It’s also another wide-ranging update, updating key toolsets including Geometry Nodes, the Cycles and Eevee renderers, and the built-in Compositor and Grease Pencil tools.
Below, we’ve picked out five changes that particularly caught our eye, from headline features like the Vulkan backend to hidden gems like the new lighting controls and FBX importer.
We’ll be adding a round-up of the other changes tomorrow, so check back for updates.
Blender’s new Vulkan backend improves viewport performance, streamlining a lot of day-to-day workflows, from opening large files to digital sculpting. Video by SouthernShotty.
1. Viewport: the Vulkan backend is now production-ready
An under-the-hood change in Blender 4.5 that affects a lot of day-to-day workflows is that the new Vulkan backend is now effectively production-ready.
First introduced in Blender 4.1, and updated in Blender 4.4, it provides an alternative to the ageing OpenGL backend for rendering Blender’s UI and viewport.
OpenGL is still the default in Blender 4.5, so you need to enable Vulkan manually in Preferences, but the two are now officially “on par”, with the update adding support for missing features like subdivision, OpenXR, and USD import and export.
Performance has also been improved “significantly”, making the viewport and UI more responsive, particularly when working on large or complex scenes.
That affects a lot of day-to-day tasks, from simply reducing the wait for shaders to compile when opening a scene, to improving performance when scrubbing through an animation.
You can get a sense of what difference it can make in the video embedded above.
The Vulkan backend is supported on relatively old GPUs: NVIDIA’s 10-year-old GeForce GTX 900 Series and AMD’s eight-year-old Radeon 400 Series are supported on Windows and Linux.
However, one thing to note is that the Vulkan backend can’t handle “huge” meshes – those over 100 million vertices – and requires all of the textures for a scene to fit into GPU memory, with the exact limits being determined by your GPU driver.
The new Manifold solver speeds up Sculpt mode’s Trim tools, and produces clean Boolean geometry even in cases where the old Float solver would fail.
2. 3D modeling: Manifold solver creates better Trims and Booleans
There are a lot of updates to the 3D modeling tools in Blender 4.5, but one that particularly caught our eye was the new Manifold solver for Boolean operations.
It’s based on the open-source Manifold library, also used in Nomad Sculpt, and is described as “as fast as, and sometimes faster” than the existing Float solver.
As the name suggests, it only works on manifold geometry, where each edge is adjacent to exactly two faces – although manifold geometry is usually a must for production work anyway.
It’s also much more robust, producing results in cases where the Float solver fails: some beta testers have said that it produces output more like that from commercial tools like Cinema 4D.
The new solver is available in both the Boolean Modifier and the Mesh Boolean Node, and is also used in the Trim tools in Sculpt mode, as shown in the video above.
You can see a detailed comparison of the pros and cons of the Float and Manifold solvers here.
Different Dicing Scale values in Blender’s Adaptive Subdivision settings. The Adaptive Subdivision system takes a big step towards becoming production-ready in Blender 4.5.
3. Cycles: Better adaptive subdivision speeds up renders
Adaptive subdivision has been an experimental feature in Blender for years, but in Blender 4.5, it comes a step closer to being production-ready.
It automatically adjusts the subdivision level used by the Subdivision Surface Modifier according to the distance of an object from the render camera, so that near objects are subdivided more.
That helps to maintain the visual realism of renders – particularly when objects have displacement applied to them – without increasing render times to unmanageable levels.
In Blender 4.5, Adaptive Subdivision supports a number of previously missing features, including motion blur and UV subdivision.
It’s also much faster, with multithreading improving performance by “10-14x”.
Blender 4.5 features a number of new lighting controls, including Exposure, Temperature and Normalize, shown here in this video from animator Remington ‘SouthernShotty‘ Markham.
4. Lighting: new controls create lighting set-ups more intutively
Layout and lighting artists get a number of new control parameters in Blender 4.5, making it possible to create both realistic and stylized lighting set-ups more quickly and intuitively.
Temperature makes it possible to set the color of a light as a temperature on the Kelvin scale.
That’s particularly useful for recreating natural daylight accurately, although the result can be stylized by setting a separate Tint color.
A new Normalize option prevents the intensity of area lights from changing when the light is scaled up or down.
Again, it’s particularly useful for natural lighting, making it possible to specify the power of a sun light in Watts per square meter.
Exposure acts a multiplier for the intensity of a light – and unlike the existing options, it can be used to adjust all of the lights in a scene simultaneously.
The controls are also supported natively in Hydra, the Universal Scene Description’s rendering framework, so they are preserved when importing or exporting USD files.
A hidden gem in Blender 4.5: the new C++ FBX importer imports models in FBX format up to 15x faster than the old Python importer, and preserves more shading and animation data.
5. Pipeline: new importer speeds up FBX import by up to 15x
Another under-the-hood change that could make a big difference to your day-to-day work, particularly if you’re using Blender in production, is the experimental new C++ FBX importer.
Based on the open-source ufbx library, also now used in Godot, it is “generally 3-15x faster” than the old Python importer, and “often uses less memory too”.
As well as simply being faster, it imports a lot of ‘problem files’ that simply fail to import properly through the Python importer, due to unusual technical issues.
It also supports a wider range of FBX files, including ASCII files and very old binary files.
The new importer supports more shader parameters, including coat, sheen and thin film settings: according to the documentation, this particularly improves import of OpenPBR materials from 3ds Max.
And as a bonus, when importing animations with multiple takes in FBX format, the new importer automatically creates slotted Actions, following the new structure introduced in Blender 4.4.
However, you will need to select it from the Import menu: dragging and dropping a FBX file into the viewport still uses the old Python importer.
License and system requirements
Blender 4.5 is compatible with Windows 8.1+, macOS 11.2+ and glibc 2.28+ Linux. It’s a free download. The source code is available under a GPLv3 license.
Read the Blender Foundation’s overview of the new features in Blender 4.5 LTS
Read a longer list of new features in the Blender 4.5 LTS release notes
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