Blender 5.2 LTS is here: discover its 5 key features
The splash screen art for Blender 5.2: an image from artist Joanna Kobierska.
The Blender Foundation has released Blender 5.2, the latest version of the open-source 3D software for VFX, animation, game development and visualization.
Although it’s officially a Long-Term Support release, it’s quite a significant update, adding major new toolsets, and making important structural changes under the hood.
Below, we’ve picked out five new features that we think are particularly significant, from cloth and hair physics in Geometry Nodes to the new texture cache system in the Cycles renderer.
We’ll update this story shortly with a run-down of the changes to Blender’s other core toolsets, including sculpting, animation and the built-in Compositor and Sequencer.
Blender 5.2 introduces new Geometry Nodes-based systems for simulating cloth and hair, powered by a XPBD (Extended Position Based Dynamics) multiphysics solver. Video: CGDive.
1. Physics: new Geometry Nodes-based systems for hair and cloth
Easily the most-discussed features in Blender 5.2 ahead of the stable release have been the experimental new Geometry Nodes-based physics systems for hair and cloth.
Blender already has hair and cloth simulation tools, but the new versions differ in two key ways.
First, they’re part of the wider Geometry Nodes toolset, which provides a much more versatile and creative way to control simulations.
Second, they’re both powered by a new underlying multiphysics system, the XPBD Solver, which provides a unified framework for hair, cloth and particles.
The simulations they create can be influenced via effectors: either built-in effectors for common phenomena like surface collision and gravity, or custom systems.
The new toolset is still experimental, and lacks some obvious features: notably, advanced self-collision for cloth, and readymade forces like wind, turbulence or drag.
However, it’s arguably the most significant change to Geometry Nodes since simulation nodes were originally introduced in Blender 3.6 in 2023, bringing support for particle simulations.
The XPBD Solver also brings Blender in line with other key VFX tools: Extended Position Based Dynamics) is also used in Houdini’s Vellum solver and Unreal Engine’s cloth toolset.
The new Mesh Bevel node is one of the most visible new features in the Geometry Nodes toolset – but there are a lot of other important changes beneath the hood.
2. Geometry Nodes: bevels and bundles and lists, oh my!
There are also a lot of other changes to the Geometry Nodes toolset: some immediately visible, others happening under the hood.
In the first category, the new Mesh Bevel node (shown above) provides a more versatile alternative to the Boolean modifier for rounding edges or corners of geometry.
Another new node, Sample Sound Frequencies, retrieves the amplitude of a given frequency range from an audio input, opening up new workflows for sound-driven motion graphics.
In the second – and perhaps ultimately more significant – category, Geometry Nodes set-ups can now be driven by node bundles or lists of numbers or text strings.
In addition, empties can now have Geometry Node modifiers.
The change seems to have been made primarily as a way to implement custom forces for the new physics systems, but should open up a much wider range of node-based workflows.
The new Thin Wall mode in the Principled BSDF shader provides a fast, intuitive way to recreate a range of real-world materials, from paper and foliage to glass. Video: SouthernShotty.
3. Shading: new Thin Wall mode for paper and glass
Another seemingly small change with important consequences is the new Thin Wall mode in the Principled BSDF shader.
When enabled, the surface to which the shader is applied is considered a thin sheet, providing a more intuitive way to recreate materials from paper and leaves to glass and soap bubbles.
Equally importantly, it resolves a long-standing issue in architectural rendering – that interiors often come out darker than they should, as light is attenuated when passing through non-Thin Wall glass in windows – and simply renders faster than existing shading methods.
Cycles’ new texture cache system can slash the memory needed by Blender’s production renderer for scenes like the Bistro demo, at the cost of a small increase in render time.
4. Cycles: new texture cache cuts memory usage up to 80%
There are a number of changes to Blender’s native engines in Blender 5.2, but one of the biggest is the new texture cache in Cycles, Blender’s production renderer.
As in renderers like Arnold and Redshift, the textures used in a 3D scene are automatically converted into .tx files, and regenerated when the scene changes.
.tx textures are tiled and mipmapped, reducing memory use, since Cycles doesn’t need to load textures that appear a long way from the render camera at full resolution.
The memory saving is highly scene-dependent, and mainly benefits scenes with a lot of separate image textures, but it can be significant.
In the standard Blender demo scenes, it reduces memory use by up to 80%, the largest saving being in the Bistro scene.
The downside is an increase in disk space used – required to store the cache – and render time, although to judge from the benchmark test results above, it isn’t a particularly significant one.
The implementation is intended to work automatically out of the box, but there are are additional controls for rendering on render farms, and for viewport rendering.
The texture cache is also now used for Open Shading Language, which previously used OpenImageIO, which should improve performance when rendering OSL shaders.
The new Delaunay algorithm used by Grease Pencil’s Fill Tool fills freehand strokes with color more quickly and accurately than the old pixel-based flood fill system.
5. Grease Pencil: new Delaunay solver fills strokes more accurately
We debated which of the other toolsets to single out in this article, since the Sequencer and Compositor also got sizeable updates in Blender 5.2, but in the end, we opted for Grease Pencil.
There are a number of changes to Blender’s 2D animation and storyboarding toolset, but one of the biggest is the new Delaunay algorithm for the Fill Tool.
It creates exact geometry from the strokes it fills, automatically detecting gaps, is zoom-independent, supports inverse filling, and often just runs faster than the previous algorithm.
In addition, when converting freehand strokes with the draw brushes to curves, it is now possible to choose Bézier, Catmull-Rom, or NURBS curves.
For line materials using dots or squares, the dots can now be generated at render time, a workflow “orders of magnitude faster” than before.
License and system requirements
Blender 5.2 LTS is compatible with Windows 8.1+, macOS 13.0+ 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 5.2 LTS
Read a longer list of new features in the Blender 5.2 release notes
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