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.
At the end of the story, you can find a round-up of the changes to the other core toolsets.
Blender’s 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 on par with OpenGL
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 workflows.
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.
It’s 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.
Blender 4.5’s new Set Mesh Normals node creates smooth transitions between meshes without changing their topology, unifying multiple objects into one seamless-looking surface.
3. Geometry Nodes: Set Mesh Normal blends objects together
There are a lot of changes to Blender’s Geometry Nodes system in Blender 4.5, but one of the most interesting is the new Set Mesh Normal node.
It stores a normal vector for each element of a mesh, making it possible to create custom normals within Geometry Nodes set-ups.
That has a number of potential uses, but since normals control how a mesh is shaded, one of the most interesting is to make intersecting objects look like one continuous surface.
You can see the effect in the video above: the Set Mesh Normal node blends the cube and the sphere (or the Suzanne head) together, without needing to change their topology or materials.
The same workflow could be used – for example – to add surface details to a hard surface model without the need to create fillets between each detail element and the surface beneath.
The node comes with three modes for storing data, ranging from Free – which is extremely fast to evaluate, but does not support deformation – to Tangent Space.
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.
It imports 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 Python importer.
Other changes in Blender 4.5 include the option to use screen captures to create custom thumbnail previews for assets in the Asset Browser.
Other changes: what’s new in the other key toolsets?
Blender’s UI gets a lot of updates – the release notes list well over 100 individual changes.
Highlights include support for the horizontal scroll wheel on some mice to scroll the 2D editors left and right, and changes designed to make the UI easier to navigate on graphics tablets.
In addition, the Asset Browser include the option to take screenshots to use as previews from anywhere within Blender, making it possible to create your own custom thumbnails.
Over in the 3D modeling toolset, there are three new operators for manipulating curves, including Separate, Join and Split.
The Grid Fill operator can now be used to remove tris and diamonds from existing geometry, replacing them with even quads, as well as simply filling holes.
The Point Cloud object type, which makes it possible to visualize and edit point cloud data, like raw scans or particle simulations, is no longer an experimental option.
During UV editing, a model’s UVs are now visible in the Image Editor’s Mask and Paint views when working in any mode, not just Edit mode.
The sculpting toolset gets better support for pen tablets, with the Draw, Draw Sharp, Plane and Clay Strips brushes now supporting pen tilt.
There are a lot of changes to Geometry Nodes, including dedicated import nodes for importing text, CSV files, VDB volumes, and 3D geometry in OBJ, PLY and STL format.
A new Camera Info node can be used for camera culling.
The update also improves workflow when using Frame Nodes to group nodes visually in the editor, helping to keep large node graphs organized. Find more details in this blog post.
There are smaller changes to character rigging, including the option to set the viewport display mode for bones on a per-bone basis, and a new Duplicate Shape Key operator.
The animation editors – the Graph Editor, Dope Sheet, Timeline, NLA and Video Sequencer – get the option to snap the playhead to any element visible in the timeline.
There are also performance improvements to simulation, with liquid sims now 1.25-1.5x faster.
In Cycles, it is possible to create custom camera views with Open Shading Language (OSL), supplementing the standard perspective, orthographic and panoramic cameras.
In addition, adaptive subdivision now supports a number of previously missing features, including motion blur and UV subdivision, bringing it closer to being production-ready.
There are a lot of changes to Grease Pencil, Blender’s 2D animation toolset, including support for Node Tools, SSAA as well as SMAA antialiasing, and the option to export animated SVGs.
It is also now possible to export a separate Grease Pencil render pass to the Compositor, for finer control of how Grease Pencil strokes are composited in rendered output.
The Compositor itself gets a lot of new nodes, including noise and utility nodes previously only available in Geometry or Shader Nodes, and an Image Info node.
In addition, the Open Image Denoise-based Denoise node now runs on the GPU.
The Sequencer, Blender’s built-in video editor, gets support for HDR in previews, and a refactored Slip operator.
For pipeline integration, there are updates to glTF, OBJ and OpenEXR import and export, and support for importing multiple SVG files.
In USD workflows, it is possible to import more primitives, light types and camera properties, and MaterialX now writes the Principled BSDF as an OpenPBR Surface.
For post-production, it is now possible to write videos using ProRes codecs, and video rendering to the FFV1 codec supports 16-bit output.
There are also some compatibility-breaking changes to the Python API, although a bigger change is coming up in Blender 5.0: the Blender Foundation has announced that Blender 4.5 will be the last version of the software to officially support Intel Macs.
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
Read a longer list of new features in the Blender 4.5 release notes
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