The Blender Foundation recently announced the release of the new version of Blender 4.2 LTS , and this release introduces a large number of significant changes and improvements, including a modernized and unified plugin and theme system, a new and modernized EEVEE, improvements for Linux, Wayland, and more.
This new version of Blender 4.2 is positioned as an Long Term Support (LTS) release and will be supported until July 2026. The LTS branches of Blender 3.3 and 3.6 will also continue to receive updates until September 2024 and June 2025, respectively.
Main new features of Blender 4.2 LTS
Linux improvements
- Linux: Added support for registering and deleting file associations, allowing Blender to be run when opening various file types, as well as the ability to copy and paste images from the clipboard in user environments based on the Wayland protocol.
Unification of plugins and themes
- Extension system: The plugin and theme systems have been unified under the concept of extensions, simplifying installation and management.
- Installation and update: Extensions can be easily installed from disk, a local repository, or
extensions.blender.orgusing drag and drop mode. Additionally, they can be updated directly from the Blender interface, with automatic update checks each time the program is started.
New implementation in EEVEE
- EEVEE Next: The EEVEE rendering engine has been completely rewritten and now supports real-time physical rendering using the GPU. The new version stands out with its support for global illumination, displacements, improved subsurface scattering (SSS), volumetric blur effects, and an unlimited number of BSDFs and light sources in the scene.
- Motion blur: EEVEE can now automatically extract strong ambient light sources and treat them as sunlight, generating more realistic shadows, and simulate motion blur in the viewport.
Cycles improvements
- Ray Portal BSDF Node: A new node that allows beams to be transferred to a new location in the scene, useful for rendering portals.
- Interference effects: The BSDF shader now supports physically accurate interference effects, allowing realistic rendering of bubbles and other similar materials.
- Improved noise reduction: The quality of noise reduction has been improved and the ability to accelerate these operations using AMD GPUs on Linux and Windows has been added.
Build improvements
- Builds for isolated environments: Expanded capabilities to automate the deployment and maintenance of Blender builds in animation studios and environments without access to the global network.
- Offline mode: The scripts and plugins used can be packaged as separate sets, and the option is provided
--offlineto start Blender in offline mode. - Portability: There is now automatic configuration to recreate the user's environment, placing configurations in the portable directory.
New modes and tools
- Quick creation of polygonal shapes: Added a new mode where each left mouse click adds a new polygon point. If the click matches the starting point, the shape closes.
- Sculpture mode: The line gesture can be used to crop, set faces and hide, and the free lasso gesture to hide areas.
- New sockets and nodes: Added a new socket type that uses arrays, simplifying conversions. Additional standard nodes for working with arrays.
- Improved interactivity: “Node Tools” has been improved to expand the core capabilities of Blender. Viewport and mouse position information can now be used.
- Optimization of geometric nodes: Speeding up the execution of nodes for scaling elements (4 to 10 times) and for UV surface sampling (10 to 20 times).
Improvements to the non-linear video editor
- Improved interface: Added elements with rounded corners, increased timeline margins, and thickened outlines for active and selected tracks.
- Element position adjustment: Added improvements to element manipulation and highlighting of elements associated with non-existent files.
- Text clues: New additional settings for the shadow cast by text.
Exportation and importation
- Linking export controllers: It is now possible to link a specific export handler to each collection to facilitate re-exporting assets.
- Support for USD and glTF formats: Blender 4.2 adds import and export of hair models in USD format, import of point clouds, and acceleration of mesh control during import.
- Alembic file import: There is now the ability to import multiple Alembic files simultaneously.
Performance and editing improvements
- GPU acceleration: Added support for GPU acceleration in the post-processing system (Composer).
- Graphic editor: performance has been improved significantly.
- Built-in text editor: this allows syntax highlighting for the GLSL shading language.
Finally, if you're interested in learning more about this new release, you can find the details at the following link.