Blender 4.5 is now available with a wide ranging set of improvements including full support for Vulkan, a more flexible compositor, and enhancements to the animation timeline.`

The free, open-source and cross-platform 3D computer graphics software for Windows, macOS and GNU/Linux platforms has tools for creating animated films, games, visual effects, art, 3D-printed models, interactive 3D applications, and virtual reality.

Blender 4.0 added features including node tools and repeat zones in geometry nodes, along with a new principled BSDF shader. Version 4.5 is a long term support release that builds on version 4.0, starting with the addition of full support for Vulkan, the open project maintained by the Khronos Group. Vulkan is a low-overhead, cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API that gives developers with more control over GPU hardware to improve overall performance. Using it in Blender provides a significant performance boost, especially in scenes that contain a lot of polygons.

The new release is also faster at startup, and now has EEVEE shader compilation. EEVEE is Blender's real-time render engine, and the new support reduces the waiting time caused by shader compilation on some GPU-driver combos.

There's also a more flexible compositor that comes with a new Grease Pencil pass and new nodes to set the grease pencil color, depth and softness. 

Alongside the new grease pencil nodes, Blender 4.5 adds a number of other new Geometry Nodes focused on data access and string handling, including Camera Info, Instance Bounds, Match String, Bit Math, Field Average, Field Variance, and Field Min & Max.

Custom mesh normals are now editable in Geometry Nodes with a new Set Mesh Normal node. Users can modify both "Tangent Space" normals and a new, faster "Free" format, and the custom node tools are now easier to organize with support for collapsible panels, including the use of boolean sockets as checkboxes in their headers, just like native built-in operators.

Other improvements include enhancements to the animation timeline, support for importing multiple formats in Geometry Nodes, UV visibility in all modes, and a faster Video Sequencer with HDR support.

Blender 4.5 is available now. 

More Information

Blender 4.5 Download

Related Articles

Blender Free Game Tops Steam

Blender 3.2 Adds Light Groups

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info