 Today's the day, Blender 3.6 just got released and it has some significant performance improvements as well as some important new features that you're not going to want to live without. I'm Jonathan Lampell from CGCookie and in this video I'm going to walk you through all of the changes in Blender 3.6 so that you can get up and start with it right away. First let's talk about the UI changes. There's nothing wildly different in this version, but as usual Blender is continuing to get a little cleaner and more intuitive with every update. As in the properties editor, now show the name of the tab immediately on hover, which should help new users find the right one more quickly. The open recent menu now includes 20 items rather than 10, which is great for all those people who have a lot of unfinished projects lying around. No idea who could need that though, me. And I might regret telling everybody this, but did you know that Blender supports basic emojis in any text input field? Well, now it also includes all of the new ones added to Unicode 15. So if you really want to name your objects with the jellyfish or shaky face emoji, only your conscience can stop you now. The color picker pop up no longer gets cut off if it's too close to the edge of the screen, thank heavens. And by heavens I suppose I mean Harley the developer. The alt click hotkey for changing the properties of multiple objects at the same time now also works for string properties such as an object's name. Just make sure that you're holding down alt when you hit enter to confirm. In Blender 3.6, whole menus or sub menus can be added to your queue hotkey quick favorites, which makes things much easier to organize. More context menus now open with the last used item highlighted. UI lists now have a hover highlight. The outliner can now filter by grease pencil objects. Operator confirmations can now be disabled by turning off the confirm property for that shortcut in the keymap settings. This was recently a hotly requested feature on Twitter for the X to delete hotkey and it's cool to see how fast it made it in as a general option for any relevant hotkey. Files in the file browser can now be dragged and dropped by grabbing their name and not just their icon, which makes total sense, and escaping or right clicking now cancels drag and drop operations. There's a new menu called external in the file browsers context menu that lets you find open and edit the file with your OS defaults. Also new in Blender for Windows is autofocusing on whichever window is hovered over and copy and pasting images to and from the image editor. You'll just need a copy and paste via the image menu since the control C and control V hotkey is not set for the image editor by default. However, you can do that pretty quickly by right clicking and assigning the hotkey yourself. Just don't forget to save your preferences after. On Mac, recent Blender files are now shown in the doc context menu and an app expose and double clicking a blend file will now always load even if Blender loses focus while launching. Next, let's talk modeling. When editing text objects, you can now just click to place the cursor, click and drag to highlight and double click to highlight a word. It's so much easier than before when you had to navigate it like a Python console. A few other text improvements include changing the text style for the whole selection rather than just the cursor, two uppercase and two lowercase supporting more languages, and two new operators for moving the text cursor to the beginning or the end of the text. It may seem like a small set of updates to anyone unfamiliar, but if you regularly work with text in Blender, you'll know that this alone will make it worth upgrading for. The proportional editing size can now be set manually in the proportional editing popover, so if the circle is too big or too small to see, then you can check this setting without doing a lot of scrolling and guessing. The position of the text in the ruler tool is a little bit smarter and doesn't get in the way as much while working. On the performance side of things, some mesh data is now shared between copies of objects, resulting in an overall memory usage reduction of at least 25% with large geometries. The mesh conversion that happens under the hood while working with shape keys, UVs, selection history, multi-res objects, and other mesh operations has been multi-threaded and is now up to 50% faster. This speedup is most noticeable for meshes that have a lot of attributes. Calculating split normals, such as when using auto smooth or custom normals, now uses less memory and is up to 80% faster. The subdivision surface modifier is now significantly faster for dense meshes that don't have any loose vertices, since previously those had to be checked for separately. Drawing selection in the viewport for a curve edit mode is now about four times faster for curve selection and 18 times faster for point selection. This will definitely come in handy when working with Blender's new hair system. There's also an entirely new transform orientation in Blender 3.6 called parent, which passes along the local orientation of the parent object or bone. In some ways this is a rather small change, but it's incredibly useful and intuitive. One of the most exciting updates in Blender 3.6 is the massive UV packing improvement that some of us have been hoping for for years. The new packing algorithm finally handles concave shapes and holes with ease, and there are new options for rotation, pinned islands, and overlapping islands. It's so, so much better than before. Also, sphere and cylinder UV projections can now optionally respect seams. The UV select similar operator has new face options for similar winding, which just means flipped or not, and similar object. Lastly, reading UV map data for displaying in the viewport is now up to three times faster. Asset tooltips in the asset browser now show the full name and asset description, and the clear asset operator now works on all selected assets instead of just the active one. Asset libraries can now be set to use a relative path when linking assets, which is perfect for working out of shared cloud folders. Also, resyncing library override is now a bit smarter and should result in less issues when data is missing. And it's not part of the release necessarily, but it is worth noting that a new official asset pack of human base meshes is available to download for free from blender.org and is well worth having in your asset browser. I feel like I need to give this one the hype of a tech keynote speaker. Today, I'm proud to announce, even though I had nothing to do with it, that Geometry Nodes now supports simulations. To use it at a simulation zone, which includes a simulation input and a simulation output. Every change that you make inside the simulation zone gets compounded every frame, meaning that rotating the geometry by 5 degrees will rotate it 5 additional degrees every frame. The concept itself is fairly simple, but can be used to create fairly complex behaviors when using fields to control the effects. The simulation's results can be cached or baked, which is controlled by a new simulation nodes panel in the physics properties and visualized in the timeline. There's a new node called index of nearest that returns the index of the closest non-self element. The mesh to volume node now generates a proper open VDB fog volume rather than a converted SDF, which is a nice enhancement, but do be aware that the old files using this node will not look the same when rendered in Blender 3.6 or later. Creating new input nodes via the link drag search feature now copies the value from the original node to the new node for convenience, and to avoid recalculating the node tree. If you're ever unsure about what a node does, you can now use the link in the right-click context menu that takes you right to the documentation. There are significant performance improvements to Geometry Nodes in this update as well. Implicit sharing of data between geometry copies can improve the memory usage of the copy by up to 25%. Skipping creating copies when converting geometry makes the instance on points, instances to points, points to vertices, mesh to points, capture attribute, and store named attribute nodes at least 10 times faster. Using many primitive nodes, which is what most procedural modeling is based on, is also much faster thanks to the fact that they don't have to be checked for loose edges and their bounding boxes are pre-calculated. Last but not least, the mesh to curve node is about 10% faster during animation playback, and the curved mesh node got a small speed boost of a few milliseconds as well when working with a high number of curves. Blender 3.6 also has some nice quality of life upgrades for animators and rigors. Blur, average, and smear tools are now available in grease pencil weight paint mode. And hotkey alert, Alt-S is the new shortcut for smoothing operators, and Alt-D is the new shortcut for blending operators in the graph editor. The control clicking on a channel now toggles selection for it rather than renaming it. Navigating animation curves in the graph editor is now much easier thanks to the new hotkey Alt-Middle Mouse button while hovering over the channel list. Frame selected is now also in the right-click context menu. It would be pretty sweet to have the option to do this automatically when selecting channels, but I won't get ahead of myself. This is already a great time saver. Inverse kinematics is a very technical topic, especially if you switch the armature's IK solver type to ITASC, but the short version of it is that ITASC is newer, flashier, and intended to better handle constraints. It's been around for a little bit, but in Blender 3.6, the solver no longer requires the root bone to be at the object origin, which makes it usable in a lot more scenarios. In weight paint mode, you can now grow and shrink the selection like in edit mode. The scene's duration can now be added to the status bar in its right-click menu. The timecode follows what you have set in preferences under animation and timeline. The copy global transform add-on, which you should definitely enable if you haven't already, because switching between parents or spaces can be a bit of a headache otherwise, now has an option to paste the mirrored version of a transform. That's a great addition. The dashed lines which tell you which armature bones are connected can now be drawn from the head of the child to either the head or the tail of the parent. This can make for a much cleaner display in some situations. Drivers have a new variable called context property, which allows you to get a value from the current scene or view layer. This is actually a pretty big deal because it means that you can get the transforms of things like the active camera without needing to specify exactly which camera, and then having to go into the driver and switch it out every time you change the active camera. The only show selected curve keyframes and use high quality display view options for the graph editor have been moved to preferences in the animation section so that you don't have to set these with every new blend file. The key menu in the graph editor is now much cleaner thanks to moving the options related to channels into a channels menu and grouping more things into submenus. A new Gaussian smooth operator in the graph editor is the new and improved method of smoothing animation data. It has more options, is independent of keyframe density, and handles spikes a bit more predictably. The insert keyframe menu in the graph editor has a new option to only add keyframes to the active curve. Pasting keyframes in the graph editor now comes with new offset options. Channels in the dope sheet can now be pinned. The dope sheet and timeline no longer let you scroll to infinity and lose your keyframes. Hopefully this makes it to the NLA editor as well. The NLA editor has been cleaned up a bit though, and most excitingly strips can now be dragged through other strips so that you don't have to do that weird up and over maneuver. There are no new big flashy rendering features in this release, but we did receive some pretty sweet performance improvements. Light trees which were introduced in the last release now use less memory and can compile about 10 times faster. Loading dense meshes is now about 5 times faster. Loading mesh attributes is up to 10 times faster. Loading UV maps is up to 60 times faster. Loading point clouds is up to 9 times faster, and loading curves is up to 10 times faster. That's incredible. AMD GPU rendering on Windows now uses hardware ray tracing acceleration with HIP RT, which speeds things up significantly, but has some trouble rendering hair shadows and motion blur. AMD GPUs now also support light trees, which is a feature that came to Nvidia users in the last release. Intel CPUs and Intel Arc GPUs get hardware ray tracing as well using Embry 4. Your first time using this with AO or bevel nodes will cause a large recompilation time, which can take several minutes, but afterwards will be much faster. On Apple Silicon GPUs using Metal, the new Nano VDB support reduces memory usage of large volumes. OSL, the scripting language for creating custom shader nodes, can now create more surfaces from the Material X library, and the glass shader is now more physically accurate at higher roughness levels. The awesome real-time viewport compositor that we got recently is now much closer to matching the features of the Classic compositor, now that it supports 13 more essential compositing nodes. Convert color space, plane track to form, D noise, stabilized 2D, mask, corner pin, texture, ID mask, map UV, fog glow glare, displace, Z-combine, and anti-aliasing. It now also supports bicubic interpolation, repetition along an axis, and multi-layer EXR images. A new transparent render pass for EV can be used to adjust alpha-blended surfaces in the compositor. The PLY importer and exporter has been rewritten in C++, which makes it about 4 to 30 times faster than the previous Python version. It also added better support for importing point clouds with vertex colors, importing files with non-standard line endings, importing models that use tri-strips elements instead of faces, exporting multiple objects, exporting loose edges and vertices, exporting UV maps, and more. The USD importer now supports multiple primitive paths and no longer creates duplicate shader nodes. The USD exporter now better handles USD preview surface materials, additional root transforms, curves, and hair. Exporting meshes with FBX is now about twice as fast, and importing meshes can be up to 45 times faster for heavy scenes with no animation. Blender also used to have a 3DS format importer and exporter that's now been brought back by popular demand. That's for working with 3DS Max, not the Nintendo 3DS, but I do support anyone still using either. As for the scripting stuff, custom float properties now have subtypes and can be set to display as a temperature, power, distance, time, angle, factor, percent, pixel, or plane data. You can now add multiple script directories in preferences, meaning that you can now load in add-ons from multiple folders on your computer. It's also important to note that changes have been made to the mesh, F-curve, script directories, and various other parts of the Blender API, so not all add-ons will automatically work in Blender 3.6, though most shouldn't have any issues. And that's all for this release. Let me know in the comments which features you're excited about the most, not you like the format of this video. Again, I'm Jonathan Lampell from CGCookie. Thanks so much for watching and happy blending.