 Hi! Remington from Southern Shotty 3D here excited to be on the official Blender YouTube channel to let you know that there's a new version of Blender out Blender 2.83, meaning that we're going to cover all the new features in less than five minutes. If you'd like to see a full list of the dev notes check out the link in the description below but for now let's get started. Blender's amazing grease pencil tool just got even better. With a complete overhaul of the drawing engine you'll see massive FPS improvements especially on large scenes. One of the most exciting updates is the use of lights with grease pencil objects. You can now add lights to your scenes for some really unique and dynamic effects. Overall the grease pencil user interface has been refined greatly. There are way too many changes to the list out in this video but the overall user experience has been improved with a focus on efficiency and ease of use. A few new cool operators include merged similar materials to reduce excess materials and reset a fill transform operation, improvements to color palettes, and a cool new tool is the vertex paint mode tools making it easy to paint vertices in your scenes quickly. This is an exciting new way to save time in painting your grease pencil objects. This also gives you the ability to color strokes independently of their material, something not possible before. There's also a new transform fill tool to adjust UVs and a tint tool for adding vertex color. No need to go outside anymore because virtual reality is coming to Blender. This is cool. The first milestone is scene inspection allowing you to move around your scene and VR some controls. This is great for directors, clients, and briefings. The back end uses OpenXR which is a new standard for virtual augmented and mixed reality. Currently it supports Windows mixed reality in Oculus and it works on the Linux as well. The new object type volume is perfect for simulation junkies and foggy scenes. OpenVDB files can now be imported and rendered with this new volume object. They are added to your scene through the add menu just like any other object or you can drag VDB files right into the viewport. There's a wireframe in solid mode to give you awesome previews making it easier than ever to work with these files in the viewport. By default it renders with the principle volume shader which of course you can change if you want. There are plans to continue with developing this feature and adding modifier support in the future. More good news for Blender simulations. Hair now has the same collision engine as the cloth engine yielding much more reliable and realistic collisions and now you can finally add all those luscious locks to your characters and make them even more beautiful. The cloth self-collision has been optimized with overall improvements seeing a 15 to 20 percent increase. Fluid system has had a lot of bug fixes and usability improvements including improved baking speeds and loading times for particle systems. Blender sculpting tools weren't already amazing enough they just got even better. Of course there is the amazing cloth brush which blew up the internet already and it has mass dampening and radius controls mixed with physics solver and a little bit of magic to generate incredibly realistic and satisfying cloth wrinkles. Once again proof that wizards are real and that they are staffed by Blender. There's now mesh boundary auto masking option to protect the boundaries of the mesh when sculpting cloth. A new tool called the clay thumb brush has been added simulating that you're deforming the clay with your fingers. There are lots of changes to other brushes most notably the layer brush was completely redesigned to improve artifacts, multi-res and masking support. Brushes have separate normal and area radiuses now to achieve better behavior when working on curved surfaces. There are now face sets, a new system to control the visibility state of the mesh in sculpting and paint modes. Intended to provide more control with complex shapes and overlapping surfaces, boxel remesh can now be previewed by pressing shift r which is a lot faster than constantly mashing control z after a bad remesh. Freestyle is now its own past. This is great for NPR users looking to have more control over their line work and post. Lots of little changes to improved modeling modifiers. 2.83 really is a massive user experience update. One overlooked feature that has a lot of potential is the fact that a voxel mode has been added to the remesh modifier. This allows you to remesh live meaning you combine and mash objects together to get some really fun results for quirky little characters. Multi resolution has been rewritten from scratch to solve artifacts. Curve editing has seen extruding tool improvements and now you won't duplicate points but instead extrude on contingent selected segments. Metaballs can now be instanced via mesh vertices and faces. In addition, every modifier that can be limited to vertex groups can have their effect inverted as well. Adaptive sampling has been added to cycles. This feature smartly increases samples counts only in the areas where it's needed. This can reduce the overall render time by 10 to 30%. It's enabled with the adaptive sampling setting in the sampling panel. Optic viewport denoising has been added meaning that cycles now supports denoising in the viewport with AI acceleration. The noise and wave texture now have a roughness input to blend between smoother and rougher noise patterns. EV now supports more passes making it a much more viable for final rendering with its ease of compositing. Light caches have been updated with a cube map array system not only looking better but it also solves light leaking issues. However, this means if you have an old EV project with light maps you'll have to rebake them when you open them in 2.83. Hair geometry now supports alpha hash and clip modes for transparency with shadow blend modes as well meaning you can have your EV hair look closer to their results in cycles. If blender couldn't already do enough it's taking over video editing with a variety improvements to its sequencer including a new toolbar, selection handles, disk cache, and other various improvements. With hundreds of bug fixes and lots of other minor features and improvements as usual this is a great update and this release is a great closure for the 2.8 series paving the way to an even greater 2.9 which will be coming out in just a few months. Join the development fund now to fund the development of blender and all these amazing updates.