 Hi, I'm SouthernShotty and today we're going to be going through the Blender 3.1 new features which is all about performance and speed. Let's get started. So we'll be happy to hear that mesh bounding now utilizes multi-threading. Nerds accuracy has been improved, mesh normals have been refactored, and last but not least, subdivision surface modifier now benefits from GPU acceleration. Improving speeds by up to 10 times. For this one to work, it needs to be the last modifier in the stack. Cycles now supports Metal GPU for all you Apple users. Currently, this release is only for Apple Silicon and AMD graphics cards and needs to be MacOS 12.3. More performance updates are in the way in future releases. Point Clouds now support direction rendering objects as spheres helping reduce memory usage. Point Clouds can be imported from other software or generated via geometry nodes to create sand, water splashes, and motion graphic style renderings. Ray tracing precision has been improved, specifically in small, large, and far away objects helping eliminate artifacts at the cost of overlapping geometry artifacts becoming worse. So be mindful of overlapping geometry in your scenes. The asset browser libraries are now indexed to load faster, and the image editor can now handle huge images, something that was a bit laggy in the past. This update also helps in preventing tearing artifacts. Geometry nodes has also seen a host of speedy updates. Overall, the node editor has seen improvements for calculating large node trees, and the node editor can also display node timings, now to help identify heavy calculations and slowdowns in the node tree. Field evaluation has been improved, reducing memory usage by up to 100 times, improving the performance by 3 to 4 times, and a number of nodes such as set position, realize instances, set spline type, cube, grid, and more have all seen large performance gains of up to 4 times faster. There's a full list of all these improvements below in the description. An awesome new quality of life feature in geometry nodes is context aware search menu when dragging links. It looks inside dropdowns for operators like math and can match the relevant socket type. Even better, this has been applied to shaders, compositor, and texture nodes. This update, we're getting a lot more control over meshes in geometry nodes with a batch of new nodes, including the dual mesh node, which lets you transform faces and diversities and vice versa, an extrude mesh node to perform extrusions. There's a new primitive mesh called the arc, and there's several new nodes that have been added to provide access to mesh topology information. As usual for the last few updates, we have a lot of micro updates for geometry nodes as well, and some of the highlights are a new scene time node, which can be used to replace the hashtag frame driver used in the past, a new accumulate field node, useful as a building block for more complex setups and building sums of values inside multiple groups, a merge by distance node, which can be used on point clouds as well as meshes, a domain size node to give the size of any attribute domain, such as the number of vertices on a mesh, instances now support dynamic properties and allowing you to treat instances as if they were real objects, and you can convert geometry to an instant with the geometry to instance node. There's also an awesome new update for animators, and it's this custom action frame range. This allows you to set a frame range for actions and indicate whether it is cyclable or not. This frame range is used when adding the action strip to an NLA instead of the actual range of keys in the action. The cyclic setting uses the cycle aware keying option to automatically make curves at the right point in time. If you remember the blend and neighbor pose mode feature added in 3.0, you'll be happy to hear that it is now accessible in the graph editor. In addition, a breakdown operator has been added as well. Armature opacity can now be adjusted in wireframe mode, helping reduce clutter when working in the viewport. The graph editor now has an equalize handle feature allowing you to equalize the easing of all handles at once. This is amazing for matching easing across complex graph setups. There's also an awesome new item called the copy global transform, which makes it possible to copy the world space transform of the active object bone and paste it to another object or bone. This is incredibly useful for rigs with ikfk switches or moving between various character rigs. Grease pencil received a cool new modifier and allowing you to shrink wrap your grease pencil objects to meshes. This could be used to add simple depth to some of your more complex camera moves. Additional options have also been added to the line art modifier for the grease pencil. You can now invert your selection, preserve contour lines through face mark filtering, use back face culling and more. The fill tool now has an option to dilate at a negative value allowing you to offset the filled area and leave a gap for a stylized look. New operators have been added including a merge all layers option and a new option to export PDFs to a full scene frame range. This would be great for working through storyboards as a team. The video sequence editor now supports automatic proxy building, but if a video is already small or fast to decode, Blender won't create unnecessary proxies for it. The compositor has also received the scene time node and a new color space conversion node allowing you to convert between different color spaces in the compositor. Batch renaming has received support in the form of renaming collections, volumes, lights and selected items in the outliner. Element now supports exporting animated vertex colors and override layers. USD can now export a preview surface material and the OBGA export has been rewritten and is now magnitudes of times faster. FBX and other exporters received additional performance improvements as well. UDEM has been improved for texturing with additional tile naming support. Minor UI improvements have been made including default thumbnail mode when exploring fonts. And as usual, there are hundreds of bug fixes, minor features and improvements, which of course can be seen at the link in the description below. And if you'd like what you see, go support Blender and join the development fund.