 Now that you've finally gotten around to learning the last Blender update, it's time to feel behind again because the Blender devs are faster than you. I'm Remington from Southern Shawty and this is Blender 2.93 features in less than 5 minutes. Let's get started. Sometimes it's hard to choose what feature to start with when an update has so many awesome new features, but I'm going to have to give the opening to the new amazing depth of field rendering in Eevee. The engine has been rewritten to be more accurate to give us better results and there's a lot more control in the settings now. Most notably, it handles falloff and close-ups way more accurately. Not everyone's computer can handle cycles ray trace rendering and it's awesome to see Eevee dishing out such amazing results. And aside from the depth of field, both ambient inclusion and volumetrics have been improved in Eevee. The Geometry Nodes project was expanded to build on the attribute system, allowing the sampling of textures, supporting volume data, improved usability, and much more. A ton of new nodes have also been added, mostly revolving around the attributes, including proximity, sample texture, remove, convert, clamp, map range, separate and combine XYZ. Bounding box, collection info, is viewport, points to volume, volume to mesh, subdivide, string input, along with a host of new mesh primitive nodes. We can now utilize new attributes from mesh data such as UV layers, vertex colors, material index, face normals, shade smooth, and edge crease. A lot of these nodes are really starting to dive into the nitty gritty elements of attributes and this will open up the door for technically minded artists to deep dive and produce some pretty incredible systems. The spreadsheet editor is a new way to inspect your scene and blend file data starting with Geometry and 2.93, but it will be expanded to all kinds of data in the future. And lastly, a default workspace has been added for Geometry Nodes, making it simpler to get started with a layout. In the user interface, we have render visibility toggles are now on by default in the Outliner. Several improvements have been made to contrast and readability of the user interface. It's nice to see that the devs are not only delivering new features, but also refining small user design issues as well that make a big difference. On that note, you should join the Blender Development Fund. It helps make the Blender project in these kind of little fixes possible. If you're here, you probably think Blender is the best 3D application. However, I'd go as far to say that it's a strong contender for the best 2D animation app as well. The new LineArt modifier is now included to automatically generate stylized lines and it's honestly just super cool. It has accurate occlusion results from any geometry, intersection lines can be generated and separated, chaining allows strokes to be connected for a smooth display of grease pencil styles and textures. Vertex weights can be used to further add style and strokes can be baked and edited like a regular grease pencil object. We now have multi-prime support in draw mode, including the fill tool as well. The fill tool has been refactored to be better all around. It's faster, has an autofill option for the outside viewport, multi-frame filling, stroke extension to create temporary closing strokes, and other small improvements. The interpolate tool is now a tool, not an operator, and it's seen several improvements. The biggest thing to note is that it just overall performs better and this is such an awesome time-saving tool for 2D animators. You can import and export grease pencil objects in fcvg and pdf format. Export pdf's of your storyboard or sfg's to edit an inkscape. Small user interface improvements as usual, most notably you need to have the auto key enabled to draw, edit, sculpt new frames now, making it easier to tweak your animation without having to be in the exact frame. Looking at new modeling features, curves now have new taper modes, allowing for more control over your taper. These are small changes but I found myself using curves quite a bit more with all these new simple additions lately. Subdivision surface has more UV smoothing options and this is great if you're subdividing more complex characters or objects with lots of sharp corners. Previously you could get UV tearing, these options also make subdivision play better with other software. The mirror modifier has some new merging options which help when you're working on smaller scale objects. The edge loop now supports loops with 3 or more connected faces, which makes it easier to grab an edge loop when you're rushing and don't have the cleanest topology. Proportional edit connected mode is now more accurate. Have you ever thought, I hope I never have to open another piece of creative software? Well, apparently the devs did because the video sequence editor just got even better with these new updates. Now that we have automatic proxy setting, meaning that it will automatically generate a proxy to ensure playback speed. These proxies are generated much faster and require much less storage space. Cycles now has persistent data, making rendering animations faster by not rebuilding the BVH on every frame unless geometry has changed, also makes re-rendering faster as well. Subsurface scattering now uses this word, guiding to reduce noise and yield better results. Open image denoising has been updated to 1.3 and gives sharper fine details and less blurry normals. The open color has been upgraded to 2.0 for better color accuracy. Area lights now have a spreading angle to simulate the effect of honeycomb or grid placed in front of a light, giving you more control over your soft lighting. Sculpting has new operators including the expand operator, mask operator, and face sets. Animation rigging has received a small update where now armature bones can have their axis displayed anywhere, which if you're rigging complex characters can make for an easier read when setting up your controls. There's now a new place to find all of your overrides in the Outliner, and the re-sync process has been made faster and easier. For all of your visual effects users out there rejoice, motion tracking has a track averaging operator which can help return better tracking results. Also, the CryptoMat workflow in the compositor has been redesigned. Another thing of note is that Blender 2.93 is a long-term support release receiving fixes for up to two years, making it ideal for long productions. 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. If you like what you see, go support Blender and join the development fund.