Blender 2.91 Released with Better Cloth Sculpting, Faster Video Encoding and Decoding

Blender 2.91

Blender 2.91 open-source, free and multi-platform 3D creation software is now available for download as the fourth major update in 2020 and it’s packed with great improvements and new tools.

It’s been three months since Blender 2.90 series launched as probably the biggest release of 2020 to this powerful and widely used 3D creation software, and now Blender 2.91 continues the awesome development with even more cool enhancements.

Highlights of Blender 2.91 include better cloth sculpting with collision support for the Sculpt Cloth brush and filter, a new Sculpt Trim tool for cutting and adding geometry using box or lasso gestures, new Simulation Target property for simulating cloth effects, and new Boundary brush for controlling the shape of mesh boundaries.

To improve modeling, a new Exact solver is included in this release to handle complex geometry, along with better Intersect Knife and Intersect Boolean, the ability to use a collection as boolean, new options for the Subdivision Surface modifier, better loop select tools in UV Editor, as well as Split Viewport and Render Resolution in Ocean Modifier.

Blender 2.91 also improves curve and text objects by introducing support for custom bevel profiles, as well as support for flat curve caps on all bevel types, adds a new modifier for volume objects to dynamically convert them into a mesh, and lets you convert any mesh into a volume with the new Volume Displace modifier.

Furthermore, Blender now supports one-click conversion of images into Grease Pencil objects and features a new Holdout option in materials for painting holes in strokes and filled areas. Complex simulations that weren’t possible before are now also supported with the new support for Compound Shape collisions.

Among other noteworthy improvements, Blender 2.91 makes animation curves snappier, allows you to insert keyframes types without changing the F-Curve shape, enables one-click conversion of proxy objects into overrides, improves the performance of the UV/Image Editor, and makes video encoding and decoding faster.

Also included in this release is support for pure emissive colors and better alpha blending in the Image Editor, a new Brown-Conrady distortion model, a new Emission Strength in the Principled BSDF shader, support for controlling UV smoothness in Preferences, and support for motion blur rendering from Alembic files (Cycles).

For more details (with examples) about the new features and improvements included in the Blender 2.91 release, you should visit the release announcement page, or check out the video below if you’re in a hurry. Meanwhile, you can download the binary for 64-bit systems right now from the official website.

Last updated 3 years ago

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