5 Key Features of Blender 4.2

The long-awaited release of Blender 4.2 is here, and below you can explore five key features of this release. The most significant change in Blender 4.2 is Eevee Next—a long-awaited overhaul of Blender's real-time rendering engine. Initially planned for 2023, this update enhances the visual quality and stability of Eevee’s results, bringing them closer to Cycles, Blender's production rendering engine. Major changes include a new global illumination system using screen-space ray tracing, real-time displacement, motion blur, and support for an unlimited number of light sources in a scene. Additionally, improvements have been made to shadow rendering, volumetrics, and depth of field.

Cycles, Blender's production rendering engine, has introduced a new Ray Portal BSDF that transfers light rays from one location to another within a scene. This opens up a range of production rendering tricks, especially for VFX, allowing for the creation of non-physically realistic phenomena, such as the portal shown above. However, it can also be used for architectural visualization and general CG work—such as windows opening to inner spaces or projecting images from a camera onto a monitor. Users can specify the new starting position and direction of light rays passing through the portal, as well as tint the rays after they have passed through it. The implementation supports AOVs, offering better control over reflections and refractions.

Blender's digital sculpting toolkit has received eight new tools. The existing Trim, Face Set, Mask, and Hide tools now have new counterparts, Line and Polyline. These new tools, previously available only for Box and Lasso selections, enable quick cutting of polygonal shapes, as demonstrated in the video above. Additionally, the Trim tools now offer Fast or - more slowly but more precisely - Exact solvers, and there is now an interactive option to zoom in or out on the visible portion of the mesh.

The integrated layout editor in Blender has become significantly faster in Blender 4.2, with GPU acceleration now available by default for final rendering rather than as an experimental feature. Additionally, the existing CPU server component has been overhauled to boost performance, now being "often several times faster than before." The CPU and GPU server components are expected to produce consistent results with "minimal differences" between devices. To enable this GPU acceleration, the update removes some settings during layout and means that some changes are no longer non-destructive to the workflow.

The final key change in Blender 4.2 concerns not the software itself but the additional tools available for it. A new extension platform provides an online library of "officially approved" add-ons that can be installed and updated directly within Blender. To be listed, an add-on must be free and open-source, with a license compatible with the GPL, although there are ways to link it to commercial plugins. Additionally, extensions must explicitly state when they require internet access or access to the user's file system. To be included on the extension platform, add-ons must undergo a public review and approval process. As of this writing, over 170 extensions are available online, with dozens more awaiting approval.

Blender 4.2 is compatible with Windows 8.1 and newer, macOS 11.2 and newer, and glibc 2.28 and newer Linux. It is available for free download. Starting with version 4.2, Blender requires a processor compatible with SSE4.2: any AMD or Intel processor released in the last 10 years should be supported.