Blender 3.3 LTS is Updated on 3S Cloud Render Farm

In order to best serve our users, 3S Cloud Render Farm technical team has updated to the latest version Blender 3.3 LTS. This version is intended to be a version that studios can rely on throughout the duration of a production. As such there are more optimizations and bug fixes than flashy features, but that’s exactly what we need! Let’s dig into the ones you need to know about!

Blender 3.3 LTS and new features

The highlight of the update is the new hair grooming system that comes with Blender 3.3 LTS. Featuring a Sculpt mode, support for Geometry Nodes, and tons of auxiliary tools, such as Add/Delete, Density, Comb, Snake Hook, Pinch, Puff, Smooth, and Slide, the system brings never-before-seen control for grooming hair in Blender.

The new system features:

Sculpt on top of curves deformed with Geometry Nodes
Snap to the nearest or deformed mesh surface
Supports EEVEE and Cycles
Curves sculpt mode supports selecting control points or curves
Spreadsheet Editor filter by selected Curves or Points
Symmetry support in X, Y, Z axes
Select Random, Select Endpoints, and Grow/Shrink selection operators

The Blender 3.3 LTS’s Geometry Nodes toolset has got two new nodes that would definitely simplify your unwrapping workflow. Meet UV Unwrap and Pack UV Islands, two novel nodes that allow one to create and adjust UV maps procedurally using Geometry Nodes.

Shortest Edge Paths: Finds the best path along edges from every vertex to a set of end vertices.
Edge Paths to Curves: This node generates a separate curve for every edge path from a set of start vertices.
Edge Paths to Selection: Generates an edge selection that includes every edge that is part of an edge path.
Volume Cube Primitive: Allows sampling a field in a dense bounding box to create an arbitrary volume grid.
Points Primitive: Creates any number of point cloud points, with position and radius defined by fields.
Mesh to Volume: Same functionality as the existing mesh modifier, now also available as a node.
Instance Scale + Instance Rotation: These two new nodes provide access to instance transformations.
Interpolate Domain: Allows evaluating a field on a different domain inside of another field, avoiding the need for a “Capture Attribute” node.
Intersecting Edges: The Mesh Boolean node now has an output field that gives just the intersecting edges.
UV Unwrap + Pack UV Islands: Nodes for creating or modifying UV Maps.

Upgrades and improvements Features

Blender 3.3 LTS takes a significant leap in usability around Library Overrides, the backbone of Blender production. Here’s the list of some of the smaller upgrades and improvements:

Animation & Rigging

Custom Properties for Actions
Improvements to NLA frame start/end sliders

VFX & Video

Default to descending average sorting in Movie Clip Editor
Improved playback of Variable Frame Rate files
Smooth drawing in Mask Editor
Mask spline visibility overlay
Add mask blending factor for combined overlay

Core

Faster JPEG preview thumbnails
Font fallback support
Duplicating objects is much faster
Better EXR preview thumbnails

Video Sequencer

New retiming system
Add filter method to strip transform
Delete Strip and Scene in one step
Add API function to select displayed meta strip
Add Scene and Strip at the same time in one action

Modeling

New Shade Auto Smooth operator
Nearest Face Snap mode
Improvements to Surface Deform modifier

I/O

USD: Export OpenVDB volumes
Alembic: support for export presets
glTF: Several improvements
OBJ: Support “xyzrgb” and “MRGB” vertex colors
STL: New experimental importer
Massive performance gains importing large amounts of objects in USD, Alembic, and OBJ

Sculpt, Paint

Sculpt Elastic Transform
Improved sculpting performance in EEVEE
Duplicate active Color Attribute
Support packing UDIM texture sets
Voxel Remesh constant size
New icons for trimming tools

Unwrap only selected
UV Select Similar
New options in Average Island Scale
Minimize Stretch will now unflip faces
Improved constrain-to-image-bounds

User Interface

Display Gizmos on transform
Pin Scene to Workspace
Keymap Editor: auto-complete paths
Always visible scrollbars
Windows: Dark mode support for title bar
Windows: Precision touchpad support

Updating your software to Blender 3.3 LTS now to create an impressive graphics project. Then render it on 3S Cloud Render Farm to show your idea to the world.

3S Cloud Render Farm currently supports popular 3D software packages such as Blender, Houdini, Cinema 4D, Maya, 3ds Max, Cycles, Eevee, LuxCoreRender, VRay, Arnold, Corona, Redshift, Octane, Mantra…