Software update: Blender 3.3

Version 3.3 of the cross-platform and open source program Blender has been released. This application is intended for 3d modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback. More information about the extensive possibilities of Blender can be found at this page are being found. This program includes short open source animation films Elephant’s Dream, Big Buck Bunny, CinderTears of Steel, Cosmos Laundromat and Sprite Fright made. Version 3.3 is not just the release in the 3.xx series that features extended support, it is another release with lots of changes, too many to mention here. Here is a brief overview of the main improvements:

Among the many changes to find with today’s Blender 3.3 release are:

• Initial support for Intel oneAPI back-end with the Cycles renderer. This is intended for use with Intel Arc Graphics / Data Center discrete GPUs and not existing integrated Intel graphics. This also requires using recent Intel compute driver releases. This is still work-in-progress and look for more Intel GPU acceleration in future releases.
• The AMD HIP back-end has been extended to now work going back to GFX9/Vega hardware on Windows and Linux. RDNA1 and GFX9/Vega issues were worked out since Blender 3.2 to allow broader AMD Radeon GPU support for Blender.
• Improved Apple Metal rendering GPU performance on macOS.
• OpenVDB volumes are rendered with half-float rather than full-float precision to yield significantly lower memory usage.
• NVIDIA’s OptiX denoiser has better performance now when rendering with multiple NVIDIA GPUs.
• “Drastically improved” drawing performance when sculpting with EEVEE enabled.
• Much better performance for LineArt with the grease pencil.
• A new hair workflow is possible with the new curves object type that has a sculpt mode intended for hair grooming.
• Improved usability of the Library Overrides UI/UX.
• Full support for cameras background images.
• JPEG preview thumbnails are created faster while also using less RAM. EXR preview thumbnail images should also consume less RAM.
• Font fallback support.
• Various performance improvements to geometry nodes.
• Improved performance when importing USD / Alembic / OBJ files with large numbers of objects. For a USD production scene with 260 thousand objects its reported to drop from 3.5 hours to 1.5 minutes.
• A new experimental STL importer that is written in C++ and about eight times faster than the former Python-written STL importer.
• glTF 2.0 handling improvements for import/export.