Round-up of what’s new in Blender 4.5 LTS
- The Vulkan backend is now fully supported in Blender 4.5 LTS
- Got OBJ, CSV, STL, VDB, PLY, or a custom text file?
Bring them all together with Geometry Nodes. - Import files by dragging and dropping them onto the Geometry Node Editor.
- When combined with the new Format String node, importing sequences is as flexible as it gets.
- Custom mesh normals are now editable in Geometry Nodes with the new Set Mesh Normal node! Modify both “Tangent Space” normals and a new, faster “Free” format.
- Grease Pencil creation with Geometry Nodes just got better, including added support for custom Node Tools.
- Custom node tools are now easier to organize thanks to support for collapsible panels, including the use of boolean sockets as checkboxes in their headers, just like native built-in operators!
- Blender 4.5 LTS is noticeably faster thanks to performance improvements such as faster texture loading, quicker startup times, and multi-threaded shader compilation by default on supported platforms.
- A new user preference allows choosing between multi-threaded and subprocess compilation.
- A new shadow terminator bias has been introduced, helping eliminate self-shadowing artifacts on low-polygon geometry. This is a per-object setting to shift the shadowed position along the shading normal.
- All the procedural texture nodes you know and love from Shaders and Geometry Nodes, are now available in the Compositor.
- The Compositor is now more unified than ever.
- Common nodes have been added and can be easily copied across Shader and Geometry Nodes setups.
- This release is a big one for Grease Pencil. Featuring integration with the Compositor, introducing support for Geometry Nodes tools, missing features have been brought back, and strokes look better than ever. Blender 4.5 LTS is the perfect match for your next 2D/3D animation project.
- View UVs for the active or all selected objects, in any mode, at all times.
- Meet Point Cloud, a new object type for representing large numbers of individual points in 3D space. Ideal for visualizing 3D scan data, particle simulations, or sparse datasets.
- Fills. It can be used to clean up an area with bad geometry, which will be replaced with a fresh, smooth, grid-filled set of quads. It almost feels like cheating.
Blender 4.5 release notes and more info: https://www.blender.org/download/releases/4-5/
