Blender 3.5 available with viewport compositor, built-in hair assets, and more

The 3D CGI tool, Blender, has just had its version 3.5 release and is now ready for download on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Steam. One of the main new features in this update is the inclusion of the Essentials asset library which comes with 26 hair assets that you can manipulate in many ways to create unique characters more easily. If you’re creating animals or scenery, the hair assets will also suffice for the creation of fur and grass.

With Blender 3.5 users also get a new GPU-based compositor backend that improves the 3D Viewport. Apparently, you’ll now be able to continue doing modelling while compositing is on, however, View Layer passes and some nodes aren’t supported yet but work is planned to add these too, in future releases.

If you’re on a supported Mac computer, the 3D Viewport will take advantage of macOS’s Metal API which enables low-overhead hardware-accelerated graphics. Metal should enable “massive performance improvements” for animation playback and EEVEE rendering.

Other enhancements in Blender 3.5 are as follows:

UV Editing

UV Copy & Paste between meshes

Improvements to Constrain to Image Bounds in Shear Operator

Better handling of poles in Sphere/Cylinder Projection

Support for Fan or Pinch UVs

Several fixes

Core

Added support for boolean custom properties

Video Sequencer

New filtering mode Nearest (3×3)

Copy drivers when duplicating/pasting strips

VSE: New “Update Scene Strip Frame Range” operator

Motion Tracking

New workflow for optical center

Linux

Require glibc 2.28, including Ubuntu 18.10, Fedora 29, Debian 10 (Buster), RHEL 8 and derivatives CentOS, Rocky Linux, Alma Linux

User Interface

Font previews for Korean, Japanese, Simplified & Traditional Chinese

Cancel Viewport orbit/pan/zoom with RMB

Fix UI freeze with linked material previews

Fix menus alignment with mixed icons

Assets

New asset library “All”

Improved Asset Libraries list

Set a default Import Method in Preferences

macOS

Minimum macOS version is now 10.15 Catalina

Removed user notifications

Python API

New bundled libraries

Breaking changes

Order and time modifiers

Internal Mesh Format updates

OBJ I/O

Added “Split by Objects” and “Split by Groups” import settings

Import polylines with more than 2 vertices

Exporting is now up to 1.6x faster

Add-ons

glTF: Several Import & Export improvements

Rigify: Generate Action Constraint layers

Storypencil: Several improvements

Sun Position: Analemmas & Surface display

Modeling

Flip Quad Tessellation

New Set Attribute operator

Faster editing when using modifiers

Sculpt

“Extrude Mode” for Box Trim tool

“Extrude Mode” for Lasso Trim tool