Blender 3.2 beta is available today for those willing to build from source, while binaries will ship tomorrow. Major new features included in the Blender 3.2 beta include the all new hair system, light groups and the beginnings of the rewrite of the real-time renderer EEVEE, in the form of EEVEE next.
Features of EEVEE next include:
- Victual shadowmapping: Increases shadow resolution and maximum sharpness while keeping relatively low memory footprint.
- Subsurface Scattering: New algorithm that eliminate light leaking between objects and supports per pixel radius.
- High Light count support: Lights are now efficiently culled and there is virtually no limits to the maximum number of lights in a scene.
- Panoramic Camera: By rendering up to 6 views we can cover any panoramic projection by reprojecting the sample.
- Motion Blur: Now supports shutter curve.
- Grease Pencil Object support: Grease pencil object are now treated as any other geometry and fully compatible with the shading pipeline.
- Shading: Arbitrary number of BSDFs are now supported without major performance impact. Raytracing and SSS is no more restricted to one BSDF node.
- Thickness output: This is a new output which control the thickness for translucency, refraction and volume shader.
- Renderpass: All passes are rendered at once and do not need multiple geometry passes (except cryptomatte).
Key Links
You can learn more about the Blender 3.2 beta and see the new Light Groups and Hair systems in action in the video below.