A mere three months after the release of Blender 3.5 the Blender Foundation today released Blender 3.6. With just three months elapsed since the last release, you wouldn’t expect to see a huge list of new features in Blender 3.6, but impressively, you would be wrong.
Highlight features (all showcased in the video below) of the Blender 3.6 release include:
Simulation Nodes
A further improvement to the geometry node system, Simulation Nodes have been added which enable artists to create all kinds of time based special effects.
Viewport Compositing Improvements
Viewport Compositing was first added in Blender 3.5, which enables artists to preview scene composition effects directly in the viewport. It is not 1 for 1 of the effects available in the renderer, but with the 3.6 improvements it is getting closer.
Raytracing on AMD and GPU Devices
Both AMD and Intel GPUs have received raytracing support. On AMD GPUs it is unfortunately only available on Windows and there are some known limitations in this release.
Grease Pencil Weight Painting Tools
Even though Grease Pencil 2 is slated to be added in Blender 4.0, Grease Pencil users got great new weight painting tools in the 3.6 release, including the ability to blur and paint average weights across multiple bones.
File Importer Improvements
The 3DS plugin has been added back into the Blender release (it needs to be enabled to be used). Meanwhile the PLY exporter has been rewritten in C++ and is several times faster than the previous Python implementation.
UV Unwrapping Improvements
There are have been several improvements to the performance and implementation of UV Unwrapping tools including several new vertex island tools.
Key Links
You can learn more about the Blender 3.6 release and see the top 6 coolest features (IMHO) in action in the video below.