Blender 2.92 is around the corner. What’s new and key?
* Geometry nodes, scatter and instancing.
“Nodes can be used to change an object’s geometry in a more complex way than regular modifiers.” There’s a new node-based system for this, which “lays the groundwork” for the future but for now it has “object scattering and instancing” already enabled. Could be useful for DAZ and Poser… scatter in Blender, save and use in Poser or DAZ.
* Primitives in a click.
“Create primitives with two clicks.” Nice. It’s now probably a bit easier to set up a Synthwave picture by loading simple primitives to an Eevee scene, and then (see below) to get mattes for later compositing.
* Eevee Cryptomatte
Create mattes from the scene, for compositing. This was already in Cycles, is now also in Eevee. A “new compositor node was also added to adjust the exposure of images”.
* Grease pencil
Edit grease pencil strokes using Bezier curves. Also a rather vital Grease Pencil menu, that was accidentally totally bjorked by 2.91, is back again. Nice for the NPR crowd, but grease pencil is obviously one of Blender’s many ‘moving targets’ with features and menus popping into and out of existence.
* Cycles
Faster rendering on complex scenes. “Multithreaded export of geometry, to improves performance in scene synchronization when there are many mesh, hair and volume objects.” Also faster hybrid rendering. “GPU devices can now take over rendering of tiles that are currently being rendered by CPU threads, to improve hybrid rendering performance”. This looks like the main thing.
Cycles getting power-ups is important, because these may well feed into Poser 12 at some point. In Poser, Cycles is ‘SuperFly’.
* Fluids
Viscosity, so you can now do things like ice-cream cone twirls. Or er… doggie doings. Yum.
