Blender 4.2 has just been released, and it comes with a hugely anticipated change, some cool surprises, and a whole slew of quality-of-life improvements. Let's dig in!ExtensionsOne of the most interesting updates in Blender 4.2 is the introduction of Extensions. At the moment, an extension can either be an add-on or a theme, both of which were already available before, but can now be downloaded and, most importantly, updated from within Blender itself. Most of the add-ons Blender came with before are no longer pre-installed, which makes the download a good bit smaller. But, you can still get them directly in Blender by going to the extensions tab of the Preferences editor and installing them there, which will both download them from the internet and enable them. This change has prompted some of the key features of the most used add-ons to be built into Blender itself, but more on that later.Once downloaded, you can still move those add-ons with Blender onto a thumb drive or a server and use them without any internet connection just like before. Its just the initial installation. If youre extra concerned about privacy, you dont need to be, as the new Allow Online Access option in the System preferences is disabled by default. What appears in the Extensions tab in Blender is hosted on a new official Blender Extensions website, which allows anyone to add a theme or add-on to Blender if it passes a review. This website only allows for free and completely open-source content to be submitted and only by the official creators, so it does not attempt to compete with commercial add-on marketplaces, which will also benefit from these new features since Blender can now support updating add-ons from remote repositories like GitHub or Blender Market. Its a win-win all around. What this mostly means for you as a user is, in the future, less confusion about which version of an add-on you should install for your version of Blender and an easier way to upgrade add-ons when you want to. If you want to install an add-on that is not hosted on the Blender Extensions website, just click the dropdown, choose Install from Disk, and select its .zip file just like in previous versions of Blender. Add-ons for previous versions will work just fine in Blender 4.2 but, if youre an add-on developer, you can support the new extensions features by adding a blender manifest file that replaces the old bl_info in __innit__.py. Full instructions are in the release documentation if you want to see all the details. ModelingAuto Smooth is back, baby! At least in name. When you right click in Object Mode you can choose Shade Auto Smooth, which adds a smooth by angle modifier to the object. Its also pinned to the bottom of the stack, which is another new feature. You can now pin and reorder pinned modifiers via the dropdown options. The increment snapped to during rotation snapping is now customizable, and Absolute Grid Snap is now just another Snap To option called Grid. You can now use edge and vertex sliding in the UV Editor by double tapping G, as well as Snap Base by hitting B while transforming. The curve Edit Mode for the new hair curves continues to mature and now includes converting hair types, an add menu, a new option for only drawing onto selected objects, Bezier handles, and new operators for setting the handle type, subdividing, switching direction, toggling cyclic.New variations of existing tools were added to Sculpt Mode, like Polyline Mask, Lasso Hide, Line Hide, Polyline Hide, Line Face Set, Polyline Face Set, Line Trim, and Polyline Trim. Theres also a new sculpt operator for growing and shrinking which faces are visible and a new option to use the fast Boolean solver rather than the exact solver when trimming. Undo is now 2-5 times faster, which is a huge improvement for complex scenes, with the tradeoff that autosave is now slightly slower.Stream the fundamentals of Mesh Modeling in Blender 4.2Animation & RiggingTheres a new Frame Scene or Frame Preview Range operator in the View menu and tilde pie menu that frames horizontally, or you can press the "Home" hotkey like before if you want to frame everything vertically as well. The Ease operator has a better curve to it now, and the sharpness can be adjusted. While using the operator, you can hit tab to toggle which property youre adjusting. Performance when navigating and transforming animation curves that have thousands of keyframes has been significantly improved, yet again! The Dope Sheet has a new keyframe type called Generated, which just indicates that the key was set automatically by an operator or add-on rather than by hand. In the Shape Key editor, non-relative shape keys are now visible and editable.Performance in the Non-linear Animation editor was also improved when zoomed in on a long action. Subdividing bones now correctly names the bones sequentially. You can now set the wire width for custom bone shapes, per bone, so that the most important controls can stand out, and the armature drawing mode "Stick" now uses bone colors. Bones can now be active even if they are hidden, so you can select a bone in the outliner and edit its properties even if you cant see it in the viewport. The Limit Rotation constraint no longer flips back to the minimum when it goes past 180 degrees, but theres an option to use the old behavior for compatibility. If you didnt realize that you could just select multiple objects and copy a propertys value to all the other selected objects, well, neither did I! But now, you can also do that for drivers. Just right click and use Copy Driver to Selected. The Copy Global Transforms add-on, which is one of the few that still ships with Blender, got two new features. One bakes the animation to the camera, so the motion matches up with it if, for example, youre animating on twos. The other allows you to copy and paste transforms relative to another object. Over in the Pose Library, you can now blend a flipped version of the pose in the right click context menu. If you hold down Ctrl while dragging on a pose asset, it will start the operation as flipped.Stream the Fundamentals of Animation in Blender and the Fundamentals of Rigging to learn more what's new in Blender 4.2 Geometry NodesWhen modeling procedurally, you might create instances that are made up of instances and end up with a hierarchy, like instances of a wheel that contain instances of spokes. To address that, the Realize Instances node has a new Depth option, which allows you to specify how many levels down you want to realize, so you could realize a wheel as a whole without realizing the individual spokes. But you can crank that value up if you want to have a deep realization. The Sample Nearest Surface and Geometry Proximity nodes have a new Group ID, which allows you to process the geometry in multiple chunks. The Capture Attribute node supports capturing multiple attributes at the same time, which can be much more efficient. The Store Named Attribute node now supports storing 8-bit integers, which is needed for some specialized tasks like changing the order of NURBS components. The Remove Named Attribute now allows you to use the * symbol as a wildcard, so you can remove multiple attributes if they match. For example, using the pattern `sim_*` removes all attributes with the `sim_` prefix. More nodes that deal with rotations are updated to work with the newer rotation socket, like the Curve to Points node. There are also three new rotation nodes:Rotation, which is a simple rotation input,Axes to Rotation, which takes two orthogonal axes and outputs a rotation, which is something that took two Align Euler to Vector nodes to do previously, and Align Rotation to Vector, which replaces the Align Euler to Vector node by doing the same thing but with rotation sockets and a name that makes more sense.If youre still getting used to the rotation socket, hold on to your trousers because we now also have a matrix socket and 12 new matrix nodes. This is one that will be quite useful for all those that are into the wild world of linear algebra. Now, you might have all this stuff figured out but, for me, working with matrices is still a bit over my head, but Im still very excited about this because matrices are what make up the very core of computer graphics, and being able to manipulate data in that same way in geometry nodes opens up a lot of possibilities for people to get creative with mesh operations. The input and output sockets in the Repeat and Simulation zones and Bake nodes are now aligned, which looks very clean and may come to more nodes whose inputs and outputs match in the future. The Simulation Zone now has an overlay which shows which frames have been baked, similar to the Bake node. You can now plug connections into the Menu Switch node without opening up the sidebar because it now has an extender socket like group inputs and the Index Switch. In addition, you can Ctrl click to rename sockets directly on the node. The Face Neighbors mesh topology node now gives the correct number of unique faces.The Scale Elements node was rewritten to become at least 4-10x faster, the Sample UV Surface node is 10-20x faster when used on large meshes, and nodes that require a lot of memory have been sped up by actually reducing the number of threads they use. Node tools can now access the mouse position, position and angle of the viewport, and active vertex, edge, or face for making tools that are really user friendly. Collections, objects, materials, and images can also now be used as inputs to node tools. Lots of various UI tweaks have been made to Geometry Nodes as well, such as:Input sockets that don't allow editing (like the default Geometry socket) don't show up in the sidebar anymoreSlightly improved sorting when adding nodes via searchHovering over the title of a node now gives a tooltip with its descriptionImproved tooltips for reroute nodes and multi-input socketsNode groups can have descriptions now, which are used in their tooltipNode groups now have a color tag, so you can show what type of data its processingNode group properties have been reorganizedMultiple images can now be added at the same time using drag and dropInvalid (red) links now have some additional information for why they are invalidWhen adding a frame around the selected nodes (ctrl+J), the new frame will now be added to the common root frame of these nodesDragging a node onto a link does not remove the link anymore if it is incompatible. It's dimmed insteadResetting socket values now actually works, instead of always setting values to zeroUsing the shortcut (ctrl+shift+click) to connect to a viewer now also moves the viewer closer to the nodeReroute nodes can now inherit their upstream labels EeveeThe real-time render engine Eevee has been completely overhauled for Blender 4.2, and just about all of the core features have been improved in some way. Eevee now supports screen space global illumination that you can enable in the Raytracing panel, which, when combined with significantly faster light probes for catching the light from areas not on screen, can make for a pretty convincing alternative to Cycles in some situations. So convincing, in fact, that when I ran a comparison poll on twitter featuring a scene Eevee works well on, most people guessed wrong! Some other notable improvements include the fact that shadows are now sampled more accurately using Virtual Shadow Maps, removing the need for contact shadows. To get softer shadows, increase the number of steps in the Shadows panel and increase the number of samples. You can also jitter the shadows like in the old version if you need more accuracy when theyre very soft. Just be sure to turn it on for both the light and the viewport if you want to see the effect in the viewport. Volumes now correctly take the shape of the mesh, and their resolution can now go as low as 1 pixel. Refraction and subsurface scattering approximate the thickness of the mesh a bit better, and you have fine tune control over that with the new Thickness output and Surface setting. Motion blur can now be enabled in the viewport during animation playback. Eevee now supports true vertex displacement.Sphere and cube reflection probes are now updated in real time. Depth of field was rewritten and optimized.The brightest spot in HDRIs can now cast configurable shadows. Theres also no shader limit now, though your graphics card still has limits so its still something to be mindful of. Any one of those things would have been worth breaking out the champagne for, but to have all of them at once? Amazing. Most scenes should look comparable when migrated to this new version of Eevee, but there will be some differences and theres a migration process in the documentation that explains every single change youll want to look out for. CyclesCycles is not without its own exciting news, because theres an entirely new shader called the Ray Portal BSDF that lets you use vector math to warp the fabric of spacetime itself. This has been used already to create everything from portal effects of course to live camera feeds and really nice-looking sword trails. The Principled shader now supports thin film color effects, like what youd see on soap bubbles or a puddle of water mixed with gasoline, which is just gorgeous. The Huang Principled Hair shader now has a new rounded model that it switches to when the hair covers more than a pixel on the screen, which drastically improves the quality of close up shots without impacting performance when the hair is farther away. Spot lights and area lights with spread are now sampled more efficiently in volumes, and when combined with the Light Tree feature the noise clears up significantly faster. In the view layers tab, you can now render each layer with a different world using the new override. Cycles now uses a Blue Noise sampling pattern by default, which produces a clearer image at lower sample counts that can be denoised more easily. OpenImageDenoise is now GPU accelerated on AMD GPUs on Win dows and Linux, and it can optionally use GPU denoising with CPU renders. Its also upgraded to version 2.3, which has a nice boost in quality. Rendering on Intel GPUs now uses their host memory fallback feature, which allows for rendering more textures than can fit on the GPU at once. You shouldnt be seeing those out of memory errors much, even on larger scenes that you used to have to switch to CPU to render. Color ManagementTheres a new view transform on the block called Khronos PBR Neutral. Its not intended to be a replacement for AgX, but rather a better alternative to Standard for when you need the color you set in the material to be exactly the color you get in the render. Its perfect for certain types of product shots where you need branded colors to be spot on. It doesnt hold up well under strong lighting conditions or super saturated lights, so its not meant for photoreal scenes like AgX is, but it handles bright areas significantly better than Standard and I think a lot of people are going to find this one helpful. CompositingFinal renders can now use the new GPU compositor, which is a massive speed boost. Switch it over in the Compositor sidebar or in the Render Performance panel. But, even if you dont choose to use it, the CPU compositor has been rewritten and is several times faster than before.Some important effects of the change include the fact that transformations are now immediately applied by transform nodes, so scaling down an image destructively reduces its resolution Also, the old compositor tried to infer an image size from upstream/output nodes, while the new compositor evaluates the node tree from left to right without inferring image sizes.These changes do away with a few tricks, but overall makes operations much more predictable and intuitive.The viewport compositor is now limited to the camera region when in camera view, so that it better matches the final rendered result. In addition to that, you can now see how long each node took to calculate, similar to geometry nodes, by enabling Execution Time in the overlays. The Glare node now has a new Bloom option, which is very similar to the bloom that was available in the previous version of Eevee but is not present in Eevee Next. So, if youre looking for bloom, head to the compositor, add a glare node, and set it to Bloom. The old Fog Glow option does still work too, and its now 25x faster than it was before, though it is quite a bit slower than the new bloom. The Fast Gaussian mode in the Blur node, which has been fixed to now be the same size as the other modes, now also works in the Viewport compositor, as does the Legacy Cryptomatte node. The Translate node has new pixel interpolation options. The Hue Correct node now evaluates the saturation and value curves at the original hue, not the updated one, and the curve now wraps around. The Vector Blur node has been simplified, and now uses the same motion blur algorithm as Eevee.Learn more about compositing in Blender with Sean Kennedy! Video EditingThe strips in the Video Sequence Editor got a visual overhaul and now have rounded corners, no handles on the sides, thicker outlines, half waveforms, and updated colors.Adjusting strip handles feels a bit nicer now with new cursor change when hovering and the ability to tweak connected handles.In the overlays, you can now turn on or off the cache line. This menu has also been reorganized. Text strips have new options for outlines, shadow placement, and shadow blur.You can now drag and drop multiple files into the VSE at the same time. The AVI RAW and AVI JPEG movie file output types have been removed, since they were the same quality as H264 but with larger file sizes and reading those files in Blender took a lot of effort to maintain. On the performance side of things, both rendering and playback speeds have been slightly improved. User InterfaceOpening a new version of Blender for the first time is even faster now, thanks to improvements in font shader compiling, which was apparently one of the slowest parts. Properties dialogs, confirmation dialogs, tooltips, menu separators, square color pickers, overlay text, and the status bar have all gotten a bit of polish. Tooltips for colors are especially nice now and show a chunky preview and the full values of the color. More tool shortcuts are now displayed in the status bar rather than the header.Orphaned Data was renamed to Unused Data in the outliner, but the broken heart still reminds us that we should give it a home before it is too late. The File Cleanup menu now has a Manage Unused Data option, which just pops up the outliner in that view. Purging unused data-blocks now lists exactly what will be deleted. The Blender File view of the outliner now shows user counts and lets you add or clear fake users. "Ctrl+F" now starts a search in the outliner, like it does in the properties and other data editors. A few miscellaneous UI scaling issues and icon size inconsistencies were fixed, so you can work perfectly fine from 30 feet away or with a microscope if you really want to. Ctrl + Shift clicking on a node in the node editors now links to the preview node without needing Node Wrangler.Motion paths can now be themed. I certainly never noticed, but the default view was tilted by about 0.8 degrees and that has now been fixed. The depth of field focus distance now has a picker that measures the distance of whatever you click in the 3D View.Composition guide and passepartout visibility can now be toggled separately in the viewport overlays. You can now add, clear, and copy modifiers right in the 3D Viewport using the Object menu. You can also add, remove, apply, and reorder modifiers on all selected objects by holding "Alt". Theres a new keymap preference called Region Toggle Pie that lets you toggle all editor regions with the hotkey "N". Theres a new button to save custom themes, so you no longer have to create a new one with the same name to update. The 3D mouse deadzone was set to 0 for more convenient navigation with a Spacemouse. A slight pixel shift when pasting images on windows was fixed, and pasting images now works on Linux. Text can now be dragged and dropped into the text editor and Python console, and the text editor now supports GLSL syntax highlightingImport / ExportA really interesting new feature, especially for those working in games, is the ability to set export defaults per collection. You can set custom file paths and formats per collection, even multiple if you want to, and then export each collection individually or all at once from the File menu. The new hair curves object types now fully work with USD. USD importing now supports point clouds and there are new options for Unicode files, defined prims, dome lights, and mesh validation. USD exporting has new options for filtering objects by type, dome lights, the up axis of the stage, XForm operators, triangulation, down-sampling textures for USDZ, generating MaterialX from Blender shaders, and renaming UV maps to follow conventions. Alembic supports the new hair curves object type as well, it can import multiple files at once now, and theres a big fix for animated curves not updating during rendering. The Collada file type is now considered legacy and it will be removed in a future version because the library its based on has been inactive for six years and is becoming incompatible with modern code. glTF importing has new options for setting bone shape and size. Its exporting has received a ton of fixes as well as new options for vertex colors, centering root objects, and UDIMs.ConclusionThats everything thats new in this version of Blender! Of course, there were hundreds of bug fixes as well. Download it today from blender.org and dont forget to donate to the development fund to make future updates possible. Happy Blending!Looking for the most comprehensive Blender 4.2. master class in Blender. Check out CORE a Nine Course Journey from CG Cookie