from Hacker News

Blender 3.6 LTS Released

by victornomad on 6/27/23, 3:30 PM with 59 comments

  • by doodlesdev on 6/27/23, 3:54 PM

       > Support for hardware ray-tracing acceleration has been added for AMD and Intel graphics cards.

   Added experimental support for AMD hardware ray-tracing acceleration, using HIP RT. This improves performance on RX 6000, RX 7000, W6000, and W7000 series GPUs.

   Known limitations:

       Windows only, as HIP RT doesn’t support Linux yet.
       Degenerate triangles may causes crashes or poor performance.
       Shadows in hair are not rendering accurately.

   > Windows only, as HIP RT doesn’t support Linux yet
    NOOOOOO. I guess I'll have to stay with Blender 2.80 for now. Honestly, the situation with hardware acceleration on Linux is pretty sad. I'm a full-time Linux user, and I acquired an AMD GPU specifically because of better Linux support and much better open-source drivers.

    Blender 3 taking so much time to give AMD Linux users hardware acceleration back makes me sad. I guess it's not misguided though, they got a lot of attention from the industry in recent years, and that's where funding comes from, so naturally they will focus on supporting the major use cases (i.e. Windows and Nvidia) and improving features. Though I do love the new and improved features, UV packing, for instance, was a longtime pet peeve of mine while using Blender compared to other (closed-source) modeling packages.

  • by q_andrew on 6/27/23, 5:07 PM

    Impressive numbers.

    -Up to 60x Faster copying mesh attributes

    -10x Faster loading curve objects

    -9x Faster loading point clouds

    -4-6x Faster loading large meshes

  • by paczki on 6/27/23, 4:45 PM

    Lot of great quality of life stuff in this update, but especially being able to edit text objects by just.. clicking on it. Changing styles is nice too.

    I don't often do anything with text within Blender for this specific reason, if your text was anything more than really a word or two it was nothing but friction.

    Excited to be able to use it in a much easier manner. Blender remains one of my favorite pieces of software out there.

  • by codetrotter on 6/27/23, 5:33 PM

    Does anyone know to what extent Blender is currently making use of hw acceleration on macOS?

  • by smcnally on 6/27/23, 5:10 PM

    “List mode items can now be dragged by the name“ not just the icon — very helpful

    https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/commit/c3dfe1e2...

  • by tracerbulletx on 6/27/23, 6:40 PM

    I love Blender so much. A true success story for Open Software.

  • by justinclift on 6/28/23, 3:00 AM

    No Blender 3.6 Splash screen Demo file (yet?):

    https://www.blender.org/download/demo-files/

    Those were nifty. ;)

  • by kaveh808 on 6/27/23, 8:09 PM

    Are there any plans for a C/C++ API for Blender?