Everything new in Blender 3.6 LTS

Blender 3.6 LTS has just been released, and it has some significant performance improvements as well as some important new features that you’re not going to want to live without.

The highly-anticipated long-term support release brings Simulation Nodes, an upgraded UV Packing system, improved Cycles renderer, and more.

Exiting beta, the application comes with Simulation Nodes, a long-awaited framework for setting up particle-based simulations, an upgraded UV Packing system, multiple performance improvements to Cycles and mesh editing, and many other new features and improvements.

The highlight of the release is, without a doubt, the introduction of Simulation Nodes, a support for simulations added to the software’s Geometry Nodes toolset. Controlled via a new Simulation Nodes panel, the simulation results can be cached or baked to storage, visualized in the Timeline editor, and even interacted with in real-time.

Blender’s UV packing engine has been greatly enhanced, featuring improved performance on large meshes and better support for non-square materials. The updated version of the engine introduces several new features, including:

• Shapeshift: Choose the final shape of the UV packing between Exact Shape (Concave), Convex Hull, or Bounding Box, giving layouts that use available space depending the geometry.
• Better Together: The new Merge Overlapped option makes overlapping islands stick together during UV packing.
• Bounding Experience: Pack To > Original Bounding Box allows islands to be packed back into the original bounding box of the selection.

Blender’s user interface received several updates to hover highlighting of UIList rows, support Smooth View on the Node Editor, support operator enums in Quick Favorites, support Alt+Click to edit string properties for multiple objects, support Unicode 15.0 emojis on the Noto Emoji font, support filtering of Grease Pencil objects, and increase the default size of the “Open Recent” menu list to 20 items.

Blender 3.6 LTS include support for the “Adjust Last Operation” panel in the mesh and color filters, a new trim orientation in the Box Trim UI, multi-threading support for light trees to use less RAM, the ability to configure multiple script directory paths in Preferences, support for relative paths when importing assets, and a new C++ based PLY importer and exporter.

Blender 3.6 LTS Adds Light Trees Support on AMD GPUs, HW Ray-Tracing on Intel Arc

This release will be supported with bug and security fixes for two years, until July 2025.