Today, 3December 2021, Blender Foundation announces the release of Blender 3.0, to mark the beginning of a new era for open source 2D/3D content creation.

Released 3 December, 2021

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WHAT’S NEW IN LESS THAN 7 MINUTES

The Freedom to Create, V3

ASSET BROWSER

The first milestone of the Asset Browser project is here!
Your workflow is about to get much more organized.

EASY AS
DRAG & DROP

Materials, Objects, and World datablocks are supported as part of the first milestone, with more planned to come on the next releases.

Download this Cube Diorama .blend file to play with the new Asset Browser.

Asset Libraries

Define folders as Asset Libraries in your Preferences so you can load your favorite assets anytime, from anywhere.

Catalogs

Organize your assets in catalogs. These are independent of the .blend file the asset is stored in, providing great flexibility.

Tags

Special metadata can be added to assets such as author, tags, and asset description.

AND MORE

• Custom asset thumbnails

• Link, Append, and Append reusing data modes

• “Frame Selected” to scroll to the selected assets

• Python API

• Support rendering previews for Action datablocks

GEOMETRY NODES

The procedural system introduced in 2.92 has been extended with a re-imagined method for designing node groups, a new attribute system, around 100 new nodes for interaction with curves, text data, instances, and more.

QUICKSAVE

Loading and saving compressed .blend files is now magnitudes faster
thanks to using the Zstandard algorithm instead of gzip.

Load Fast

• Blender 2.93

• Blender 3.0

• 2.92 splash

• 2.81 splash

• Ember Forest

• Mr. Elephant

• Loading compressed .blend files.

• Unit: seconds

Save Faster

• Blender 2.93

• Blender 3.0

• 2.92 splash

• 2.81 splash

• Ember Forest

• Mr. Elephant

• Saving .blend files with compression.

• Unit: seconds

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TEAM PLAYER

Interoperability takes a leap forward in 3.0 with the support for importing Pixar’s Universal Scene Description and improvements to Alembic.

USD IMPORTER

The first milestone for importing USD files is here:

• Meshes with UV coordinates, Vertex Colors and Subdivision.
• Cameras, perspective and orthographic.
• Curves including USD Basis and NURBS.
• Volumes as OpenVDB field assets.
• Materials, including an experimental feature to convert shaders to Principled BSDF.
• Lights, does not include USD Dome, Cylinder, Geometry.

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ALEMBIC

• Support for exporting animated UV maps.
• Import per vertex UV maps.
• Import and export support for generated mesh vertex coordinates (ORCOs).
• New Render and Viewport evaluation modes.

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