Discover what's new in the latest version of Blender.
It’s that time again! Blender has just released Blender 4.2, bringing with it many new and improved features.
Codenamed EEVEE Next during development, Blender 4.2 ships with an entirely rewritten version of the EEVEE render engine.
In many situations, this will enable you to create images with EEVEE which come far closer to the quality that can be achieved with the Cycles render engine.
Obviously, this also means that EEVEE can be used within the viewport to give a closer approximation of what a final Cycles render might look like.
Some of the key new additions to EEVEE are:
One noticeable change within EEVEE is the removal of the Bloom option that used to live within the render settings. It’s still possible to add Bloom but this has now moved to the compositor through an update to the existing Glare node.
The Glare node now has a new Bloom option which will produce similar (although not identical) results to the old EEVEE Bloom.
Whilst this workflow is slightly more complicated to setup, it provides better consistency with Cycles which is helpful when switching between render engines for preview and final render. It also offers a more versatile solution when combined with the power of the compositor.
Whilst the new version of EEVEE generally produces similar or better results than at used to, there are some things which may need adjusting depending upon the specifics of your scene.
To help with this, Blender have produced a migration guide and a list of limitations which are both well worth checking out.
The other big headline change for Blender 4.2 is a reworking of the way in which addons and themes are managed. Collectively these are now known as Extensions.
Blender 4.2 now ships with only a very small subset of the addons and themes that it used to, but additional addons or themes can now be easily installed, or updated, using the new Extensions Platform.
A new website (extensions.blender.org) has been created to house all of the community created, free and open source, addons or themes. These can still be browsed from within Blender, using the new “Get Extensions” tab within the preferences, or extensions can be dragged and dropped directly into Blender from the website.
A key change to enable this new extensions platform has been a requirement for Blender to have internet access. This is something which, historically, was never required by Blender and the developers have opted to leave this disabled by default. You can either permit internet access to use the extensions platform through Blender directly or, alternatively, leave internet access disabled and still install extensions manually.
Whilst the focus has been on EEVEE for this release, Cycles has also gained a couple of new tricks in Blender 4.2.
A new Ray Portal BSDF node allows light rays to be transported to a different part of the scene. This can be used to create some cool looking portal effects but the degree to which it will be useful will very much depend upon your specific needs.
The Principled BSDF now supports physically accurate thin film interference effects. This can be useful for iridescent materials such as soap bubbles.
Denoising has also been improved for cycles. The new blue noise dithered sampling is designed to improve the visual quality of renders when using low sample counts so this could be great for speeding up renders and viewport preview performance.
Animation updates in Blender 4.2 are minimal and mostly centre around improved performance.
The Graph editor especially has seen significant performance updates for heavy scenes when panning or moving keys.
The pose library has added the option “Blend Pose Flipped” to the context menu and pressing “Ctrl” before dragging on a pose library item will start it in flipped mode.
The updated EEVEE and Extensions Platform are obviously the two key highlights of Blender 4.2 but, as usual, there are numerous other additions and changes.
“Import Images as Planes” which used to be available as an addon has now been fully integrated into Blender 4.2. This has been renamed to “Mesh Plane” and can be found under the Image section of the Add menu.
The Video Sequencer has seen a number of improvements to make it more useful for those using Blender to edit their projects.
The compositor now has GPU acceleration and improved CPU speed.
As already mentioned, the compositor Glare node has seen the addition of the new Bloom mode, whilst it’s Fog Glow performance is now up to 25x faster and available within the viewport compositor.
As always, there are also numerous geometry nodes additions.
For full details of all the changes, check out the official Blender 4.2 release notes.
Finally, Blender have released a new showcase reel to accompany the launch of Blender 4.2 which you can check out below.
Blender 4.2 is now available to download for free from the Blender website.
