💻🖥Software update🖥💻

🛠️ G’day Squadrons and Non-Squadrons! 🛫

Blender 4.5 LTS has just launched—and it’s packed with game-changing features! That means new tools, smoother workflows, and way more power under the hood for our Living Machines and animation missions.

Here's a clean rundown of what’s new:

🧠 Core & Performance

• 🚀 Vulkan backend fully production-ready (faster viewports & rendering).

• 🧵 Multi-threaded shader compilation = faster material previews.

• 🧠 Dependency graph 18% faster in complex scenes.

• 🕓 Up to 250% faster startup and scene loading.

🧰 Modeling & Geometry Nodes

• ✂️ Manifold Boolean solver – clean, non-destructive boolean operations.

• 🧭 Set Mesh Normal node – custom normals for smoother blends.

• 📂 Import support for OBJ, STL, PLY, VDB, CSV, TXT into Geometry Nodes.

• 🎯 Snap-to-cursor supports rotation; improved curve and UV tools.

💡 Rendering & Lighting

• 🔥 Cycles:

  • Adaptive Subdivision is 10–15× faster.

  • Improved bump filtering and OSL camera support.

  • AMD GPU HIP ray tracing = ~30% faster renders.

• 🌑 EEVEE & Viewport:

  • Vulkan improves sculpting & edit mode responsiveness.

  • Shadow terminator fix = cleaner low-poly lighting.

• ☁️ New Volume Shader: Accurate light scattering, absorption, and emission.

✍️ Grease Pencil & Compositor

• ✏️ Grease Pencil render pass added (supports nodes & depth).

• 🎨 Compositor can use shader texture nodes (Brick, Noise, Checker, etc).

🎞️ Video & Pipeline

• 🧠 VSE (Video Editor): Better shortcuts, resizing, and pinning.

• 🏎️ New C++ FBX importer (15× faster, better material/anim support).

• 🎥 Support for ProRes, FFV1 10/12/16-bit, and ACES metadata in OpenEXR.

🧑‍💻 UI & Usability

• 🖱️ Horizontal scrolling & improved stylus/tablet support.

• 🖼️ Asset Browser lets you make custom thumbnails with screen capture.

• 🎛️ UI polish: Ctrl+Scroll input tweak, themed errors, tooltip size tweaks.

🔐 Stability & Support

• 🔒 Long Term Support (LTS) until July 2027.

• ⚠️ Deprecating Intel macOS, Collada, and big-endian support in Blender 5.0.

🎨 This update is a massive win for both creativity and performance. Perfect timing too, as I’m working on a few Living Machine upgrades that’ll take full advantage of these tools.

Let me know what feature you’re most hyped about—or if you want to see how I use any of these in the next animation drop! 💥