A new version of this 3D modeling software (among other things) was released just 24 hours ago, and the first new feature mentioned in its release notes is quite striking. They've used a play on words to say "here it is" or "here we go," but "here" is spelled like "hair." Blender 3.3 has introduced a new tool that could easily be described as a "hairdressing" tool.
Blender 3.3 has a sculpting mode and supports more geometry nodes. Just look at the image at the top of this article to see how impressive the results are. If you don't focus too much on the left eye (on the right), which appears to still be being edited, the hair looks very realistic, especially on the right eyebrow (on the left), where the bokeh effect is practically nonexistent and everything is perfectly clear.
Blender 3.3 will be supported for a longer time
Blender 3.3 is an LTS version , meaning it will be supported for a longer period and will receive many more bug fixes. Among the new features it brings are:
- New tools to treat the hair, among which there is one to sculpt it.
- UV Unwrap and Pack UV Island nodes that open up the ability to procedurally create and adjust UV maps using Geometry Nodes.
- New geometry nodes, such as:
- One that finds the best path between edges from each vertex to a group of terminating vertices.
- Node that generates a separate curve for each boundary edge that comes from a starting vertex group.
- Node that generates a selection of edges that includes every edge that is part of an edge's path.
- Several more nodes, like the Volume Cube Primitive, Points Primitive, or Mesh to Volume.
- Novelties in the brushes, such as the Ping Pong mode.
- Support for rendering with the latest GPUs that have added oneAPI from Intel.
- Improvements in support for the Vega generation of AMD GPUs.
- Other improvements, available in the release note.
Blender 3.3, released three months after version 3.2 , is now available from its website for all supported systems. Linux users can download the tarball from there. The new packages will appear in most distributions within the next few hours.