Blender 5.2 LTS Released!

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I nearly missed this one, I find a lot of new features pretty interesting !
A lot of killer feature like image cache in cycles, physics in GN, online assets…

Really cool to see the direction the compositor is taking, in the end it’s getting a set of features quite specific to blender and it’s a bit atypical compared to what you’d expect from a standard comp app but in the meantime it paves the way for a lot of trickery right in the viewport, and while NPR tools are still lacking I get the felling that with the addition of a few bricks in materials this situation can get a radical change… Even though it’s going to be long to have the full set of tool that was envisioned initially !

Anyway, it seems to me that many areas starts to mature with that release… What are your opinion on that and / or the things you’re the most exited about ?

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I will stay on this LTS for a while

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:+1:

I really like the Outliner’s Sync Selection option. A welcome quality-of-life improvement. No more tedious manual scrolling inside the Outliner. :+1:

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It was really nice to see the new hair and cloth simulation.

It was really sad that cloth didn’t have any self collision.

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Yes ! well I’m sure it’s going to be added as it’s common feature, in the meantime there was great things done with it even in this experimental stage !

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That is a memorable release, full of features expected since a long time.
That was logical to ask for them, when previous milestone was accomplished.
But apparently, they could not be done quickly.

And there are a lot of quality of life improvements.

Indeed, texture cache, GN physics, assets custom repository.
But also, Lists nodes, Bundlles as geometry data, Node Tools as python operator, Bevel node, Thin Wall mode, new GP materials allowing new GP brushes, Loop tools by default, Scene Project brush, New compositing nodes relative Scene objects, converting 3D space to Screenspace and reciprocal…

And the quality of life improvements :
capture attribute node supporting selection, Transfer Attributes node, Empty Objects supporting modifiers, Cast Shadow option for world, render output saving disabling, copying of shadow/light linking, Time node and Boolean/Vector Input nodes for shading nodes, removing of some EEVEE limits, Move to Layer GP operator that shows tree structure, Playback loop modes, Duplicate and Rename operator for rigging, snapping to lattice, select through back face culled faces, snap base for UV editing, select overlap on UV Islands, unwrapping on original bounding box, good interpolation of attributes while merging or remeshing, focus on active object in Outliner, improved grouping and ungrouping of nodes, searchable AOVs in AOV ouput, Image drop in World shader creating an Environment texture,…and no more confirmation to enter Dyntopo.

A lot of things, users thought about at first try, are finally there.
That is a release with a better UX, easier to work with.
And it has a lot of fundamentals allowing to create better node assets and addons to share.

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The main difference is that, as nodes, caches of simulation may be mixed, may be used as start of another simulation with different settings, more easily.

But the speed and flexibility of these GN simulations are also related to the fact, that they are handling less complex interactions.

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Quick test with eevee shows they seem to have fixed much of the light leaking and eevee looks viable to me for the first time since 3.6. Fingers crossed!

I’m also really happy about all the bundled node and compositor assets, even tho i recreated a lot of them myself in the meantime.

So I’m kinda salty that i have to stay with 4.5 for a good while longer! In the middle of a project right now, and migrating is always a pain in the ass especially with the inevitable regressions and incompatibilities and whatnot.

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can someone explain what is this useful for?

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Hum, this can have a lot of applications, generally it’s when you start cheating stuff basically.
One simple application that comes to mind is for instance if you want to make a lensflare system, you’ll need the position of the lightsource in 3D but the whole flares are going to be in screenspace.

Another example if say you want to do some linework that varies in size depending on the distance to camera. It might be better to think in screenspace rather than actual distance to camera, because the focal length will mess up the calculations…

In the end, when you need to do these things it’s that you’re starting to hack stuff, and it will appear clear to you that thinking screenspace is going to be simpler in that case that thinking world space. And to my knowledge it’s probably be more for stuff like NPR or stylized things than classical 3D stuff…

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To add to what sozap said, it is maybe most obviously useful for node tools. Think mouse input. Mouse coordinates are in screen space and you might want to find the projected point in worldspace which corrensponds to that.

This will be especially useful/needed once modal node tools land, which are currently being worked on, hence might be in one of the next releases already.

greetings, Kologe

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Compositing work is 2D Screenspace work.
But it is applied to render of a 3D Scene, where things are animated in 3D space.
So, basically, those nodes are useful to animate compositing effects coherently with 3D animation.

You can choose two ways to do that. You attribute a depth to tweaking of 2D widgets, used on Backdrop of compositor, (the node is easing exploitation of depth pass). Or you use 3D widgets, made of empties, in 3D Viewport, that can handle Viewport Compositor.

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I always appreciate tools that can help less experienced users do things in Blender.

Also the collections outputs are mega! I’m not a geometry nodes person (yet?) but I suspect that’s going to be huge

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I guess if being totally fair, it was nice to see some of loop tools are now built in, with more to follow.

Tho based on what I really use, I’ve already uninstalled the addon, but I do wish it was accessible via the right click menu. Instead I’ve added ‘circle’ to the quick favorites, since I use that so much.

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