by today 08:40 local [amsterdam] time, blender v4.5.0 release is available for download.
happy 
ing!
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The features preview page!
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Set Mesh Normals. Yes. Yes. Yes! 
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Hi there, apparently it was moved to the N-panel > Item menu:
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Strange move(no pun intended lol) but thanks for letting me know :D.
Not sure this was a good move though, since it’s not an improvement to the UX. They could of just added the content of “Active Spine” to the “Shape” menu? 
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Its strange and non-blender way, that it was there like that in the first place.
I mean, it kind of makes sense, no?
As a collection of attributes of just one element, it doesn’t really have a place in the main settings of the whole curve. Similar to Transforms, Radius and Tilt being in the same menu.
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I understand and agree with your logic. However from a user experience point of view. I have to move my mouse much further than before, which isn’t an improvement(but not a deal breaker).
From a user perspective, I don’t want to move my mouse too far off, or use more clicks than needed to do things(model,change settings,etc).
Limitations
- Virtual reality using Vulkan has performance issues. For virtual reality we will recommend to use OpenGL.
- Vulkan backend cannot handle huge meshes (100.000.000 vertices). Vulkan has different limits compared to OpenGL. These limits are controlled by the driver and vendor specific. Changing drivers could increase these limits.
- All textures should fit inside the GPU memory. Vulkan has different limits compared to OpenGL. These limits are controlled by the driver and vendor specific. Changing drivers could increase these limits.
Does someone how what does this means in practice? What are e.g. the max vertices from OpenGL? Is it per object or for the hole scene?
Does the texture limit affect Cycles or Evee? Or only if you preview in workbench the textures of the scene?
https://developer.blender.org/docs/release_notes/4.5/eevee/#limitations
Move from where though? O_o It’s much closer to the edited curve.
Amusingly enough, I had to write a script for myself to move these options to the N-panel, because they were too far (and often hidden).
I guess, it depends on the user 
They’re closer to the viewport now, but let’s be real, most of us are running multi-screen setups
From my understanding it’s per object, but anyway the limit is very high …
An object with 10 000 000 vert is already a lot. You probably don’t want to be in a situation where you reach that limit and if that was really the case then nothing prevent you from splitting it into two objects.
look at your scene’s metric to get an idea of what it represents…
it should impact eevee and workbench, but workbench anyway doesn’t show all the textures only the active one. And you can reduce their size in the preference in any case :
Anyway, again you don’t want to find yourself in a situation where all your textures don’t fit in memory because things are going to be very sluggish… in reality both are kind of a non-issue. It’s just that maybe OGL is going to be a bit more forgiving in these corner cases that you don’t want to be into anyway…
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100 million vertices can already be found in some high-quality film assets created by major production houses such as Weta and ILM, but it will likely not be an issue for Blender users until Blender itself becomes optimized enough to actually handle meshes that big while still remaining usable, even in the context of sculpting.
It may not be something the developers have to address right at this moment.
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If anyone wants a video that simply gets to the point and runs through all of the notable features and changes without a lot of dialogue. Southernshotty delivers again.
Compare this to the extent of the Blender release notes back in the 2.3x days. There is so much now that one is very hard pressed to actually master everything in their area of interest before the next massive release drops.
Though what is truly impressive is how Blender appears to remain relatively stable and resistant to file corruption and crashes despite the rapid rate of change and feature growth, something you simply can’t say for a lot of other applications.
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Wow, time flies. I thought release was next week 
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Well, with 4.5 this officially marks the end of the Blender 4x series (in terms of major releases).
Overall i’ve been pretty happy with 4 series. Almost every major update introduced something new that improved my workflow. I’ve probably put thousands of hours into Blender 4x by now and the software itself has become more stable and mature with each version.
I’m excited to see the infrastructure groundwork started in 4 series (Vulkan, EEVEE-Next, Cycles texture caching, etc) come into full fruition during 5 series.
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Most of my Blender experience has been in 4.x with it being the version where I actually started working on my first real scene. Even for someone less experienced than me, the amount of improvements and things where I’m like, “Wow, that’s actually relevant to me!” is insane. For example: UVs finally being visible in Object and Texture Paint mode (why was this not added sooner?!), or Vulkan. Despite me having issues with sharp shadows on EEVEE NEXT, I am seriously considering upgrading to 4.5 for Vulkan alone.
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Hey ! I just did a quick comparison tests between OGL and Vulkan on a shot.
It’s a cartoony shot with 2 characters animated .
My card is a GTX 1080, intel CPU 2x6 cores
I tested with different level of subsurf / simplify : 0, 1 and 2
the scene without subsurf is 60 670tris. at SS = 2 : 387 000tris…
I tested workbench and eevee :
In general vulkan is faster, on lighter scenes, workbench becomes especially faster. Eevee also but it’s still slow for animation…
I also tested quickly on heavy scenes (16 500 000 tris) where navigating the viewport gave worse performances with vulkan…
So it’s indeed faster on lighter scenes but it doesn’t scales well for now.
Anyway, given it’s going to be optimized later it already a good start I’d say !
I also noticed that ~6 years ago the performances one these shots where twice as slow. Basically I was around 13fps when there was 2 characters in a shot with subsurf level 1…
It’s super cool to see blender getting faster with time, and this also shows how difficult getting those speedups can be !
Anyway, I really like that release. I’ve been playing a bit with eevee next and I really like it. I hope it will keep evolving but it’s already great to work with.
Adjusting shader is much smoother than before. It’s just tweaking the steps for shadows that takes some times.
The new boolean is pretty cool too ! Tons of little things I like too but I’ll keep it like that for now 
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