A new dropdown allows select group socket subtypes ( e7f395dd20).During the development of Blender 2.8, the release cycle was formalized into a 4-releases per year schedule, with one of the releases offering long-term support ( Blender LTS).

A shortcut to the Online Manual is now included in the node context menu ( e95ba8a70e).

The Curve to Mesh node is a few milliseconds faster in a test with 1 million curves ( 52eced3eef).

Improvements to the Mesh to Curve node improved FPS in a test by 10% ( 98ccee78fe).

Drawing curves selection data in edit mode is up to 3.8x faster ( 70d854538b).

Recomputing bounds can be skipped after translating a mesh ( 59c0e19db2).The mesh bounding box is pre-calculated for primitive nodes, saving time calculating it later ( a1f52a02a8).Primitive nodes, the Realize Instances node, and the Curve to Mesh node now use precomputed this data too, saving hundreds of milliseconds for large setups ( 8e967cfeaf, 00bb30c0e9, 63689e4756).The Subdivision Surface node tags meshes with no loose edges/vertices ( 54072154c5).Blender now caches loose edges and loose vertices for meshes, making drawing large meshes in the viewport and other operations faster after some node setups.Copies can also be skipped when duplicating attributes with the Store Named Attribute and Capture Attribute nodes ( b54398c16c).Avoiding copies when converting geometry types can make the Instance on Points, Instances to Points, Points to Vertices and Mesh to Points nodes at least 10x faster ( e45ed69349).Generally copying geometry to change part of it is much faster, and overal memory usage can be significantly better as well (at least 25% in simple situations).Blender and geometry nodes make use of a new system to avoid copying large data chunks, called 'implicit sharing' ( 7eee378ecc, dcb3b1c1f9).

Confusing units have been removed on some inputs to the String to Curves node ( 4f08eeae9c).The legacy read-only 'normal' attribute has been removed from the spreadsheet ( 300c673a64).A new Index of Nearest node gives index of the closest 'non-self' element ( 15f9e42c4f, d8f4387ac9, 4346314351).Index of nearest sample file, CC-BY Sean Christofferson

Blender 3D 3.6.1 for ipod download