Blender 2.81 is now available and these are its most outstanding news

The new version of the open source 3D modeling software “Blender 2.81” has already been published. This new version includes a series of changes that many consider as good for the software. Since the developers have been working for more than four months on the features and improvements implemented in Blender.

This new version incorporates more than one hundred improvements, among which are the addition of new tools, brushes, engine improvements, some interface changes, among other things.

Main news of Blender 2.81

Among the most prominent changes, we can find that a new interface is proposed to navigate the file system, implemented in the form of a pop-up window with a typical fill for file managers. Various display modes are supported (list, thumbnails), filters, dynamically displayed panel with options, place deleted files in the trash, store modified settings.

Another of the changes that stand out is in a redesign of the sculpture tools, the cursor aligns with the normal geometry. The software shows the edges impacted by the brush. New brushes have been added: the “Pose” brush allows creating a deformation of the model according to its reinforcement. The “Elastic Deform” brush allows distorting the model while maintaining the volume.

In addition, the function of renaming groups of elements in batch mode is implemented in Blender 2.81. If it was previously possible to rename only the active element (F2), now this operation can also be performed for all the selected elements (Ctrl F2).

When changing the name, it supports features such as the replacement of regular expressions, the specification of prefix and suffix masks, the removal of characters and the change of upper and lower case letters.

Eevee now supports shadow wheels and instantiated lights. The final distance of the sun's rays is now calculated automatically. Volumes are faster to calculate in modern GPUs. Relief mapping provides a more accurate result, thus approaching the results that can be obtained in Cycles

Of the other changes that stand out:

1. Improvements in the Poly Build design tool that greatly facilitates deformation and the creation of polygons.
2. Lightning path support based on NVIDIA RTX technology in Cycles
3. It is possible to preview the different rendering passes of Cycles
4. The shaders used by Eevee and Cycles have been greatly improved
5. Noise suppression using Intel's open image
6. A better highlighter: you can now select several items in the hierarchy window and use the Shift or Ctrl keys to modify your selection
7. A new file browser with several types of views: a list view and a thumbnail view and a side toolbar for options. In addition, the dialog box is now independent and closer to the classic file selection windows
8. New brushes have been added to the “Grease Pencil” tool. Performance and rendering quality has been improved.

If you want to know more about the details of this release, you can check them in the following link.

How to install Blender 2.81 on Linux?

Finally, for those who are interested in being able to install this new version of the software, they should know that the developers provide a simple installation method, which is through the Snap packages. So in order to install it on your system you simply have to have the added support.

The installation will be done by opening a terminal and typing in it the following command:

sudo snap install blender --classic

And ready. If you have already installed an earlier version by this means, it will be updated to the new version.

Now for those who are users of Arch Linux, Manjaro, Arco Linux or any other Arch-based distribution. You can install this new version directly from the Arch repositories.

Simply in a terminal they have to type the following command:

sudo pacman -S blender