We are just a few weeks away from the release of Blender 4.2 LTS. A major upgrade with loads of new features and improvements that require testing.
It is impossible for developers to cover all use cases that need to be tested, this is where the power of the community comes in. Let’s put it to the test!
What to Test
While Blender 4.2 LTS brings updates in pretty much every corner, some of the main ones are:
- EEVEE – Known as project “EEVEE Next”, a new render engine replaces the old one and needs as much testing as possible. Open your old files and check that they render properly. Read the migration process for details.
- Cycles – Ray Portals, Thin Film Interference, updates to shaders, denoising, sampling, and more. Open your old scenes and check if they still render the same.
- GPU-accelerated Compositor – A new performance setting allows you to use the GPU to compute the compositing. Find it under the Performance panel in Render properties. In most cases it should render faster and look fairly similar (although not 100% the same).
- Python API – Try out the new methods, commands, and see if the documentation about breaking changes regarding statically typed IDProperties, EEVEE, and others is clear.
Plus plenty of new features such as the introduction of Extensions, per-collection export, sculpt polyline tools, re-visited Shade Auto Smooth workflow, and so much more.
Hardware Requirements
Hardware requirements have changed as well, on Windows and Linux a CPU with SSE4.2 is now required. This is supported since AMD Bulldozer (2011) and Intel Nehalem (2008).
Make sure to check the full list of compatibility changes (for Blender 4.2 LTS and future releases).
How to Test
Testing can be pretty straight forward:
- Download the latest Blender 4.2 LTS Beta
- Open your old scenes (backup first just in case)
- Check that everything looks and works fine
- Found a bug? Report it. Within Blender go to Help → Report a Bug.
Read more about writing good bug reports.
You can also try out the usual demo files.
For feedback on the features and changes, check the individual threads under Feature & Design Feedback on the forums.
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Should be highlighted more often on blender.org
likewise for the extension platform when it becomes available.
A lot of artists are switching over to Plasticity because of its ease of use and flexibility. One of the main reasons is perhaps hard surface modeling.
What’re your thoughts on this and will the same features (Plasticity) be introduced in blender anytime soon?
Ali, I bought Plasticity so I can address your question. Plasticity is by no means a replacement for Blender. Ask the developer and he will eagerly tell you this. It doesn’t –and will never–have a renderer or animation or any tools to properly add rich materials. There will never be simulations. Plasticity is a nice companion to Blender as it adds NURBS modeling features that standard DCCs like Blender, c4d, maya, max do not have.
Why wil in Blender 4.3 this be removed?
Support for AMD and Intel GPUs through the Metal backend on macOS has been removed.
Basically most of the recent features were disabled already because they are super slow, since Apple hasn’t worked on supporting those in old hardware.
Quoting one of the developers:
Read more on DevTalk.
If you need support for that hardware the best you can do is dual-boot Linux (or Windows even) to extend the lifetime of your hardware as long as possible. Anyways Blender 4.2 is an LTS release meaning rendering using AMD and Intel GPUs will have support until 2026.
Ok I understand at some point you must look into the future :)
I’m really missing Blender Today, Pablo :(
Do you already know how/what will be done in the future on youtube?
Could it be possible to make a video about 4.2 LTS? Many big changes!
I enjoyed the extensions platform video and it really got me up-to-date!