Blender is one of the poster children for Open Source Software– proof that something hacked together by enthusiasts could grow to rival the big boys in 3D modeling, animation and rendering after it was abandoned by its original corporate owners. Once you climb that initial learning curve, which can indeed feel cliff-like, you can do almost anything in Blender you can in paid competitors– almost.

Traditionally, one of the weak points has been simulations, with even those working in Blender professionally offloading simulation to programs like Houdini. According to [3Dan], once version 5.2 is out of beta in July, that may become a thing of the past. 

Simulations aren’t a necessary part of a 3D animation software, but they are very, very nice to have. If you want realistic-looking fluids, hair, or cloth, it’s incredibly difficult to animate it by hand. One, because there are so many degrees of freedom in, say, flapping cloth, keyframing is a major pain, but also figuring out how to make the model move and deform realistically is by no means trivial. It’s easier to offload all that on a physics simulation; then, as long as the physics is realistic, the animations will be as well.

That’s not easy, computationally speaking, and one thing that’s clear is there’s been work behind the scenes to optimize the simulation algorithms, not just improve the workflow, as the basic “drop cloth on a monkey head” demo now runs twice as fast. The new workflow itself bring simulations more into line with how Blender has been going– it’s part of geometry nodes now. So there’s simulation nodes you bring in, but that means things like tearing cloth become quite straightforward compared to the occasionally byzantine workarounds required before. This node-based workflow also brings Blender more into line with how paid software works these days.

[Dan] demonstrates the power of it by adding air pressure to a cloth simulation with some custom nodes, inflating and popping a fabric sphere. He also demonstrates how cloth simulation can be applied to animate realistic foliage. This update probably doesn’t have Houdini developer SideFX shaking in their boots, but it might allow some animators to stop paying that license and go fully-open source, which is great to hear.

While the work on the simulations engine is raising the bar on what was, traditionally, one of the weak points of the software, v5.2 brings oodles of improvements across the whole gamut of what blender can do– which is a lot. See them all on the official release notes. Even if you’re not into digital sculpting or animating, you may find yourself downloading a copy of Blender at some point to add texture to 3D prints, or make fancy resin-print miniature models FEM-friendly. The right addon can even let Blender do parametric CAD, if you want open-sorce and can’t stand FreeCAD. Though FreeCAD is getting better all the time, too.