In the next article we are going to take a look at Blender 3.0. In December 2021, the Blender Foundation announced the launch of the new version of this program, with which they want to usher in a new era in the creation of open source 2D / 3D content. Blender is a public project, licensed under the GNU GPL, and owned by its contributors. For that reason, it is forever free and open source software.
The new version of animation creation software features much faster GPU rendering than previous versions. We are also going to find an updated theme and a lot of new options to customize the design of the user interface to our liking. Although this is only the beginning of this new version.
General features of Blender 3.0
Some of the features provided by this new version of Blender are:
- His new browser Asset includes materials, objects, and world data blocks.
- Cycles GPU cores have been rewritten to better performance, rendering 2x to 8x faster in real world scenes.
- We will find a more responsive viewport, due to the new programming and display algorithms.
- OpenImageDenoise updated to version 1.4, with which a better preservation of the details has been achieved. Added a new pre-filter option to control noise removal.
- They have also improved work with shadows in scenes. Color shading and precise reflections make it easy to blend 3D with real footage.
- Subsurface dispersion now supports anisotropy and refractive index for Random Walk.
- Improved adaptive sampling.
- Compatibility with NVIDIA CUDA / OptiX and AMD HIP.
- Light option to be visible in the rays of the camera.
- Includes new ‘Fields‘ to build node groups.
- Dispose of shader language metadata support open for ui labels and checkboxes
And these are just some of the features of this new version. All of them can be consulted in detail from in the release note.
Install Blender 3.0 on Ubuntu
As snap package
The easiest way to install Blender 3.0 on Ubuntu is by using the snap package. Users can find and install it from Ubuntu software option.
In addition, we can also open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and execute in it the install command:
sudo snap install blender --classic
After this we can start the app looking for the corresponding launcher that should be created in our team.
Through the official tarball
The developers of Blender Foundation offer an official Tarball pack that we can use to have this program in our Ubuntu.
Download the Tarball package
The first thing we will have to do is go to the official download page. In it we will only have to click on the button “Download Blender 3.0”.
Once the package is downloaded, we will create a new folder for Blender in / opt:
sudo mkdir /opt/blender
The next step will be extract the downloaded package that I have saved in the Downloads folder to the new folder created. We will achieve this with the command:
sudo tar -Jxf ~/Descargas/blender-3.0.0-linux-x64.tar.xz --strip-components=1 -C /opt/blender
Check if the program works
After extracting the package in / opt / blender, user can run the following command, which should start the program:
/opt/blender/blender
Create a shortcut for Blender 3.0
The package we use already includes the shortcut file by default. Although this will not work due to wrong file path. In order to solve it, run the following command in terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) to open the file:
sudo vim /opt/blender/blender.desktop
When it opens, find and change the lines’Exec‘e’Icon‘ for:
Exec=/opt/blender/blender %f Icon=/opt/blender/blender.svg
Finally, we will copy the file in ‘~ / .local / share / applications‘so that only the user can use the program. Or we can also copy it or in ‘/ usr / share / applications‘for global use.
sudo cp /opt/blender/blender.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/
The application icon will be displayed in the search result from ‘Activities‘. But nevertheless, it is better to change the property of the shortcut. We will achieve this with the command:
sudo chown $USER:$USER ~/.local/share/applications/blender.desktop
After this, we can look for the shortcut in ‘Activities‘and start the program.
Uninstall
Snap package
To remove the snap package from Blender 3, we can use the Ubuntu software option, or open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and run in her:
sudo snap remove blender
Tarball package
To uninstall Blender, simply delete the folder that we have placed in the directory / opt. To do it, in a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) it is only necessary to write:
sudo rm -R /opt/blender
And to finish, let’s delete shortcut file, which we create for the user, of the application by typing in the same terminal:
sudo rm ~/.local/share/applications/blender.desktop
For more information about this program, users can consult all the information offered by its creators in the project website.
