Blender 3.1 might have a smaller list of new features, but it boasts some amazing speed and quality of life improvements that I'm very happy to see. What should you know about before you switch over? Let's dig in!

User Interface

The View pie menu, with the always handy Frame Selected and Frame All shortcuts, has been added to the Node, Video Sequence, Dope Sheet, Graph, NLA, Image, Clip, and Outliner Editors.

Curve widgets, like the one on the RGB Curves node, now allow you to change the curve handle type when you select a point.

The Outliner now displays a little warning icon when a data-block needs to be re-synched.

Batch Rename also now works in the Outliner as well as for collections, volumes, and lights.

Modeling

Mesh display and editing performance has been improved, and you should notice a difference when navigating complex scenes in Object Mode or switching in and out of Edit Mode.

The Subdivision Surface modifier can now use GPU acceleration, but it must be enabled in Preferences / Viewport / Subdivision and it must be the last one in the stack. I believe this had been added previously but was removed back in 2.8.

The Subdiv modifier also now supports vertex creasing, which allows modelers much more fine tune control over their shapes.

Wondering when to use creases vs. holding edges? Check out this YouTube video:

NURBS (i.e. geometry made from curves instead of polygons) calculations have been improved. They’re still very limited compared to other apps, so I still can’t recommend using them for modeling, but maybe one day.

Geometry Nodes

The biggest area of visible improvement in Blender 3.1 is in Geometry Nodes. While there are a lot of new nodes (19 to be exact), the most important jump in my opinion is in performance. The list of improvements is too long to list here, but the evaluation of several nodes, including crucial ones like Set Position and Realize Instances, was sped up 2-6x and in some cases multithreaded.

A new overlay option, Timings, shows how long each node takes to calculate so you can more easily figure out what part of the graph you need to optimize.

When dragging a node input or output link over empty space, a new search menu allows quickly connecting any node with a compatible socket.

The attribute workflow has been improved with a new Domain Size node, which returns the number of data points in an attribute such as the number of vertices in a mesh. There’s also a new operator, for when after the Geometry Nodes modifier has been applied, that converts the resulting generic attributes to vertex colors or UV layers.

Instances now inherit the attributes from the points they are instanced on, can be deleted with the Delete Geometry node, and realized geometry can be turned back into an instance with the Geometry to Instance node.

The new Dual Mesh node, which is very cool but strangely named, converts faces into vertices and vertices into faces.

Real modeling is finally starting to become possible thanks to the introduction of the Extrude Mesh, Flip Faces, and Scale Elements nodes. Several other nodes were also added to give more information about the topology, such as the Vertex Neighbors, Face Neighbors, Edge Vertices, Edge Neighbors, Face Area, Mesh Island, and Edge Angle nodes. Most of the Curve nodes were updated with small additional features as well.

Animation

There’s a new armature opacity slider in the overlay options for Pose, Edit, and Weight Paint modes, which is great for seeing the form of the model more clearly while you’re working.

Actions can now have a custom frame range, which can be set in the sidebar of the Action Editor, Dope Sheet, and NLA Editor. This is similar to setting an action’s NLA strip length manually but is more convenient. The new Cyclic Animation toggle below the frame range options does not actually cycle the animation, but it does tell Cycle-Aware Keying which frames to use as the start and end frames, which should make it easier to use.

A new preinstalled add-on, Copy Global Transform, helps to copy the world space location, rotation, and scale of any object or bone and paste it to any other object or bone. This would have been extremely useful when animating the cartridge switching hands during the FPS Weapons Animation course!

The Graph Editor has a new Equalize Handles operator in Keys menu under Snap, which averages out the handles on each side of the keyframe. It can also flatten out the handles if desired.

The Breakdown and Blend to Neighbor operators, which were introduced to the 3D View in Blender 3.0, are now available in the Graph Editor as well.

Grease Pencil

The Line Art modifier has several new updates in Blender 3.1. The collection selection (which rhymes nicely) can be inverted, the mesh can be calculated without backfaces, there’s a new option to keep the contour lines around objects when Face Mark Filtering is enabled, and more details can be preserved when using Chaining.

All the layers in a Grease Pencil object can now be merged at the same time.

The Grease Pencil PDF export now supports saving each frame of the animation as a separate page.

The Fill tool has a new Dilate option, which can either be used to over-flood an area or leave a gap between the fill and the stroke.

Grease Pencil objects can now use the Shrinkwrap modifier, and Length modifier got a new Randomize option for changing the random seed over time.

Cycles Rendering

Mac users will be happy to know that Blender now supports Apple’s Metal for GPU rendering! At least, for those with M1 and AMD computers. Apple will continue to expand the list of supported cards and optimize it further over time, as well as allow Eevee and the viewport to use Metal as well.

The distance precision values were tweaked internally, resulting in fewer artifacts when objects are extremely small or extremely big and far away. The tradeoff is that normal overlapping geometry may cause more extreme z-fighting, so be on the lookout for that.

Cycles can now render point clouds! This is extremely exciting since it allows you to render particles directly and efficiently without having to instance spheres. A new Point Info node in the shader editor lets you get data about each point, such as their size, to use in your shaders. The downside is that it only works with particles imported from other software for some reason, and with points generated with Geometry Nodes.

Mandelbulb3D fractal by Michael A Prostka

A new Fisheye Lens Polynomial lens type was added to the panoramic camera options, which helps to better simulate certain real world lenses.

On the baking side of things, the margin is now calculated using the distance from the UV’s adjacent faces, which is great for making sure that the bake for one island doesn’t overlap another island.

Similar to the one for Geometry Nodes, the Map Range node in the shader editor can now work with vectors.

Video Editing and Compositing

The Video Sequence Editor, as well as its preview area, now supports dragging and dropping from the Outliner and Asset Browser. You can also now copy and paste strips that have animations from one scene to another.

Video proxies (smaller, compressed versions that can be played back faster) are now automatically built for you when working on videos that would otherwise be slow to skim through.

The Compositor also got some love, with a new Convert Color Space node to swap between two different color spaces, and a Scene Time node that outputs the current time in seconds or frames.

Assets and Exporting

The Image Editor’s performance has been drastically improved, and it can now handle really freaking big (technical term for anything over 8k) images while remaining buttery smooth to navigate.

The Asset Browser now supports node groups! Time to finally save my custom procedural textures where I can actually find them for later.

Exporting to Alembic, one of the file formats that supports animation, now lets you include animated vertex colors. The Mesh Sequence Cache modifier, which can read Alembic files, has a new Override Layers section for using another Alembic file with matching attributes to override parts of the original.

The OBJ file exporter was re-written from scratch in C++ rather than in Python and now runs about 10 times faster. That’s amazing!

The relatively new USD file format, which will hopefully become the universal 3D file standard at some point instead of FBX, now converts simple Principled shader setups into USD compatible materials, with textures included.

To be honest, I’ve never used the glTF file format, but I always see it get a big list of updates every release. In Blender 3.1, the exporter manages animation data much better and the importer is a bit more user friendly.

That's all for this release! Which new feature are you most excited about?