Blender 4.2 is the next LTS release of Blender and for those who would like to get this, you can simply go over to Blender.org, go over to the download section, go all the way down to where you get to find Download Blender Experimental and from here, you'll be able to download Blender 4.2 the beta for Windows, Mac and Linux.

And something else you'd also notice is right here, we have different architectures that are available.

So, if you're using the ARM64 chip, you might have to wait for the beta but if you're simply using the x64 chip, then you can simply go ahead and download this right now.

And for those who like to see some of the latest changes, you can simply go over to the latest changes section, where you'd also notice that we have the Blender 4.2 LTS and Blender 4.3 seems to currently be in alpha.

And of course, if you simply check that, you'd notice that we literally have nothing, which is just something that is yet to be developed.

Meanwhile, for those who like to see some of the cool updates that are currently available with Blender 4.2 the beta, we're simply going to dive directly into Blender and start exploring them.

So, with Blender 4.2 the beta simply open up right here.

The very first thing which you'd notice is we have a wonderful splash screen.

A huge shout out to the folks at Blender Foundation for making this possible and if you're trying to import your preference from Blender 4.1 right here into Blender 4.2, all you need to do right now is to click on Import Blender 4.1 Preference and that will automatically be loaded in.

But of course, if you like to create your own preference, you can simply set this up and then you can save your new preference.

Now let's talk about the UI, as there's a couple of interesting updates right here with the UI and the very first one you'd notice exists within the status bar.

So if you simply go over to the status bar and you right click, you'd notice we've got something called Extension Update.

And that talks about the extension slash network related icon that is right here.

So if we simply click on that button, this pops up the preference and from here you would notice that we've got a network section.

Now this simply allows you either stay online or offline depending on what you want.

Say for example you like to get some of the extensions which we'll talk about in a bit, you can simply allow online access and automatically your Blender can communicate with the online repository of the Blender extensions.

And speaking about the Blender extensions, right now, Blender no longer deals with the word addon as much as you would now notice that instead of having addons here, they are now called extensions.

Now within the extension section, right here is where you can find the extensions that deals with both addons and also themes.

As at this point, if you would like to work with the themes or the addons, you can simply go over to the extension platform and download them directly or you can simply download them from here.

But for those who don't know about this, if you go over to the link in the description it's going to bring you right here where you can download these extensions and work with them.

Right now if you would like to download say for example a theme, we can go over to the theme which you would like to download, probably the Midnight Blue and we can simply click on Get Theme.

This wasn't working before, the same romanticized idea they had, but with this new update it is now working.

And how you get this to work is very simple.

Drag this over here, click, drag and drop right into Blender and automatically you can now set it as your current theme.

The same thing happens with all of the other addons as well.

Say for example you would like to install any of the addons that exist, you can go over to the addon section, go over to the specific addon that you want, in this case we're going to look at the Light Painter, we can click on Get Addon and to install that is also pretty easy.

Click, drag and drop.

And I kind of think that this is one cool thing that is going to be happening with Blender moving forward.

Now for those who prefer to just simply install within Blender, you can simply go through search for the addon that you want and install it.

Now for you to install addons the same way you know how to install, how you get to do this is pretty simple as if you go over to extension, there is one more step which has to do with clicking on this button and installing from disk.

So instead of that gigantic install button that we regularly have, you now have to click on this tiny drop down and then install from disk.

And of course if you have repositories, you can also go ahead and add your own repositories right here.

There's also a few other things that you might need to know.

If we go over to the Teams section, I'm just simply going to go back and revert to the previous .team that we have with Blender and with Blender 4.2 you can create and save your own teams.

And to do that is pretty simple.

If we click on the plus button and we define our team to be 0-1 for example, we can have that and we can simply go ahead and have that selected.

So at this point if there's any changes that we would like to do, we can proceed to make those changes and once we're ready, we can click on the save button and save this team.

And still speaking about the UI, if we simply go ahead and go to the file section, if we go down to where we have Open Recent, we can now simply right click.

So the Open Recent now supports a context menu that allows you to go over to the file location of the file that you're trying to open.

So for example, if we like to open up the Bagger03 file, we can right click and we can go directly to the file location.

There's also this beautiful new update and it has to do with exporting all collections.

You might be wondering what this is.

So imagine you have several stuff on your viewport and you'd like to export this as individual files.

So instead of selecting this and going over to file, go over to export, export this as a lembic, export this as collater, all of that, what you can now do is simple.

You can go over to the collections section and you can select any of these objects, click on the plus sign and select the file format you would like to export this.

Maybe we would like to export this as a lembic and maybe we would like to export this as

FBX and possibly we would like to export this as STL.

So once you've got all of that, you can now go ahead and click on the export all button.

You would also notice that the individual file format that you have selected, there are properties right here.

So this is quite robust.

You can now select all of these and export them all at once.

And at the same time, you can do the same thing by going over to file and exporting all collections.

And that's not all.

If you also go all the way down to where we have the cleanup, you'd notice that this has now been condensed.

So instead of having a bit more of a longer list, like what we have for 4.1, you would now notice that the purged unused data is right here.

You can also manage unused data as well.

So if we click on that, you would notice we've got some stuff and we can choose to delete them.

And speaking about unused data, there's a bit of a renaming that has been done within the outliner.

So if we go over to the outliner, if we click on the filter section, we can now filter unused data.

This was previously named often data, but right now it is now called unused data.

Moving on, you would also be able to search for stuff within the outliner once you hit

CTRL and F on your keyboard.

This is now something you can do on the fly.

And speaking about things you can now do on the fly, if we have this object selected and we go over to the modifier, there is a beautiful pin-in that exists.

So in this case, if we simply go over to the modifier, for example, if we do a simple subdivision and then we proceed to do a simple wireframe, you'd notice that the wireframe goes down while the subsurface stays up.

But what if we like this to constantly stay down?

How we can work with this is pretty interesting.

So at this point, if you click, you can go here and pin to last.

And what is technically going to tell it is stay there every time, all the time.

So from here, we can choose to go over there and throw in the wireframe and we start getting some interesting results.

We can also click again and go down and add another wireframe and we start getting some interesting results.

The same thing can be done for almost everything that we've got.

We can also go ahead and throw in a little bit of a solidified right there and we can have that and we can actually crank this up depending on what we want.

If we'd like the wireframe to also go all the way down, we can click and pin to last as well.

So the pin to last just simply pins this hierarchically and depending on what you want to remain on the base, you can pin it and keep it there.

There's a couple of updates that also deals with text as well.

And of course, for those who work with cameras, there's a tiny update that we've got here.

So with Blender 4.1, we did see a very interesting update that has to do with the locking.

And you know, I was super excited about this one when it came out, but right now there is a very tiny update I think a lot of you guys may love.

And one of them has to do with the fact that we can turn on and off camera guides.

And the second one, which was promised to come to 4.2, which isn't here yet, but I think there's an implementation which hasn't been updated to the build, is the camera passpartout.

So the camera passpartout in viewport overlay is supposed to be here, but at this point, this is something that we don't have with the current build.

And hopefully, I do believe that this is going to be coming with the final release of Blender 4.2.

Now, here's another interesting update for cameras.

So if you're using a camera inside of Blender, you can now play with the depth of field by simply selecting the focus distance.

Previously, what we could work with was just simply selecting the object you would like to focus on and we can crank this up and down, you know, just go to town with that.

And for those who like to explore this, how you can work with this is pretty simple.

I'm going to select the camera, press 0 on the keyboard, just to lock that in.

And from here, let's actually hit home to have a full view of what we're doing.

Then we can simply go right here and we're going to turn on the depth of field.

Now with this, once you turn on depth of field, you have two options.

The option to either do the focus on the object by simply selecting this and then, you know, can go ahead and crank the f-stop depending on where you want to get or you can use the focus distance.

You probably noticed that the minute we selected this, this went silent.

So we'll close that.

We can now have this selected.

And from here, we can select the distance we would like to focus.

If we have this selected and we tap on this, you notice we have more depth there and the same thing happens.

So if we have this selected and we select that, things like that.

Now the difference between these two is, instead of having an armature that you have to animate, which has the focus, you can actually animate this property.

And this is just one of those cool things that comes with the camera.

Blender 4.2 also comes with some updates for icons and some of them will be very visible within the status bar.

And one of the examples, if we simply flip up Blender 4.1, you would notice that by default, if we go over to Select and let's say we would like to search for something, we are being urged to press the spacebar to search.

And currently, that is a text.

So if you simply hit the spacebar, you can type in the word Pattern and you're going to find some stuff that has to do with Select Pattern.

But for Blender 4.2, this now has an icon.

So if you click, you get to see that icon that simply specifies Search.

And in this case, if we would like to search things that has to do with Word Linked, we can type that in and of course, we're going to get that.

And this happens for every single menu that you select.

And in terms of icons, you'll probably find more icons in Blender 4.2 and also, most of these icons are now properly aligned compared to what we have with Blender 4.1.

And within the Sculpting section, some updates are now here.

If we go over to the Sculpt menu, you'll notice that the Sculpt Transform has now been condensed contrary to what we had with previous versions of Blender.

There's a Show and Hide which seems to be shrinked as well.

And there's also the Trim add, which also has a bit of a shrinking.

So these are some updates that we've got there.

And in terms of the tools themselves, here are some interesting things that I think a lot of you guys may love, depending on how much stuff you get to slice in Blender and how frequently you want to slice them.

Now within the Mask, the Height, the Trim and also the Facet, there are two new similar tools across all of them.

And if you click and hold, you would see it.

Polyline Mask and also the Line Mask.

And the same thing appears with the Trim.

There's the Line Trim, the Polyline Trim.

And also for the Height, there's the Line and also the Polyline.

And of course, the same thing is also here for the Facet.

And how this works is very simple.

So for example, if we simply go over to the Line, we can click and drag and we can simply trim that.

So this way, we can trim the whole chunk of it.

If this is what we want to do, let's undo that.

And say for example, we'd like to trim the ears, we can get that.

And this is pretty explanatory.

But for sure, if you like to use the Polyline, this is where things become a little bit more interesting.

So for the Polyline, just like the name implies, you need to click, click, click, click and click.

And finally, you need to close it.

So once you close that, this trims it all the way out.

So at certain times, this trims it and keeps it hollow, while sometimes it trims it and fills it up.

So if you're looking for something that will simply trim and fill up, I wouldn't suggest you rely on this, but for sure, you can simply rely on this other one.