Blender 4.2 LTS is out!
There is
SOMETHING VERY IMPORTANT that you NEED TO BE AWARE OF if you are a content creator for Second Life. And that is that the Collada (.dae) exporter is now considered legacy in 4.2, and is going to be
removed in a future version of Blender. This impacts you because as you well know Collada is the format you need to export mesh from Blender as, if you intend to upload it to SL or OpenSim.
Collada is being discontinued because, as explained
here,
The main reason for this decision is that the third-party library used by Blender (
OpenCollada 21) has been fully inactive for 6 years now. This is becoming a serious issue for both security and compatibility with modern codebase (e.g. the library cannot be built anymore against the recent versions of some of its dependencies).
Further more, the Blender implementation has also seen no significant activity for several years now.
In other words it's old, nobody's working on it, and nobody uses it. Like, seriously, someone points out in the comments of that dev post that as far as they know Linden Lab are literally the only people who use this file type anymore.
All is not lost; the comments also point out that LL has been implementing portions of the glTF format as part of its new PBR system and while they haven't quite gotten all of it in there yet, hopefully it will be by the time Collada is finally dropped from Blender.
Otherwise, it's always possible that someone can create a new Blender addon for exporting as Collada. And remember that you can always download and use older versions of Blender that still have the functionality, although you'll always run a risk especially now of models using more current shaders and certainly other features like geometry nodes not being fully backwards-compatible with those older versions of Blender.
Anyways, with all that out of the way, this video goes over all the changes in Blender 4.2 LTS:
The EEVEE render engine has been redone. It's now EEVEE Next, and it has raytracing, better lighting, better shadows, and it's faster too. It now produces results in some situations that are really close to Cycles, but with EEVEE speed. That's awesome. EEVEE Next was the change I was personally looking forward to most in this release.
Geometry nodes are continuing to expand and improve. There's some modeling and compositor improvements too.
There's also the whole "Addons are now Extensions" thing I went over in the last post. Do note though that in order to be able to download extensions from within Blender itself, you need to enable online access in Blender's preferences. This option is turned off by default, because BLENDER ACTUALLY RESPECTS YOUR PRIVACY AND AGENCY AND DOES NOT PRESUME YOU WANT IT TO BE ABLE TO CONNECT TO THE INTERNET. And you only need it enabled while actually downloading or updating extensions, by the way - once the extension is downloaded it's yours, it's local, you won't need to stay connected to the internet or reconnect every so often in order for Blender or any downloaded extension to work. This is how things SHOULD be.