Blender 4.2 LTS Ships the New EEVEE and Extensions Platform

A new long-term support release

Blender 4.2 LTS was released on July 16, 2024. As a long-term support version, it combined a rewritten render engine, upgraded ray tracing and a new extensions system, and it aligned with the VFX Reference Platform 2024 using Python 3.11, OpenEXR 3.2 and OpenColorIO 2.3.

The next-generation EEVEE

The headline was a from-scratch rewrite of the EEVEE render engine, adding screen-space global illumination, real displacement and vector displacement, improved subsurface scattering that no longer leaks between objects, dithered volumetrics, and viewport motion blur through the camera view with a custom shutter curve. Supporting features included virtual shadow maps, unlimited BSDFs and lights, and multithreaded shader compilation.

Cycles upgrades

Cycles gained the Ray Portal BSDF, which transports rays to another location in the scene for portal effects, and physically accurate thin film interference in the Principled BSDF for dielectric materials. The release added blue-noise dithered sampling, improved volume light sampling for smoother spotlight and area-light results, and upgraded to OpenImageDenoise 2.3.

The Extensions platform

Add-ons and themes were unified as Extensions that can be installed by drag and drop from extensions.blender.org and updated from within Blender, with internet access fully optional and off by default. Geometry Nodes added a Matrix socket for working with transformations, and the built-in Khronos PBR Neutral tone mapper joined AgX for true-to-life product rendering.

Related on Skillo

See also: Blender 4.1 and Geometry Nodes baking.

Sources

• Blender 4.2 LTS release notes (blender.org)

Published date reflects the original event date (2024-07-16). This article is original Skillo editorial written from the sources above; facts were verified in September 2026.