We are just a few weeks away from the release of Blender 4.2 LTS. A major upgrade with loads of new features and improvements that require testing.

It is impossible for developers to cover all use cases that need to be tested, this is where the power of the community comes in. Let’s put it to the test!

What to TestWhile Blender 4.2 LTS brings updates in pretty much every corner, some of the main ones are:

  • EEVEE – Known as project “EEVEE Next”, a new render engine replaces the old one and needs as much testing as possible. Open your old files and check that they render properly. Read the migration process for details.
  • Cycles – Ray Portals, Thin Film Interference, updates to shaders, denoising, sampling, and more. Open your old scenes and check if they still render the same.
  • GPU-accelerated Compositor – A new performance setting allows you to use the GPU to compute the compositing. Find it under the Performance panel in Render properties. In most cases it should render faster and look fairly similar (although not 100% the same).
  • Python API – Try out the new methods, commands, and see if the documentation about breaking changes regarding statically typed IDProperties, EEVEE, and others is clear.

Plus plenty of new features such as the introduction of Extensions, per-collection export, sculpt polyline tools, re-visited Shade Auto Smooth workflow, and so much more.

Hardware RequirementsHardware requirements have changed as well, on Windows and Linux a CPU with SSE4.2 is now required. This is supported since AMD Bulldozer (2011) and Intel Nehalem (2008).

Make sure to check the full list of compatibility changes (for Blender 4.2 LTS and future releases).

How to TestTesting can be pretty straight forward:

  1. Download the latest Blender 4.2 LTS Beta
  2. Open your old scenes (backup first just in case)
  3. Check that everything looks and works fine
  4. Found a bug? Report it. Within Blender go to Help → Report a Bug.
    Read more about writing good bug reports.

You can also try out the usual demo files.

For feedback on the features and changes, check the individual threads under Feature & Design Feedback on the forums.

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