Hell yeah, haven’t made a donut in a while and I have some downtime. Gday mate!
Damn! That release note page is humongous! (not umongus ok!?) I didn’t touch Blender very much since 2.5 so I am quite out of the loop, but I am doing a bit more 3D recently, so I’ll give it try once it drops for my distro.
I hope 4.3 is stable now, because I had to fallback to 3.6 because of how much 4.2 would crash for no reason. Want to see Material View? Crash. Fooled around for 30 minutes? Crash. Tried to load a stl with over 1m triangles? Crash.
Eevee was entirely rewritten for 4.2, guess it wasn’t completely bug-free on release. There have been quite a few bug fixes since then, and a new vulkan backend too, you might want to try that
Just tried, while 4.3 didn’t crash when changing to material preview, it did freeze for a good 10 seconds on the default cube. Closing and doing it again was fast, however. Changing the color of the default material the first time also froze blender for 3 seconds. Fooling around with other material options, such as Subsurface weight, again froze the program, this time for over 20 seconds. Judging from what was shown on the Statistics part I turned on (I never understood why this is off by default), all these freezes are shader compilations, so hopefully they are one time things
They’re redone each time you change a shader nodetree. That’s one of the reasons I don’t use Eevee at all, on my hardware Cycles is responsive like butter… there’s no beating this interactivity
Okay I must admit that the Geometry nodes + Grease pencil is a powerful artistic style