New
Theatre menu
An alternative to the radial hub for the Z key. Holding Z shows up to four rings of brushes, tools and functions above the cursor, and a shelf below it with pages, toggles, sliders and a search across the whole app.
The pencil on the shelf edits the menu in place: drag to move a slot, right-click to choose what it does. The pin keeps the shelf on screen.
Several complete variants of the menu can be kept, for example one for sculpting and one for presenting. The button under the pencil switches between them; right-click a variant to copy, paste over, duplicate, rename or delete it.
French and Chinese
Klay's menus, panels and messages are available in French and Simplified Chinese as well as English. The language changes immediately, without a restart. Names you gave to brushes, presets and objects are kept as they are.
Tools in the right-click menu
The viewport's right-click menu has a Tools entry that lists the tools of the toolbar's Tools section with their icons. The active tool is highlighted, and choosing one switches to it.
Lazy mouse card
Every brush has a Lazy mouse card. Its header switch turns the lazy mouse on or off, and Length sets how far the brush trails the pointer. Q still toggles it, and holding Q while dragging sets the length. The longest leash is now twice as long as before.
With Global lazy mouse on, every brush shares one setting. With it off, each brush keeps its own, saved in its preset.
Curves in the library
The library has a Curves category with two views: Profiles, the cross-sections saved in the Curve tool's My profiles, and Curve tools, complete Curve tool setups.
A curve tool stores the profile together with the radius, the Along the curve values, the stroke settings and, optionally, the physics. Click one to load it; double-click also switches to the Curve tool. Right-click loads only its profile or only its values.
Improved
Faster PBR Fast
PBR Fast now uses a much lighter shader, which raises the frame rate in close-ups that fill the screen, on the desktop and in VR. It keeps the scene lights, shadows, environment lighting, ambient occlusion, vertex paint, the specular colour and a steady emission.
Texture maps, surface detail, curvature and ambient tints and material effects are no longer drawn in PBR Fast; switch to PBR to see them.
Clearer object selection
With the Select tool, or while holding V, the object under the cursor and the objects caught by a selection rectangle are outlined, while selected objects keep their fill colour. The outline is hidden where another object is in front.
Holding Ctrl removes objects from the selection with a click or a rectangle, shown in red. A drag that starts on a selected object removes the objects it crosses. While holding V, a right-click removes the object under the cursor without opening the context menu.
Undock the tool card
The active tool card has an undock button in its header. Undocked, the card docks on the other side of the window, or floats where its header is dropped, and stays visible on every sidebar tab. On the Material and Lighting tabs, the tab's own card undocks into the same place. Its top handle sets the height and the handle on its inner edge sets the width. The same button returns it to the sidebar.
Shorter Symmetry section
The Symmetry section of the right-click menu shows your three most used commands, like Topology; its count button opens the full list. The two Mirror directions are now direct entries.
Gizmo outer ring scales on all three axes
The Gizmo's outer ring now scales the selection uniformly on all three axes, replacing the screen-plane rotation. The larger ring gives finer control, and scaling up has no upper limit.
Gizmo pivot buttons: Lock, Center and Edit pivot
The Gizmo's padlock is now three buttons. Lock keeps the pivot on the object at its current point, so it moves with the object and clicks on the mesh no longer move it; unlocked, a click on the mesh places the pivot. Center returns the pivot to the centre of the object, and Edit pivot moves or turns the pivot without moving the model.
Invert zoom direction
Two new options invert the zoom direction: one for the zoom drag and one for the mouse wheel. With the drag inverted, dragging up zooms in, as in Blender.
Middle-drag scrolls panels
Dragging with the middle mouse button over a panel or list scrolls it with the cursor.
Brush size and strength step shortcuts
Four new shortcuts step the brush size and strength up or down by one increment per press, for keyboards, tablet keys and controllers such as TourBox. They ship unassigned.
Pen side button as middle click
The pen's side button can act as a middle click instead of a right click, so a tap no longer opens the viewport menu.
Default mask preset
Right-click a Mask preset and choose Set as default mask. Klay starts on that preset, and pressing X always switches to it.
Curve ribbons for poly modelling
The Flat profile has two points, so a ribbon is one face wide, and Flip normal turns it to face the other way. With Linear on, Single edge leaves one edge at each corner instead of two, and an arrow on the selected corner drags out a bevel that gains edges as it grows. Moving a dot on a Linear curve no longer twists the rest of the curve.
Even density now works together with Rings at dots. Gizmo on dot moves, twists and scales the selected dot precisely. The end arrow adds dots at the length of the last segment and previews the next one.
Add shape places several separate shapes in one profile. They are swept together with the same twist, taper and scale. The shapes are listed one per row under the editor; a cross at the centre of each shape moves it, and Instance shapes keeps every shape identical while one is edited.
The Profile section now opens the Curve tool card, with your saved profiles at its top and a short note confirming each save to the library, and Mesh follows Along the curve. In Physics, Run lets the selected curve hang and settle under gravity, with the pinned ends held.
The selected curve's dots and line can always be clicked, even where its objects or its mesh cover them.
Order controls for curve objects
A new Order section sets which mesh goes where along the curve. Random has a seed, No repeat, a maximum run and Balance. Sequence has a start, a step, a direction including ping-pong, and Repeat each. Pattern can be mirrored, shuffled per round and followed by gaps.
Skip every Nth and Fill leave gaps in any mode, and a source can be muted from its row without being removed. Source thumbnails are the same as in the scene outliner.
Max GPU use for ray tracing
A new setting limits how much of the graphics card the ray-traced view uses, from 50% to 100%. A lower value leaves the system and other applications responsive, and the image converges proportionally slower.
Fixed
- Holding Ctrl with Trim, B-Scrape, Fill or Level now fills or cuts to the plane instead of raising ridges along the edges of a groove.
- With Orbit around mouse point or Orbit around stroke point, orbiting, zooming or clicking from empty space now keeps the last pivot instead of jumping to an unrelated point.
- On macOS, the FPS readout no longer sits on top of the toolbar.
- In an orthographic view, the gizmo's rings, arms, planes and scale handles can be grabbed again, and dragging an object follows the cursor.
- Duplicating an object inside a group now keeps the copy in that group.
- Repeated Ctrl+D now repeats the last move, rotation or scale for several selected objects and for groups, not only for a single object.
- A mask on a polygon mesh now also protects it from the Draw brush when its Spacing is set to Polywire.
- The Mask mode no longer starts on the Concave preset when Klay opens.
- Voxelize no longer crashes the application at high resolutions on some graphics cards.
- The Boolean live preview now works when an operand is an instance made with Ctrl+D.
- Boolean "Tag as a zone set" now creates a Boolean zone set holding A, B and the seam.
- The Scene totals line in the viewport display now counts the triangles of every instance, and shows billions as "1.3B".