Welcome to Blockbench 4.0 - the Mesh Update!

This update comes with 4 major new features, as well as lots of other features and quality-of-life improvements.

Shout out to the community for a lot of beta testing and other contributions, and thanks for Mojang for supporting the development of Blockbench!

Changes

Poly Editing

Polygon mesh editing is the biggest new feature in Blockbench 4.0. Meshes can be created in the "Generic Model" format.

You can go to Edit > Add Mesh to generate a simple mesh shape. Switch the selection mode in the main toolbar and select parts of the mesh. Then use the regular transform tools to modify the mesh. You can right click the mesh to find more options to manipulate the mesh, like extruding or cutting faces.

Obligatory disclaimer that this isn't for Minecraft and won't work with Minecraft.

Tabs

• Multiple models can now be opened in Blockbench at the same time
• Use the tab bar at the top to switch between tabs
• If you have multiple tabs open, you can press the search icon next to the tab bar to find and jump to a specific tab.

New UV Editor

The UV editor was rewritten in this update to be more user friendly. The main change is the ability to view and modify the UV mapping of multiple faces at once.
The UV editor window has been removed because it's functionality to edit multiple faces simultaneously now exists in the panel.

Other new UV Editor features

• Added UV rotate tool
• Added area select tool to help you select multiple UV mappings

Theme Browser

You can now switch between themes directly in Blockbench. The options consist of the following:

• Default themes (Default Dark, Default Light, Contrast)
• Curated community themes
• Your own themes that you can import from files on your computer
• Optionally one custom theme that you are currently editing

Once you have selected a theme, you can tweak it in the "Options", "Color Scheme" and "Custom CSS" section.

If you have a unique and high quality theme, you can submit it on JannisX11/blockbench-themes.

New features

• Added Find/Replace option, works in group, element and animation names as well as keyframe values, with regular expression support
• You can now press "i" to hide everything except the selection
• Added solid color map template generator
• Added option to load models from blckbn.ch link
• #618 Add Erase-Mode toggle for Fill and Shape tool

Quality of Life features

• Added new "Wheel" color picker
• Area selection now works in the 3D view. If you are using the middle mouse button to navigate, simply use the left mouse button to select an area. If you are using the left mouse button to navigate, hold control while pressing the left mouse button to select an area.
• Added Sketchfab uploader categories and tag suggestions
• Added setting to not export empty bones
• Add "Select All" and "Select None" buttons to animation import dialog
• #902 Add spacing option in toolbars
• #367 Add line break option in toolbars
• Uniform keyframe scaling is now an option that can be toggled per scale keyframe
• Enabled advanced toggles in the outliner will now be remembered between restarts
• The outliner now auto-scrolls when dragging nodes
• Importing a bbmodel file with an invalid format (due to a missing plugin) now shows an error message
• Added outer ring to rotation gizmo, to allow rotation on screen space
• Action Control now supports more tasks, including changing settings, switching tabs, opening recent models, or installing plugins
• Pop up menu when pasting ambiguous content
• Change default animated texture FPS to 7
• Brush opacity now goes up to 255 to align with the color space

Features for Minecraft formats

• #1002 Add support for forge 1.17 entity models
• Added texture meshes for Bedrock Models
• OptiFine CEM shadow size and bone "attach" field are now supported
• Added "Ignore Inherited Scale" option for locators
• #116 Added poseable display reference model (player)
• "Default Path" value now displays in dialog (#1037)
• Added OptiFine CEM multi texture support (import/export only) (#857)

Interface Improvements

• Improved design of preferences windows, added navigation sidebar
• Some number sliders now show show their value in a bar within the slider, including the brush opacity and softness slider
• Plugins are now sorted by popularity
• Plugins in the plugin browser now display their current version
• Improved screenshow dialog, now shows a full size preview as well as the resolution and format
• Names of locked elements are now gray in outliner
• Made element panel toolbar labels slightly smaller

API and version changes

• New language: Traditional Chinese
• Added event hook for updating project resolution
• Updated Electron to 14.1.1
• New PreviewController API to handle preview representations of elements
• Menu.removeAction now supports action as argument

Bugfixes

• #998 "!"-Operator in Molang is not supported
• #999 Effects animator is displayed in red
• (API) Keybind items have no delete method
• Plugin tags remain after reloading a plugin
• Animations are draggable by pressing middle mouse button
• Long texture names display incorrectly
• Fix #1043 keyframes can be created at invalid timecodes
• Fix #1025 Cannot assign tab as a keybind
• Fix issue in JSON exporter with "undefined" in array
• Texture animation timeline doesn't update properly
• Fix #1070 builtin/generated not a valid java item parent
• Fix #1071 Bucket paint tool only works on 1st texture animation frame
• Fix #1092 Rescaling is not calculated correctly with 22.5 degree elements