The Blender Foundation has published a release of the free 3D modeling package Blender 3.0, suitable for a variety of tasks related to 3D modeling, 3D graphics, game development, simulation, rendering, compositing, motion tracking, sculpting, animation creation and video editing . The code is distributed under the GPL license. Ready builds are generated for Linux, Windows and macOS.
Main changes in Blender 3.0:
- The user interface has been updated and a new theme has been proposed. UI elements have become more contrasting, and menus and panels now have rounded corners. Through the settings, you can adjust the indents between the panels to your taste and select the level of rounding of the corners of the windows. Unified appearance of different widgets. Improved implementation of thumbnail preview and scaling. The interface of linear non-photorealistic rendering (Freestyle) has been completely redesigned. Expanded area management capabilities: corner action zones now allow you to move any neighboring areas, a new area close operator has been added, and area resizing operations have been improved.
- A new editor has been added - the Asset Browser, which simplifies the work with various additional objects, materials and environment blocks. Provides the ability to define item libraries, group items into catalogs, and attach metadata such as description and tags to make searching easier. You can bind to the elements of arbitrary thumbnails.
- The Cycles rendering engine has been redesigned to significantly improve GPU rendering performance. It is stated that thanks to the new code running on the GPU side and the change in the scheduler, compared to the previous release, the rendering speed of typical scenes has increased by 2-8 times. In addition, support for hardware acceleration of computing using NVIDIA CUDA and OptiX technologies has been added. A new backend has been added for AMD GPUs based on the AMD HIP (Heterogeneous Interface for Portability) platform, offering C++ Runtime and a C++ dialect for building single-code portable applications for AMD GPUs and NVIDIA GPUs (AMD HIP is currently only available for Windows and discrete RDNA cards) /RDNA2, and for Linux and earlier AMD graphics cards will be available in Blender 3.1). Support for OpenCL has been dropped.
- Significantly improved the quality and responsiveness of the interactive rendering of the viewport, even with the blending mode enabled. The change is especially useful when setting up lighting. Added separate presets for viewport and sampling. Improved adaptive sampling. Added the ability to set a time limit for rendering a scene or rendering until a specified number of samples is reached.
- The Intel OpenImageDenoise library was updated to version 1.4, which made it possible to increase the level of detail after eliminating noise in the viewport and during the final rendering. A new pre-filter setting has been added to the pass filter to control denoising using auxiliary albedo and normal.
- The Shadow Terminator mode has been added to eliminate artifacts at the border of light and shadow, which are typical for models with a large polygon mesh step. In addition, a new implementation of the shadow catcher is proposed, supporting reflected light and background lighting, as well as settings to control the coverage of real and synthetic objects. Improved the quality of colored shadows and accurate reflections when blending 3D with real footage.
- Support for changing anisotropy and refractive index has been added to the subsurface scattering mode.
- Eevee's rendering engine, which supports real-time physics-based rendering and uses only the GPU (OpenGL) for rendering, has 2-3x performance improvements when editing very large meshes. The Wavelength and Attribute nodes have been implemented to define the mesh's own attributes. Full support for attributes generated by geometry nodes is provided.
- The interface for managing geometric objects based on nodes (Geometry Nodes) has been expanded, in which the method for determining groups of nodes has been redesigned and a new system of attributes has been proposed. About 100 new nodes have been added to interact with curves, text data, and object instances. Improved visualization of the connection of nodes by coloring nodes and connecting lines with a certain color. The concept of fields has been added to organize the transfer of data and functions, based on the creation of operations from base nodes and their connection with each other. Fields allow you to do without the use of named attributes for intermediate data storage and without the use of special βAttributeβ nodes.
- Support for text (Text) and curve (Curve) objects has been added to the interface of geometric nodes with full support for the attribute system, as well as the ability to work with materials. Curve Nodes make it possible to work with curve data in the node tree - with the provided curve primitives, you can now perform resampling, filling, trimming, setting the spline type, converting to a mesh and other operations through the node interface. Text Nodes allow you to manipulate strings through a node interface.
- In the non-linear video editor (Video Sequencer), support has been added for working with image and video tracks, previewing thumbnails and converting tracks directly in the preview area, similar to how it is implemented in a 3D viewport. In addition, the video editor provides the ability to bind arbitrary colors to tracks and added an overwrite mode by placing one track on top of another.
- Expanded scene inspection capabilities using virtual reality helmets, including the ability to visualize controllers and navigate through teleportation through the scene or flying over the stage. Added support for Varjo VR-3 and XR-3 3D helmets.
- New modifiers have been added to the Grease Pencil 2D drawing and animation system, which allows you to create sketches in 3D and then use them in a 3D environment as three-dimensional objects (a XNUMXD model is formed based on several flat sketches in different angles). For example, a Dot Dash modifier has been added to automatically generate dashed lines with the ability to assign different materials and offsets to each segment. Significantly increased the performance of art lines. Work has been done to improve the convenience of drawing.
- Significantly reduced download and write times for .blend files by using the Zstandard compression algorithm instead of gzip.
- Added support for importing files in the USD (Universal Scene Description) format proposed by Pixar. Import of meshes, cameras, curves, materials, volume and lighting parameters is supported. Extended support for the Alembic format used to represent 3D scenes.
Source: opennet.ru