The Blender Foundation has released Blender 3, a free 3.4D modeling package suitable for a variety of tasks related to 3D modeling, 3D graphics, game development, simulation, rendering, compositing, motion tracking, sculpting, animation, and video editing. . The code is distributed under the GPL license. Ready builds are generated for Linux, Windows and macOS. At the same time, a patch release of Blender 3.3.2 has been made in the Long Term Support (LTS) branch, which will receive updates until September 2024.
Among the improvements added in Blender 3.4 are:
- Support for the Wayland protocol has been implemented, allowing you to directly run Blender in Wayland-based environments without using the XWayland layer, which will improve the quality of work in Linux distributions that use Wayland by default. To work in Wayland-based environments, the libdecor library for decorating windows on the client side is required.
- Added the ability to build Blender as a module for the Python language, which allows you to create bindings and services for data visualization, animation, image processing, video editing, 3D format conversion and automation of various work in Blender. To access Blender functionality from Python code, the "bpy" package is provided.
- Support for the "Path Guiding" method has been added to the Cycles rendering system, which, compared to the path tracing technique, allows, while consuming the same processor resources, to achieve higher quality when processing scenes with reflected lighting. In particular, the method allows to reduce the noise level in scenes in which it is problematic to track the path to the light source using the path tracing technique, for example, when the room is illuminated through a small door gap. The method is implemented through the integration of the OpenPG (Open Path Guiding) library prepared by Intel.
- Sculpting mode has simplified access to auto-masking settings, which are now available in the 3D viewport header. Added options for automatic masking by bumps, viewpoint and selected area. To convert an automatic mask into a regular mask attribute that can be edited and rendered, it is proposed to use the "Create Mask" button.
- The UV Editor introduces a new geometric softening brush (Relax), which allows you to improve the quality of UV unwrapping by achieving a more accurate match of 3D geometry when calculating the texture mapping parameters on a 3D object. The UV Editor also adds support for non-uniform meshes, pixel spacing, grid top pinning, UV rotation aligned to a selected edge, and quick randomization of scaling, rotation, or offset settings for selected UV islands.
- Provided a Viewport Overlay for displaying geometry nodes, which can be used to preview, debug, or test attribute changes in the node tree.
- Added 8 new nodes for extracting data from meshes and curves (for example, determining the joints of faces, corners of vertices, setting the curve normal and checking control points). A node has been added for sampling UV surfaces, which allows you to find out the value of an attribute based on UV coordinates. The βAddβ menu provides a display of the resources of a group of nodes.
- The capabilities of the Grease Pencil 2D drawing and animation system have been expanded, allowing 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 from different angles). Added an outline modifier to generate a perimeter stroke based on the camera view. Added the ability to import several SVG files at once. Significantly improved fill tool. A new filling method is proposed that uses the radius of a circle to determine the proximity of the ends of lines when filling.
- Physically Based Rendering (PBR) extensions are implemented in ".mtl" files.
- Improved work with fonts.
- Added the ability to extract frames from video in WebM format and implemented support for encoding video in AV1 format using FFmpeg.
- The Eevee engine and viewport on the Linux platform provide the ability to render in headless mode.
- Improved performance of the Subdivision Surface Modifier, batch creation of objects, calculation of disabled modifiers, and creation of thumbnails in WebP format. Improved sculpting performance in situations where masks and face sets are not used.
Source: opennet.ru