The Blender Foundation has released the free 3D modeling package Blender 4.3, suitable for solving various tasks related to 3D modeling, 3D graphics, computer game development, simulation, rendering, compositing, motion tracking, sculpting, animation and video editing. The code is distributed under the GPL license. Ready-made builds are generated for Linux, Windows and macOS. At the same time, corrective releases of Blender 4.2.4 and 3.6.18 have been prepared in long-term support (LTS) branches, updates for which will be generated until July 2026 and June 2025.
Improvements added include:
- An experimental backend for rendering the interface using the Vulkan graphics API is proposed. The backend is available for Linux and Windows platforms, and is enabled in the Interface/Developer Extras/Backend settings section, where Vulkan should be selected instead of OpenGL.
- Changes have been made to the user interface. Support for pinning and unpinning areas has appeared, allowing the contents of parts of the interface to be moved to separate windows.
The information shown in tooltips has been expanded (for example, images are shown with their resolution and color space, videos with their duration, and fonts with a sketch of the style). Themes now have the ability to highlight the area over which the mouse cursor is located.
- The EEVEE rendering engine, which supports physically based real-time rendering and uses the GPU for rendering, has added light and shadow binding functionality, which was previously only available in the Cycles engine. Light binding allows you to apply lighting only to selected objects in the scene, while shadow binding allows you to control which objects can cast shadows.
- A new node "Metallic BSDF" has been added to the shader editor for setting up metal material parameters.
- Added a new node "Gabor Texture" for creating textures based on the Gabor function, which can simulate various rough surfaces, stones and fabrics.
- Added support for interactive multi-pass compositing, allowing you to create complex non-photorealistic (NPR) styles and effects directly in the 3D Viewport.
- The UV editor offers a new UV unwrapping method called “Minimum Stretch”, which reduces distortion when unwrapping organic forms such as characters and animals by repetitively refining the result. The method is based on the SLIM (Scalable Local Injective Mappings) algorithm.
- The capabilities of geometric nodes have been expanded.
- Added the "For Each Element" zone, which allows parallel separate processing of geometry elements, for example, you can organize the execution of a node for each face of a polygonal mesh.
- Implemented the ability to bind gizmos for manipulating groups of nodes in 3D space, which allows editing node input parameters without switching from the XNUMXD viewport to the node editor.
- Added a "Set Geometry Name" node to simplify assigning names to geometry elements with the ability to automatically initialize based on a collection of names.
- Added support for seamless work with data generated by the Grease Pencil tool, with the ability to split it into layers with curves and attributes. Separately, there are options for converting Grease Pencil data to curves and vice versa, as well as merging Grease Pencil layers.
- Added node "Hash Value" for generating hashes from arbitrary data.
- Added a "Math" node to perform mathematical operations on integer values supplied as input.
- Added the "Warning" node to organize the output of your own warnings while working with node groups.
- The engine that powers the Grease Pencil 2D drawing and animation system has been completely rewritten, allowing you to create 3D sketches and then use them in a 3D environment as XNUMXD objects (a XNUMXD model is formed from several flat sketches at different angles). The new implementation features higher performance and the elimination of some limitations. It is now possible to combine layers into groups and manipulate groups as a single object (for example, you can change the visibility of all layers in a group at once). Support for binding color tags to layers has been added. The eraser tool has been redesigned for cleaning with smoother strokes, with the intersection of the eraser edge with the content being erased normalized. A tool for filling using gradients has been added.
- The brush experience has been streamlined. Blender now comes with over a hundred brushes, and each brush is now a separate asset, allowing you to use the Asset Browser interface to save brushes, share them across projects, and create your own libraries.
- The interface of the non-linear video editor (Video Sequencer) has been improved. The function of linking clips (strips) to each other has been added to simplify their selection and transformation. In the preview mode, the ability to link with alignment by the center, borders of the preview area or corners of visible clips has been added. Thumbnail display is enabled by default on clips and in the preview area. Support for fine-tuning audio at the subframe level has been added. Significant performance optimizations have been carried out, for example, the Color Balance and Tone Map functions have been accelerated several times, the timeline and thumbnail rendering time has been reduced.
- The sculpting mode has undergone significant internal refactoring and optimization. Switching to sculpting mode is now 5x faster, and working with brushes is 8x faster.
- The Cycles rendering engine for the Linux platform implements hardware-accelerated ray tracing using the HIP-RT library, which supports AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. The panoramic camera now supports cylindrical projection.
- Improved support for import and export in glTF format, including support for importing meshes compressed using the Draco library. Added support for exporting point clouds in USD (Universal Scene Description) format.
Source: opennet.ru
