As a Blender beginner, my head is hurting looking at so much stuff to learn, but I understand these complexities allow so much creative freedom. Also, I'm looking forward to using AGX
As a blender beginner you don't have to even worry about theseee, these aren't that much helpful for a newbie. So don't worry about them, you'll cross that bridge when you get to it, GOOD LUCK ON YOUR JOURNEY BTW :3
Honestly I've been playing with Blender since it first went open; and I'm still learning about some of these features. Don't sweat it too much, you can make great models and videos without them; but when you've got time it never hurts to learn a new tool or trick.
These are important for people used to how it was before. If you're starting this is irrelevant to you beyond knowing that something exists or is a thing lol
1. **User Interface and Design Changes:** - Blender 4.0 features a notch design and a return to a flat background. - The interface font is updated to "Inter" for improved readability. - A new asset shelf in the 3D view allows easy access to the asset library without opening a separate editor. 2. **Painting and Wireframe Improvements:** - Painting modes now have a canvas picker in the 3D view header. - Wireframe fill in edit mode is now a preference and off by default, enhancing visibility. - Color of wireframes can now be controlled in all shading modes. 3. **UI and Workflow Enhancements:** - Improved organization of overlays dropdown and outliner select hierarchy. - Menus can now be searched, aiding in the new ad modifier menu organization. - File saving introduces a convenient "save incremental" feature. 4. **Modeling and Geometry Node Updates:** - A new snapping feature called Snap base is introduced for interactive object/component snapping. - Geometry nodes see the addition of a repeat zone for looping instructions and marking assets as modifiers/tools. - New nodes include edge marking in geometry nodes and a points to curves node. 5. **Rendering and Shading Improvements:** - Principled BSDF gets a full rewrite for increased physical accuracy. - Cycles rendering includes light and shadow linking, updated color transforms, and a new HDR monitor output (on Mac). - A new compositing filter node called Kuara adds a stylized painterly effect to renders. - Blender 4.0 raises the minimum OpenGL version required, drops support for Intel HD 4000 GPUs on Windows, and requires a GPU and macOS version supporting Metal 2.2 for Mac users.
I've absolutely LOVED your content over the years, you've always been a big reason why I got into 3D modeling/animation to begin with :D Were all of your videos created within Blender? Just curious
I cannot thank the Blender team enough. I started with Blender in 2019. At that time, I had no perspective on the digital world. I just wanted to learn to draw, and I chose Blender only to simulate shading. However, over time, Blender began to bring more and more new updates. I saw the potential of Blender, how powerful the program is. I mean, it's open source and free, and gradually becoming better than Maya. So, I started modeling and sculpting with it. Currently, I'm working on my own game and CGI animation using Blender and UE5. Meanwhile, I'll also be working as a game designer abroad. I just want to say thank you for your generous actions that have opened doors for many people. Without you, I would have spent years working in a factory or peeling potatoes in the kitchen. I hope you also collaborate with Epic Games.🧡
Grateful to all the Blender staff not only for the improvements, but also for the infinite possibilities they provide by allowing free use of the program!
Speaking as someone who's been making documentaries for the BBC and other UK broadcasters for the last twenty years, but has always had a desire to understand 3d packages (way back to breaking down in tears whilst trying to understand VU-3D on the ZX Spectrum) I wish I actually understood any of this! People who are masters of this software are magicians!
I'm one of those very rare people who are not only into cameras but also 3D computer graphics. I can shoot a VFX shot on set and then do the actual VFX animation in post (such as camera tracking then doing the 3D work). I've been a DOP on a 4 day short film shoot. I've done corporate and even wedding videography. Nothing as fancy as shooting for the BBC though. I even like wildlife videography and make my own custom LUTs for log profiles in Davinci Resolve using a DSC Labs ChromaMatch Pro color chart. Yet, also, I've done 3D modeling and animation over the years too. I started learning Blender on the side 2 years ago. I love it. You can actually learn this stuff. Tons of top level courses from CG Boost, BlenderMarket and FlippedNormals. As a cinematographer or documentary film maker you'll have an edge because you already understand cameras. You don't have to be a procedural shader wizard or Geometry Nodes master, 3D skills are a huge (and rare) compliment for a DOP. I like both fields :)
I'm absolutely in LOVE with the brand new graph editor updates and all the little ways you can now smooth out and edit keyframes! Such an incredible update across EVERYTHING in Blender!
Man, Blender moves so fast these days. A couple of years ago, I had a handle on pretty much everything, but I haven't had many Blender-based projects recently - a video like this is super useful to let me know what's changed!
This is a staggering amount of updates! There's the obvious big stuff like light linking and AGX, but the sheer number of small quality of life improvements is what truly blows my mind. You won't even notice most of them. You'll just magically find yourself enjoying making stuff that much more 🤩 Downloading immediately!
9:15 Lights have better energy preservation and work better with other software 9:20 Super excited about lights having uv coordinates now 9:29 Super excited about AGX color management!! cant wait to create!!!
8:40 Absolute game changer, the amount of times I had to dabble on a strength value that didn't look overly strong or using a bump/normal map combo whilst this addresses just making the normal map stronger.
Really slick, thanks for making this vid to show us all the improvements. Blender is evolving so quickly these days and yet the user experience is just getting better and better. Tremendous work!
The animation and rigging tools are amazing! Light groups in base blender! Animation got so much love this update it feels great :D I'll be downloading 4.0 to at least just play with the new shading and compositor nodes
I love Blender. There's only 3 things I'd like to see to make it even more perfect for me: 1) Memory mappable textures / mipmaps, like in Renderman. This would allow for hundreds of 4K UDIM patches on a modest 8GB graphics card. 2) Improvements to adaptive subdivision, optimizing it and making it a fully supported instead of experimental feature. 3) Surface level detection for the size of the brush in Texture Paint mode, like how Sculpting works (as it's an option for Sculpt mode). That's it. I don't "need" any of that but I'd like to see it in the future, it's not required though. Blender is my #1 tool for commercial work as a freelance 3D artist and I love all the new features provided in this update, especially with regard to shading and the new AgX view transform :)
Mipmapping was actually discussed in a recent dev meeting, if memory serves. Think it was prompted by a VFX workshop at this year's Blender Conference.
@@ArjjacksI read a post awhile back about mipmap support in GPU rendering. They were comparing Cycles with Redshift which does support it, so apparently it is possible to get mipmaps to run on the GPU. The Simplify feature set works very well in Blender, but it's scene level. I do my own work around for super heavy ArchViz on an RTX 3090 with 24GB of VRAM: I manually create an image sequence of a bitmap texture at 80% resolution of previous mipmap. So from 4K to like 0.8K in multiple increments. I use an empty's distance with a driver calculating distance to the camera and the method works, I also limit the image sequence going too far by using one of the constraints that limit distance. I can define certain areas of a scene to run this on. As you may know, you can't just swap image textures within a shader as any node being evaluated by a shader will be loaded into memory during translation phase, while the image sequence method doesn't load all the textures in. I'm not a programmer, I just tested it myself with good old trial and error. It's what I use for now. I'm sure someone might make an addon someday but I'm not a developer. Would be nice to see mipmaps used in Blender someday but again it's not necessary unless you're working with a really heavy scene. Some smart optimization is what I do which gets the job done. I started with 3ds Max in 2007 then learned Maya in 2010. I can genuinely say that Blender is the better tool overall for the freelance 3D artist. I love this program. I donate as well :)
@@ArjjacksBigger studios like WETA use hundreds of 4K patches per channel on a creature that are often painted as bitmap textures. Very little to no procedural texturing is used in the final shader; they bake it all down to bitmaps which can be edited. If Blender can someday support mipmaps with all the other incredible GPU rendering that Cycles offers, it will probably see even more adoption. I'd love to see that. Perhaps since the entire scene has to be loaded on the GPU when GPU rendering, mipmaps (all scene bitmap textures) could be stored in system memory and the GPU can fetch the specific mipmap tile as needed. Rendering would be a little slower with mipmaps enabled but would allow for huge texture sets to be rendered. Or perhaps (if GPU can't fetch anything outside of its memory while rendering) a quick camera distance to bitmap texture test is used during scene translation and the mipmaps are created on the fly prior to rendering. The Simplify feature in Cycles proves that a conversion of textures can be fast. Though, you'd probably want to convert all images to mipmaps and store them in their respective source folders or whatever for really heavy scenes. I'm sure options in the Cycles panel could be implemented. This type of feature would most benefit bitmap texture heavy scenes. People won't have to be procedural shader wizards to get insane shader details on their model, and could render really heavy scenes on even more GPUs like the 8GB ones. I don't think it would be super complex to implement, it's just a matter of will. I'd love to see memory mappable mipmap textures come to Blender :)
@@BackusCreativeImaging I mean, that's incredibly cool and interesting and all, but also sounds like a lot of work to set up and make functional, not to mention inaccessible to people that don't have that level of skill or experience. Engines like Arnold and VRay and so on just handle it for you right out the box. As do game engines, since optimisation is life or death for them. And people do want to be able to (more) easily work with really heavy scenes, regardless of how common that is.
Snap base and light linking have been requested for years by many users (Especially bv those that migrated from 3dsMax). Nice to know it finally finally finally has the support.
Super neat update, big thank you to all the people at blender, for just bringing so much freedom and endless possibilities to so many people across the globe
Thank you for the video, Jonathan. This helps me to 'consume' release-notes in a much better way, providing a clear and engaging summary of the updates🤘.
I am most excited about being able to tell the letters apart between i and l. I dont know who thought I should be written as a small l. but it wasnt a good choice.
Thanks for the updates everyone! 4.0 is a great quality of life update. I also loved to see "Display P3" under the colour management settings! It really helps when previewing colours on my P3 devices 😁
So many awesome features. But it's kinda sad for me to see the Specular BSDF go, because I hoped I'd see it in Cycles, to render those Doom Eternal models which use specular PBR. Oh well, I've been assembling my own version of that shader for Cycles, but not sure how complete it is to release. Maybe if I learn Open Shading Language, I'll make it there instead of nodes, but there's not much detail courses for the OSL and it's so confusing for me to go there
Somehow, the increment and save option is the addition I'm the most happy about. I do remember having problems with lack of light linking a long time ago, though.
Blender a llegado a un nivel tan alto de calidad que ha pasado de alternativa a competencia dentro de la industria cinematografica. Gracias desarrolladores y colaboradores por esta hermosa herramienta.
Lots of good additions. Love the node tools, the pose library and the graph editor sliders. However, I feel like we're still missing the absolute basics for some tools - texturing needs a palette to save colours onto, as well as layers (unless that's doable with canvas selection and I misunderstood). Multires could use layers as well as a whole bunch of bugfixes, because frankly it's still not production-ready. Baking has been broken since v3.2 so I'm not sure what even is the point of LTS releases.
What do you mean baking has been broken since v3.2? Sometimes, after baking a sim, things get distorted or grow out of proportion suddenly, for a frame or two. Is that what you're referring to?
@@luigiistratescu2756 No, I mean the targeting for texture baking is bugged. If you have multiple objects, some of which were created by duplicating, the targeting for baking e.g. AO texture will target the wrong object, despite your selection. Everybody on the CGCookie Human course went through this and had to switch back to v3.2 just for the baking. And this right here is the problem - Blender doesn't offer a clean process for production of assets, which they don't mess up with each update, despite LTS. If you decide to use Blender in production, you have to try and create an asset, find all the bugs along the way, find all the workarounds and then create a custom process out of that. This will change depending on what features you want out of which versions of blender (e.g. you might want the hair tools in v3.5+, or the simulation nodes in 3.6). By the end of it, instead of using the new features in new Blender versions, you just decide which feature to cut from your process, just to be able to finish the asset.
@@1InVader1why would you want to texture bake in Blender? 99% of people who use Blender do everything in Blender. Unless you want to export your model and textures to some other software, I don't see why the baking issue is really an issue
@@luigiistratescu2756 Even if you don't do real-time stuff for another software like Unreal, you still want utility textures for your e.g. realistic skin material setup which might have over 50 nodes, because you simply need the information from e.g. an AO bake at multiple multires levels. Period. Go ahead and try to create a realistic character with texture blending for dynamic skin wrinkle mapping, see how far you get.
I first used Blender in 2002 when I was 21. Over the years my work shifted me toward other 3D programs but now working for myself I only use Blender not only because of how powerful it is but also how nice it is to use. I can't say enough how much I absolutely love Blender and appreciate the hard work you people put into making it. This update is icing on an already amazing cake. Good job Blender!
F-curve modifiers allowing multiple edits at once is gonna be great because I sometimes realise "oh no I don't want this modifier anymore" and oops now I have to disable it on everything individually
My favorite Blender 4.0 feature so far is it crashing every few minutes/key strokes. Amazing! I kid. Not about the crashing, but I am looking forward to some of the new features... if it stops crashing enough to actually play with them.
Blender 4.0.1 just came out addressing some issues especially on Windows. Please report any issues you find, that's the only way to get them fixed. Go to the Help menu and click on Report a Bug.
Blender keeps on giving! So many great updates and features. I can't wait to try out the AgX color management and light linking. I am excited to see all the smaller improvements as well to overall get a better user experience. Blender is a blessing!
