I’ve been using blender for 9 years now, and it’s always comforting to know the blender team are constantly improving the software! Idk if I have seen a more active development team for a software that I use.
my guy its amazing. i started fiddling back with 2.49.... i had a big heyday around 2.5 but i dropped off playing. i need to get back in but ive kept up with tuts and stuff. just cant get into doing it as my hobby anymore, and i miss it. im trying tho. its my fav thing to learn about
@@vixrobinshood it’s hard, as you get older it seems time becomes more precious, and you have less of it to spend on hobbies. That is until you hit retirement lol.
For those who want to know, 1:50 , you can turn off those indirect lights by going to the object's visibility tab and turning off diffuse. Gives ya more control.
@justsomegirlwithamustache3391 that's true. My suggestion is just a workaround at best. Hopefully, they will implement indirect, glossy, transmission, etc; into the light linking system. That would be great.
I don't understand why it doesn't affect indirect lighting. What's the reason? Isn't it a no-brainer for performance? It seems like such low-hanging fruit to at least toggle whether or not any light from that light source could eventually hit it.
4.0 seems really cool, but as someone who mainly works with EEVEE, 4.1 is really gonna be the thing for me. Still, great seeing Blender close in on the competition!
Unreal Engine is definitely the best for rendering but what people want right now is for Evee to get to the point where they can model while there in the render so when they export to Unreal engine they don't have to reimport to Blender to make changes.
@@zcnaipowered7407 That's one way to do it I guess. I personally would just use Cycles, V-Ray, etc to prepare the assets since in those engines I will have the most accurate representation of my bitmaps/nodes/colorspace and then once I import to UE I just make the necessary tweaks if needed as I have good reference from the path-tracer how it needs to look like/what I'm going for and eevee might not display everything correctly especially on materials like glass, but that's ofc for photorealism. Basically I try not to use Eevee/Substance preview as my reference as it will be somewhat different anyway and the goal is to get it to look better in UE or wherever the final rendering happens.
This update seems great (besides the new modifier menu), light linking is gonna be so useful because I often work with product visualization and will no longer need to install the agx color space manually every time I update
The new modifier menu is not a bad idea. It might be hard to get used to for older users, but it dose make sense. Hard to tell before getting to try it myself. Just tutorials or documentation is easier to tell someone a drop down to look into then just a sea of modifiers that are all completely useless unless you need them all. If one get used to go look in a drop down for a specific modifier (like mirror) you are going to need to pick out 1 of maybe 7 modifiers in a list. Instead like now 1 out of what 30 in a grid? With categories chances are low that adding modifiers are going to truly make a big impact on muscle memory. Or name conflicts being a problem. Array, Mirror, Subdivide. Like if the drop downs are well done I can not question Blender changing this UI aspect. Problem is if the drop downs start moving modifiers around to different drop downs after that point.... So it better be perfect on release or not implemented at all.
Thanks for the video! Just a disclaimer, the version you used to demo Light Linking is a very early "alpha", so the UI is a little different from the current version. I recommend (when showing features under development) to always update to the latest, in the case of 4.0 that'd be the Beta. About the "Add Modifier" menu, it takes a bit to get used to it but the reason we had to change it was to allow for the addition of custom modifiers built with Geometry Nodes (for example the built-in Hair modifiers). This menu also supports search now (type any key to search, or press Spacebar to see the latest searched items). You can spawn the menu using Shift+A too! So if you put all these features together the workflow is much faster than looking for a modifier in the old columns layout. Slower the first time and for beginners, but faster after using it a few times, à la Blender! :D
Yeah. I downloaded the beta specifically to record this video but Windows opened an earlier version for some reason. I switched to the beta build once I realized what had happened. I didn't see you at Bcon this year. Hope you're well.
The ability to hit Shift+A while hovering over the Modifier panel is huge for me. I've gotten very accustomed to using Shift+A and F3 to open up menus and just start typing what I need, and the Modifiers menu was always a big slowdown for me when I had to spend a few seconds remembering which column I needed to be looking in. I understand that it may take some people a bit to get used to it, but it's already faster for me! I'm loving it.
AgX makes _bright_ light look more realistic. Also, colors don't shift hue, but saturation as the light gets brighter. The problem with the old colorspace is that the colors _DID_ shift in hue; they shift into only a few fixed colors rather than washing out to white as they should. Edit: AgX is a similar solution to there being too small a colorspace that ACES also tackles. AgX does bright color better, however, than ACES. I actually would've probably preferred we got ACES instead of AgX, since the lack of official support means the ACES OCIO config kind of breaks color in the Blender UI (backend stuff... I think the ACES config will actually work as intended now with the backend properly handling an arbitrary linear color transform), but the Blender engineers chose AgX for some good reasons.
Also, another thing he misspoke, they aren't removing Filmic, so your old scenes will open just fine, and if you like Filmic you can keep using it. It is a breaking change _for your brain_ in that it really changes how you work with color... 😅
There's an OCIO config by Ginurx that implements ACES and Agx into Blender 3.6 and below without breaking compatibility with Filmic transform or the color pickers and removes all the unnecessary texture spaces that make ACES a pain to use. I'd link the github repo, but RU-vid marks all links as spam.
I don't get people comparing Blender to paid software. I don't know if these people are aware that there are very talented people who really cannot afford paid software. Blender has given these people a shot. An opportunity to put their creativity on a canvas. I absolutely love what the Blender developers has given us. And to be honest, it's software like Blender that forces premium software to do better. If these companies had a choice, they'd made you pay more for less because you don't have a choice. Now there's an alternative for lackluster software development.
But you do have a choice? Even if Blender didn't exist, it's not like there will only be one or two options forever. Sure, Blender does pressure other software to improve, but it's far from the only driving force behind innovation, QoL, etc.
@@Luizfernando-dm2rf Without open source only the cooperations will decide how much you will pay. And they will always try to maximise profit. Always. Without fail. And wether you go from one corporation to another, they are all the same. Maximise profit. It's never about the user. But with open source projects, not only is it NOT about profit, you can actually tweak the software however you want, whenever you want at absolutely no cost. But all I'm saying is, Blender is not comparable with paid software.
@@Luizfernando-dm2rf And it might not be the only driving force but it's the most important. Would you pay for Maya if Blender can do exactly what it does? Who would pay for it?
To be honest, this most wanted and long awaited feature light linking that I've heard people talking about so much in the past months does not really make me feel very excited. I'm doing a lot of renders where I'm trying to mimic real world lighting, and in real life it is simply not possible to exclude object from light sources or throwing shadows. Of course in reality I can block light sources from shining on certain objects, but that's something I can do in Blender without light linking as well. BUT: what I haven't heard anyone other than you mention before are the new snapping options and navigating the viewport while moving/rotating/scaling, and I'm really looking forward to that! So thanks for showing this in your video, that is awesome.
Screw all the stuff about lighting, the snapping update is the single most exciting thing I've heard coming to Blender in *ages.* As someone who used Blender back in the 2.4x days, switched to Maya for the better part of a decade, then switched back to Blender, the loss of Maya's extremely quick and easy snapping features was the single biggest hurdle getting back into Blender. Once you have it, you forget how you used to work without it. I resorted to an addon to get that functionality back, I'm thrilled to see the Blender devs finally got around to adding in such a basic and insanely useful feature. Protip, you can achieve something similar in edit mode pretty easily with no addons (IDK if the new update works in edit mode or just object mode): in edit more, set your snap with setting to active, select all the vertecies you want to move, then shift+double click the vertex you want to snap to before moving. What this will do is rapidly unselect then re-select the desired vertex, thereby moving the pivot to that vertex. Figuring this out was the real hack that let me move from Maya back to Blender.
as someone who uses blender mostly for material/shader design, the new BSDF updates are nice. I find myself zooming in and out way too often on more complex shaders purely because of how large the Principaled node is at the moment. The new color management options look fantastic as well. Excited to use this release :)
Really excited about the new rigging system they’ve talked about. I pray that it comes soon! I’ve moved to Maya for animation but I still model most in blender! Once that new rig system gets rolled out im ditching Maya again!!!!
The changes to Node editor creating tools is wonderful. I think the natural path for this is to have a file format for nodegroups so people can easily share the Nodes as files, and not as blender files that needs to be appended. A cleaner way to share geometry nodes. I don't know much about Nodes but I could also see material node system be unified with geometry? I mean, it would be nice to be able to feed things from the geometry nodes to the material nodes, such as instance index etc. etc. (Please let me know if this is already possible) Edit: I guess you can expose geometry node outputs into Material nodes, gotta dig in more!
That's not how blender rolls. Not sure how long you are a user. It's always blender files. I don't think they will jump into that loopholez because that will open Pandora's box on file types. Images folks wanting a file type export format for every little bitty thing! Ps I've upgraded the node evae addon, comes internally with blender. It does everything automated now and I can save automatisch to template files. Super easy and super fast No manual import and closing and opening files.
I LOVE BLENDER keeps evolving. Fantastic community. The only slep (and pain) is the mods you work with needs that update as well. Or you are forced to work on version 3.4 while 4 is out.
Awesome. Personally I've been using both Maya and C4D for many many years. Switched to Blender for about a year ago - mostly because of the huge (and great) community. BUT I must admit that I was very surprised by the missing "light linking". The fact that it is finally here is just lovely ❤❤❤
But tell me, both off those engines don't have a proper internal render engine. So what engine did you use in those apps which did have light linking? To my knowledge, Maya is basically a modeling and animation app. C4d internal isnt that good. Most people use Arnold, or one of the other superior GPU enginee
Blender noob here, I am very excited about light and shadow linking, wow. I finished a remake of the Big Lebowski Gutterballs CG sequence and man the ability to nix out certain reflections and light would be great, I didnt even know Blender did not have that feature.
The ability in Unreal to use At + Shift + Transform to duplicate an object and track the camera with it has always been something I wished for in Blender, glad to see a version of that is coming in 4.0! Thanks for sharing!
the Tool is a gamechanger! Also light linking + realtime compositing is really useful. Sidenote I wonder how hard it would be to reimplement the old modifier menu, this new extra step is a pain.
New modifier menu is actually not a pain - a pro tip is don’t go sifting through the menus. They’re only there to help new users discover the options. Here’s how it’s meant to be used - press shift+a, then type a letter e.g ‘s’ and you’ve now chosen the solidify modifier. You can do it without looking in a split second. The key to the system is that when you start typing it will start searching without having to click anything, so it’s super fast. And now every menu in Blender works the same way. Once you’re used to it, you’ll start to do it without thinking even in menus you wouldn’t normally use. It’s so good.
the thing with the new modifiers menu is that you can just hover the panel, press shift+a and start typing with you need. this is both more consistent with the rest of blender both faster (i know the big dropdown was "cool", but was it really quick?)
I never liked all the modifiers being listed on one huge menu and often had to look around for what I wanted. This new implementation is not only faster and more consistent, it also paves the way for a lot more native and custom modifiers to be added to the list, with proper categorization/organization. When the list grows big enough, people will appreciate this change so much more.
I didn't know what light linking was, but I can see just how powerful that could be, especially when working in eevee and you're using a lot of lights to fake GI
Blender advances are always to be welcomed, but it's so very annoying that it took so long to implement "light linking", a feature the now-abandoned Lightwave had over 20 years ago (Lightwave is the CG software I used professionally starting in 1998).
Bit late to the party but I am very happy that Light isolation is finally here! Was using this a lot in 3ds max and when I switched to Blender 4-5 years ago I really missed that feature.
I use aces, the current standard in VFX. I don’t know if i need agx since blender can use all OpenColorIO Profiles out there. And the best futures in 4.0 for me are to navigate while transforming. And the better search function that allows to search everywhere just by hitting the spacebar. Both huge time savers. Light linking is a cool artistic future but nothing to reach realistic lightning. Because in reality you can‘t delete lights which are there.
I probably will use blender more, but Maya’s scene management, asset management and renderer management all offer significant advantages over virtually every other application for 3D.
Having worked in professional studio product photography in the past... Light linking really does mess with my mind. Feels like cheating for people who don't understand lighting. but I do recognize how it is useful in 3d work. It is the messing with the reality of lighting situations that makes me wonder if some people will lose a level of reality because their light does things that is unrealistic if they over use this tool.
I can imagine how your brain would be broken if you joined 3d more than a decade ago and see what kind of tricks people had to do with lighting setups before we got renderers like Cycles or V-ray
Did you never take multiple shots of the product with different lighting setups? Maybe use a bounce card that's right in the frame and then comp all the bits and pieces together in Photoshop? Same thing really!
@@Lightly_Salted let's just say I am old enough that we didn't have Photoshop at the time. 😛 We did it all in-camera. Although, yes sometimes you could do two exposures on two sets on different parts of the film to make a combined image so... yeah that is kind of like lighting that only fell on one or the other item in the shot I guess.
@@happyotter9 I did play with Ray Dream designer years ago... (many years ago) which was one of hte first ray-tracing programs I think. (maybe not.. but I am going with that)
Hey! Thanks for the informative and (now) sober assessment of these new 4.0 features. I'm so tired of people who hype stuff, so I really like your very grounded and no nonsense approach. On the subject of AgX, I would like to suggest that it won't *always* make things look better; different yes, but not always better. Sometimes it might not make any difference, and, if some examples I've seen are anything to go by, then it might make some things look worse [than filmic]. Of course, it is a bit difficult to tell when seeing these things on a juiced up AMOLED display, and after having gone through youtube compression, so I'm not entirely sure yet, but I would encourage people to keep an open mind on this, and not automatically assume that agx is always going to be better. Perhaps if one has a true 10 bit colour depth monitor and 10 bit output capable gpu, then it will mostly provide an improvement, but what about everyone else? The artist may get a great looking result on his or her display, but it's always important to remember what kind of devices the intended audience will be seeing your work on. Just my 2 cents.
Well, since he didn't say AgX would always be better, you wrote a lot of words to say the simple truth which everyone doing renders should know already: it depends on the scene and what your going for. Probably it will be better on average, as Filmic was compared to Standard. But even that still has use cases, so of course AgX is not always and overall better, but I didn't hear or see that statement anyway.
Man, if Blender ever makes it so that I can do some basic CAD design like Fusion 360 I'd never use anything else lol. I'm not very good at 3D CAD and fusion makes it so easy using the sketch and extrude tools and being easily able to move objects around accurately. Maybe one day it'll be built into blender.
Thanks for the video. What I've noticed is that now SSS doesn't work. And if you convert a 3.6 version it just changes your SSS node connection to a color mix with your diffuse channel, essentially faking SSS effect. But when I plug the maps into subsurface inputs - nothing changes. Maybe i t's just me, but on 3.6 it worked like a charm
I hope there will be a way to switch the modifier menu back to the old one. I really can't find my way around it as easily and wish they would rather improve on the current one than replace it with the sub-menu solution they decided on now.
I wish blender would scale their lights to real world values. Why is it that I need 10,000 watts to get the same output as an irl 120 watt tungsten fresnel?
i was just making a satellite orbiting a planet and has having a hard time with satellite making a shadow in the planet ruining the illusion. light liking is gonna help a lot
The snaping on vertex is nice but... Can't please add a simple contact tool like "Select and place" from 3dsmax? I'm blender user since year 2000 (Droped max forever after 17 years) but a tool like "select and place" would be nice... no other soft haves one so stright fordware to use
Alreet man, I can hear your Geordie accent. I’m from Newcastle but living in Manchester working as a designer and video editor for a company. Do you do one to one tutorials? Do you know of any Blender community meet ups in the North? Cheers
4.0 is giving me a headache with the new lights because the new light system creates a "light spheres" inside the radius if you're using old methods that allowed you to have light right in front of a model, now you get a wonky light sphere and lowering the radius makes the shadow too sharp and moving the light removes the desired effect
I've used the alpha and Evee next is incredible. It looks better than Evee and renders faster too. However it's not yet finished so shadows still look a little odd.
2:43 Maya is an extremely reliable, production proven tool, with a massive user-base, massive 3rd party market, and massive pipeline investment. The simple fact is that individual artists are not making this choice, on a strategic level there are no reasons for companies to switch to blender aside from the cost /feature tradeoff. The entire blender development fund is a drop in the ocean compared to the money that goes into Maya R&D and pipeline each year. Blender and Maya are for different jobs, and thats fine. Both are fantastic tools. Getting into factional bickering is pointless. If it works for you then use it.
I am far more inclined to move to Blender now, if only I could get used to the unintuitive backwards controls 😅 It's so weird because I can go from Maya to Unreal to Zbrush each has a different control scheme but I can switch seamlessly. But for some reason I have the hardest time in Blender.
Maya to Unreal to Zbrush because they all use standard interface rules applies to vast majority of UI in software. Blender doesn't because it weird and that why it will never be as popular as Maya and other commercial software, a shame really
