Blender 4.0: What's New and Why You Should Be Excited!
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- čas přidán 23. 07. 2024
- Blender 4.0 is almost here. I made a little run-down of some of the best features.
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Chapters:
00:00 Light linking
02:41 AGX
05:46 Transforms
07:48 Node tools
10:09 BSDF upgrade and UI changes
Sorry about this channel being so quiet lately. I've been working on a ton of stuff. My first course, two new channels, and the Blender conference.
Wish we got to chill at BCON again! Maybe next year!!!
No no ! It’s important your well being and peace of mind. Thank you sincerely for all work !
I'll be there!
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.
That's the power of open source
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.
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
This^
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.
Huge new feature for light linking! I'm super excited about this....thanks for sharing
Man what a good time to be a Blender user, I really do love this software and it's community. Thanks for the video 🔥
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!
I'm hyped for EEVEE next.
@@DECODEDVFX Me too. The SSGI community build is already great, but EEVEE next is gonna be on a whole new level!
You could just use UE5 for rendering. Even EEVEE Next is going to be inferior to UE5.
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.
The new snap system is AMAZING! Lifesaver! Thanks for the video! Subscribed!
Thanks for this mate it’s an excellent summary of new things
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 CZcams marks all links as spam.
@@GANONdork123 Write the title of the repro so we can search on Google.
@@TrueXiarno Ginurx/Blender-ACES-Config
Man, didn't catch you for a talk. We should do this next year.
Cool video!
Just keeps getting better and better 😌 👏👏
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.
the down side to that is that all indirect lights is disabled you dont get to choose which light to disable
@@justsomegirlwithamustache3391 exactly.. rookie mistake
How does his live preview look so good... mine looks like shit
@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.
It looks great. Thanks for the update
Really a nice update!
11:43 Right after you click add modifier you can just start typing, once I found that out it was so much nicer than before actually
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 :)
So, the Blender team is about to drop a big one? OoooohKAY!
I had a great time meeting you at the Blender Conference! I'm really excited to get my team using Blender 4.0
great meeting you too buddy.
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.
9:00 used to be called a "macro" in some software. Basically, it's a subroutine that you wrote and you can run it and feed into it the object you want and it'll do the code on that object. That's handy to be able to save some kind of procedure for using on different objects or the same one multiple times.
Some really nice stuff. Just FYI, you can pick which vertex snaps even today easily. Just set the vertex to Active, then press 1 to go to vertex mode and deselect/select the vert you want. That will mark that vert as white(active) and it will be the snapping vertex. Still it's nice that now there is a shortcut to it.
Node Tools seems to be amazing
The transform update will make CAD users very happy. And the tool feature is right down my alley - using nodes in Rhinoceros CAD + Grasshopper since ever.
Such an amazing video that makes learning Blender easy
This is so much information to take in, but this is exciting.
You are on of the Blender's beasts!
Amazing! Can't wait to update it 😁(I just hope my settings are preserved)
Your settings are safe! When you open Blender 4.0 for the first time, there is a button in the splash screen that says "Load Blender 3.6 settings" (or whatever previous version you have).
this will make art looking movies soo much better and easier to make
Light linking going to be super huge. Been looking forward to that one
I'm soooo excited for node tool!
very interesting thanks!
That new tool functionally is looking really fancy, being able to create little geo nodes setups and having that toolbar is nice
I actually loved the stark contrasted version with the neon Orange sign. It an album cover/underground comic book cover vibe.
very clearly explanations. Thanks a lot.
The transform changes are AWESOME
Light linking..about time. Most 3d applications have had this for many years
Yes, but they also have multi-million dollar budgets and hundreds of developers.
Well done, great video! you are doiing a great jobm really appreciate you getting back to doing videos that you do so well! agree with the appreciation of what the Blender Dev's are doing! yes let's see how many hardcore Blender refusers pivot again to what else they will say to continue to Deny Blenders worth.
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 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?
I switched from Modo, which had light linking like 10 years ago. It is still a welcome upgrade of course.
a week from now you say?? AWESOME!!! Looking forward to eevee next but waited untill a propper stable release before exploring it...
Omnom NOM!
The making tools thing is huge. Can't wait to make some useful ones for myself
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!
I've been using Stephen L's CAD Transform for blender. Nice to see Blender having some of that functionality built in finally
great new features. thank you for doing this 🙌
PS: You will be a great character study. can we have your turnaround blueprints 😅
Btw, in edit mode with ALT you can not only move screen view, but also can ROTATE view (middle mouse button while pressing ALT)
do you have to hold alt?
@@bidoof22 Yes. Hold ALT, while you are dragging something and HOLD middle mouse button (+ move mouse) to rotate view.
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.
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.
The biggest area that blender is still lagging behind in is physics. I watched the new Houndin launch and was really impressed.
Tell me about it. Blender's simulation tools are my biggest pet peeve.
@@DECODEDVFX Indeed. Especially for us interested in vfx that involves simulation and destruction
Sadly, it's because they don't have anyone on their team yet who specializes in it.
I dont really mind that honestly. I would rather have blender take away my need for maya since it pairs really well with houdini
I’m going to guess that Houdini is more expensive than blender? 🤷♂️
Great video!
Thanks!
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.
@@ObscureHedgehogyup, totally agree
Another SUPERIOR SOFTWARE... one of my favorites at all.
Ive got an interior office scene, takes 16 seconds to render in 3.5, 1 min 35 in 4.0. Same settings. Now THATS progress !
I think this guy knows a little about Blender. That's why I'm on this channel. Thanks for your reviews and tutorials!
it's all an act. I'm making this up as I go!
Huh. Blender really is like Reaper is for Audio. This is amazing
looks cool :)
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.
Allready there - Old Modifier Menu addon :)
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.
I think you're referring to adding nodes (e.g. in shader and geonodes), that method does not display modifier options for me in 3d viewport
I am from the future and use Blender 6.1. It is highly recommended. Look forward to it. :-p
Personally, I don't like the new 6.1 UI.
That snapping thing is amazing, I've gotten plenty frustrated by it trying to do very accurate mechanical sorts of models.
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.
I just started Blending a month ago while following a 560pg textbook so this is nice!
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.
AGX and Light linking !!!!
Light linking is way overdue, but thanks blender team! 🎉
I used to use the 3D cursor as a solution for vertex-based snapping, but it was always kind of clunky. Thankg goodness for this!
Light linking is a great feature, but man, it's also a great feature for beginners to f... up their scenes. I started on 3dsmax (which had light linking for ever) two decades ago and back then i worked with a beginner that abused that option and came complaining to me that he didn't get any shadows.
My 20+ years of 3d experiences taught me to think of light linking like that: It's the last resort when you can't help yourself any other way to archive a certain effect.
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
Been messing around with Blender since 2001(ish?) - back when the download could fit on a single 3.5" floppy disk... Sure has come a long way!
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.
With the new modifier tab you can now search for modifiers and even your own geonodes modifiers which is much better than the old system
When Blender 4 comes out in the stable version, that will be very cool :)
The snapping feature on the transforms appears to be most useful.
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.
The node tools is interesting, this reminds me of macros in Photoshop !
Any updates to caustics / amount of bounces being increased? Finding the cap at 4 bounces being super limiting
I haven't heard anything new about caustics for a long time.
10/10
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
why does your preview look so much better than mine.. the lighting just looks so natural and realistic
If you don’t need actual colour in a colour ramp, you can use the Float Curve node instead; it’s much better for adjusting the contrast of a texture.
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).
Nice update I already made a game in my mind 😂
I'm really hoping for a Render Current View option. It's a feature a lot of other software I've used has. All I'm often doing is playing around and want to know how something looks but Blender makes me fool around with a camera setup in order to do it. Anywhere else I can just hit render and it'll render the current screen as I see it.
Can’t you just change your view mode to rendered?
@@tsuso I don't use blender that often but I'm sure there was also an option to bring camera to view
If I'm understanding your comment correctly, "Stored Views" should be what you're looking for
as in, an addon, not exactly an inbuilt option within blender
Lock the view to the camera so the camera is always the same as the viewport view (in the 3D viewport N panel... View->View Lock->tick the 'Camera to View' option). Then when you render you'll get the viewport view. If you don't want to mess with the main camera position, add a camera just for this and make it active.
Blender and Houdini for life!!!!
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.
According to the comments here there's already an addon ("Old Modifier Menu") that should do just that.
We need a better text handler. I would love to see something equivalent to Cinema's ability to easily preview fonts within the editor window.
Since more than 20 years Newtek Lightwave allows to turn off lights for some objects. It's incredible tat until now it's available in blender.
Correct me if I'm wrong but were you doing some of that stuff in Eevee (or EeveeNEXT) as opposed to Cycles?? (Like when the cube was reflecting the blue light on the floor object at 1:50 ). 'Cause if so, that's also a gamechanger in my opinion.
Look it over again and it looks like Cycles after seeing the denoising
it's all cycles.
Can you add Node Tools to the asset library? That would be a big deal.
Not sure I really care about linked lighting - but the snap improvements are (for me) a life-saver.
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.
LIGHT LINKING! When is the official 4.0 released?
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.
I've been on Maya since beta, and it's these reasons I just can't switch
Great features. The snapping especially, finally! But really now, when are they ever gonna fix normal maps?
What do you think needs to be fixed about normal maps?
for them to actually work in eevee T_T@@DECODEDVFX
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.
So are loops going to be officially added to the GN system?
I expected more improvements of iridescence, light dispersions and caustics controls as these are trendy things nowadays.
Yeah I think for me the biggest drop is the new Grease pencil overhaul
Im thinking about the render things since I don’t know and not willing to try lumen in UE😢