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Introducing updates to the software's animation toolset, Compositor, the Cycles engine, and much more.
Following months of development and a one-week delay, the Stable version of Blender 4.1, the biggest update to the software since the launch of Blender 4.0 back in November 2023, has finally been released, introducing a slew of new features and improvements.
With the new release come the long-awaited updates to the software's animation and rigging pipeline, with the highlight being the introduction of a new hierarchical structure for Bone Collections. These collections are now displayed in a tree format instead of a flat list, allowing for easy rearrangement and nesting through drag-and-drop actions.
Visibility is determined by the bone collection itself and its ancestors: a bone collection is visible only when its parent, grandparent, etc., are visible. Moreover, the Bone Properties' Relations panel now indicates the Bone Collections to which a Bone is assigned.
Blender's Compositor has also been enhanced, now incorporating support for Vector Blur, Defocus, Cryptomatte, and Keying Screen nodes. Furthermore, a new Split node has been introduced, replacing the Split Viewer node with identical functionality, except that it now provides its output as a node output.
Moreover, the Keying Screen node was changed to use a Gaussian Radial Basis Function Interpolation, which produces smoother temporally stable keying screens, while the Inpaint node was changed to use Euclidean distance instead of Manhattan distance, resulting in more uniform filled regions. Scaling and Rotation in the Viewport Compositor have been upgraded as well and are now immediately realized, which means scaling up an image will now actually produce more pixels.
Blender 4.1 also comes with improvements to its Cycles render engine, which now features GPU-accelerated OpenImageDenoise, making full-quality denoising available at interactive rates in the 3D viewport. It is enabled automatically when using GPU rendering in the 3D viewport. It can be disabled in the denoising settings panel, to reduce GPU memory usage at the cost of slower denoising.
Other updates include:
Geometry Nodes
- The Bake node allows the saving and loading of intermediate geometries.
- Baking no longer loses materials.
- The Musgrave Texture node was replaced by an extended Noise Texture node.
- The Menu Switch node allows creating custom "enum" menus to allow switching between options in the group interface.
- The Split to Instances node allows separating a geometry into multiple pieces based on a group ID.
- Node panels are now displayed in the modifier interface, making it much simpler to organize.
- The panels in the Geometry Nodes modifier have been reorganized.
- The mesh "Auto Smooth" option has been replaced by a modifier node group asset.
Modeling
- A render "simplify" setting adds the ability to turn off the calculation of face corner and custom normals in the viewport.
- Shape Keys can now be locked to protect them from accidental edits via sculpting or edit mode transformation tools and operators.
- Face corner normals are cached and are recalculated in fewer cases.
- The creation of mesh topology maps used in Geometry Nodes and normals calculation is parallelized and elsewhere and can be over 5 times faster,
- The new Curves type supports new operators.
Rendering & Lighting
- Point and Spot lights have a new Soft Falloff option, that makes the lights render the same as in Blender 3.6 and earlier. This behavior is not physically based but helps avoid sharp boundaries when the light intersects with other geometry.
- The Musgrave Texture node was replaced by the Noise Texture node.
- Support rendering particle system hair, in addition to the existing geometry node hair curves.
- Improved support for shader conversion to MaterialX, including math node.
Sculpting
- Voxel remesh attribute preservation has been changed to propagate all attributes and to improve performance.
- Add brush settings for view and normal automasking values.
- Add brush setting for input samples.
- Add scene setting for automasking propagation step value.
And much more!
You can read the full list of Blender 4.1's new features here and download the new version of the software over here.
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