Blender 4.3 is Here

Blender 4.3, a new and improved version of the popular free jack-of-all-trades 3D software, is finally here, packed with a slew of new features and enhancements across all of the application's toolsets and workflows.

The list of the update's most notable features opens with Geometry Nodes, the capabilities of which got expanded with the addition of the For Each Element loop zone, which simplifies iteration over elements of geometry in parallel, the ability to add gizmos to node groups, meaning you can edit the inputs to a node tree right in the 3D viewport, the new Set Geometry Name node for the easy assignment of names to geometries, new utility nodes, and tons of smaller improvements.

The highlight, however, is that Geometry Nodes now work seamlessly with Grease Pencil data, breaking it down into layers with curves and custom attributes. The updated nodes can process Grease Pencil data effortlessly, handling each layer separately. While Blender 4.3 was still in Beta, Daniel Martínez Lara demonstrated the power of the new Geometry Nodes and Grease Pencil combination with an impressive real-time animation attached below:

Speaking of Grease Pencil, for the 4.3 release, the Grease Pencil engine was completely rewritten to ensure better performance and remove deeper limitations. GP now lets you organize your layers into Layer Groups to keep your objects tidy, introduces a new tool for adjusting the fill gradient, and adds the ability for the eraser to correctly resolve intersections at its edge and create new points on the stroke.

Another major highlight of Blender’s new version is the addition of light linking and shadow linking support to the Eevee rendering engine. Light linking allows lights to affect only specific objects in a scene, while shadow linking provides control over which objects block shadows for a given light. As explained by the team, all you need to do is create a Light Linking collection and drag in the objects you want to affect.

When it comes to shaders, Blender 4.3 adds a new Metallic BSDF node to the shader editor, exposing existing but hard-to-access metallic material configurations in a compact node. These configurations include the F82 Tint Conductor Fresnel approximation, used by the Principled BSDF, and the Conductor Fresnel, previously limited to custom OSL scripts.

As for Blender's texturing workflows, the release brings a new texture node that can create procedural Gabor noise for random interleaved bands with controllable direction and width. Additionally, it can be used to create omnidirectional noise like the standard Noise Texture node.

On top of that, version 4.3 introduces Minimum Stretch, a new iterative unwrapping method powered by the Scalable Local Injective Mappings (SLIM) algorithm. According to Blender, this method produces results with less distortion by iteratively refining the result, making the unwrapping of organic shapes much easier.

You can check out the full list of Blender 4.3's novelties and download the updated version of the software for free by clicking this link.

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