LogInThe new version of the software brings path-guiding support to Cycles, new sculpt and paint masking tools, new UV editing tools, and more.
The Blender Foundation has announced the release of Blender 3.4, a new and improved version of the company's open-source 3D creation software Blender. Developed in collaboration with online creators, Blender 3.4 brings a variety of enhancements and new features, including path guiding in Cycles, new sculpt and paint masking tools, Geometry Nodes viewport overlay, new UV Editing tools, improved performance, and more.
The highlight of the update is the integration of Intel's Open Path Guiding Library into Blender, bringing support for path guiding in CPU to help reduce noise in scenes where finding a path to light is difficult for regular path tracing.
According to the team, Path Guiding is supported for surfaces with diffuse BSDFs and volumes with isotropic and anisotropic scattering. Moreover, the new system learns important light directions over time, improving as more samples are taken.
The update also brings auto-masking settings in Sculpt mode, which are now accessible from the header in the 3D Viewport, as well as new methods for automatically masking by Cavity, Viewpoint, and Area. According to the team, the new auto-masking option enables the artists to paint and sculpt with Cavity in a more simple and quick manner.
Blender 3.4 comes with huge improvements to the UV workflow, bringing a new geometry-based UV Relax tool, which improves the quality of the UV mapping by making the UVs more closely follow the 3D geometry, and featuring several enhancements to the UV Editor grid, including non-uniform grids, pixel spacing, and the ability to draw a grid on top of the image.
The promised Viewport overlay feature for the software's Geometry Nodes toolset has also been added, allowing you to preview attributes without affecting the final result. The intensity of the overlay can be adjusted from the Overlay popover in the 3D Viewport header. On top of that, the update brings five new mesh nodes, three curve nodes, and six general nodes.
And here's the list of some of the software's smaller upgrades:
Animation & Rigging
- Adjust Last Operation panel in NLA, Dopesheet, and Timeline
- NLA: Draw track background based on strip's extrapolation
- NLA usability improvements
- Mute Drivers
Core
- Override Resource Directories
- Several improvements to fonts handling
- Metaball objects are now evaluated as meshes
- WebM videos frame extraction
Performance
- Improved performance in Subdivision Surface Modifier
- Major speed up when batch-creating objects
- Performance: Optimize evaluation of disabled modifiers
- Faster WebP thumbnail creation
User Interface
- Improved font thumbnails
- Improved caret when editing Text objects
- New shortcuts in the Python Console editor
- Detect existing file and add auto-increase for output filepaths
- Improved editing of text containing non-precomposed diacritical marks
- Select objects menu now sorted by distance
- Outliner improvements
You can check out the full list of improvements by clicking this link. Also, don't forget to join our Reddit page and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.