This article is also available in:
French
Blender 4.0 is available for download! As usual, the development team managed to include lots of new features, such as Cycles Light Linking, new Principled BSDF shader, better Color Management, Geometry Nodes repeat zone:
- New Principled BSDF, “more energy conserving, more efficient, and more flexible.”
- Color management: AgX, a new view transform, provides better color handlingthan Filmic when it comes to over-exposed or saturated areas.
- The Voronoi Texture noise now supports fractal noise, which gives you “unliminted procedural detail” in a texture.
- At last! Light Linking is now available for Cycles users. In other words, “lights (and other emissive objects) can be set to affect only specific elements in the scene”. Shadow Linking is also available: you can choose which objects can block shadows for a specific light source.
Path Guiding: this feature now works on glossy surfaces, and not just on diffuse surfaces. The dev team explains that “can significantly reduce noise on glossy surfaces, and find otherwise missing glossy light paths.” - Node Tools: Geometry Nodes can now be run as regular operators using Node Tools. The idea is to let users expand Blender, customize tools, without having to use Python code.
- Improvements to snapping’s UI & features.
- Search on menus has been improved.
- New UI typeface, optimized for computer screens.
- Shortcuts have been added, others have been adjusted to improve usability, consistency.
- Rigging: the concept of collections is now also available for Armature Bones.
- USD: various improvements including Storm, a realtime renderer part of USD.
- Bldnder 4.0 is aligned with the VFX Reference Platform 2023. This will make it easier to integrate in studios pipelines.
For more information, you can check out the official video presentation below, or head out to the official website.
Here is the official Blender 4.0 showreel:
Last, but not least, no LTS version (support long terme) is available at this stage.
