Released November 19th, 2024
Video Recap
Round-up of what’s new, in detail.
EEVEE
The real-time renderer EEVEE now supports Light Linking and Shadow Linking—features previously available only in Cycles.
SHADERS
A new Metallic BSDF node has been added to the shader editor.
TEXTURES
Make Some (Gabor) Noise
A new texture node was added that can create procedural Gabor noise for random interleaved bands with controllable direction and width.
COMPOSITOR
You can also share your own add-ons and themes!
UV EDITING
SLIM UVs
A new method makes unwrapping organic shapes a breeze.
Minimum Stretch,
Minimal Effort
A new iterative unwrapping method “Minimum Stretch” has been added which can deliver results with less distortion by iteratively refining the result.
Ideal for organic shapes. This uses the SLIM algorithm (Scalable Local Injective Mappings) internally, see the research publication.
It can be used from the Unwrap menu as well as “Live Unwrap”.
GEOMETRY NODES
SO MUCH IT
DOESN’T FIT THIS TITLE
For Each Element Zone. Gizmos. Support for Grease Pencil. Packed Bakes. Custom Warnings. Geometry Names. New Nodes.
Simon Thommes offers a delightful sneak peek into the abundance of Geo Goodies packed into this Blender update!
EFFORTLESS ITERATION WITH
FOR EACH ELEMENT
A new type of loop zone is available now! The For Each Element zone will make it easy to iterate over elements of a geometry in parallel, making repetitive processes a breeze to handle.
GET HANDS-ON
You can now add gizmos to node groups! This means you can edit the inputs to a node tree right in the 3D viewport – no need to dive into the node editor or modifier stack. It’s a game-changer for a more intuitive and hands-on experience!
Although built-in nodes aren’t using this power yet, the future looks bright. Advanced users will benefit now, and soon everyone will enjoy Blender’s growing procedural capabilities!
GEOMETRY NAMING MADE EASY
GEO NODES MEETS GREASE PENCIL
Geometry Nodes now work smoothly with Grease Pencil data, breaking it down into layers with curves and custom attributes. Updated nodes can now handle Grease Pencil data seamlessly, processing each layer separately.
NEW UTILITY NODES
Hashes various types into an integer. Useful to generate stable randomness.
Provides building block support for integer operations
WARNINGS UI
OTHER GEO GOODIES
PACKED BAKES
Bakes created with the Bake node or Simulation zone can now be packed into the .blend file.
GREASE PENCIL
GREASE LIGHTNIN’
The Grease Pencil engine was completely rewritten for better performance and to remove deeper limitations.
Pencils down up.
Group Hug
Organize your layers into Layer Groups! A new way to keep your Grease Pencil objects tidy.
They allow for easy toggling of visibility, locking, and onion skinning for all the layers in the group.
Additionally, they can be color-coded using color tags, similar to Collections in the Outliner.
Filling Great
A new Fill Gradient tool is here!
Found in Edit Mode below the Interpolation tool, it lets users change the fill gradient (set in material settings) by selecting fill strokes and click-dragging with the Gradient tool.
No Trace Left Behind
The eraser has been rewritten to allow strokes to be “cut”.
Instead of just deleting points, it now correctly solves for the intersections of the eraser’s edge and creates new points on the stroke.
The Soft eraser also does this but for multiple levels of transparency radiating outwards from the center of the eraser.
MORE GREASE PENCIL
BRUSH UP
YOUR WORKFLOW
With over a hundred default brushes and an improved interface, Blender 4.3’s new brush workflow makes management, customization, and sharing across projects easier than ever.
BRUSH = ASSET
Brushes are now assets, making them easy to save, share, and reuse through the Asset Browser.
Organize custom libraries and access your favorite brushes across projects.
AND MORE
USER INTERFACE
USER INTERFACE
Dock-on
Dock-off
Introducing: Area Docking!
Tear an area into its own (now neatly named) window, or dock it back into another area.
Lots to Say
Tooltips now provide much more information than before.
Images display their resolution and color space, movies show their duration, and fonts include previews.
To improve accessibility, tooltips now have dedicated style settings for font size, weight, and shadows.
Clarity
A new theme option allows for enhanced highlights around an area when the mouse is over it, for better accessibility.
Non-active areas can also have a custom border color.
MORE UI
- Improved Color Picker layout.
- Wider data-block search lists.
- Dialogs: Change the cursor on hover when a dialog can be dragged.
- Timeline (and similar editors) hide the scroll-bars when they are sized very short.
- Maximum UI resolution scale increased to 6x.
- Prevent tooltips from changing size on zoom.
- Viewport color picking in Rendering mode now returns the linear color value, without view transform applied.
- The Auto-Keying button is now colored red when active.
- Windows with a single editor now have descriptive titles.
- Better padding all over the place.
- File Browser thumbnail file type icon moved to corner of item bounds.
- Color sampling performance improvements.
- Hit size for resizing areas increased.
FASTER EVERYTHING
EVEN MORE SEQUENCER
GET THE ARTWORK
Blender splash artwork source files are available for you to play with, not only for Blender 4.3 but for previous versions as well.
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE
- Properties Editor: Added Action selectors for data-blocks.
- Motion Paths: New theme entry to drive the color of the lines before/after the current frame.
- Keyframing: When inserting keys, all other keys get deselected leaving only the newly created keys selected.
- Bones Eyedropper: Properties where a bone can be chosen now have an eyedropper button that allows to pick bones from the 3D Viewport or the Outliner.
- Linux: Support for hardware accelerated ray-tracing using HIP-RT.
- Volume Scatter: New phase functions.
- Oren-Nayar BSDF is now energy-presserving and accounts for multiscattering, matching matches OpenPBR.
- Principled BSDF: New Diffuse Roughness input.
- macOS: AMD and Intel GPU support from Metal backend has been removed.
- Panoramic Camera: Support for cylindrical projection mapping.
- NVIDIA: Performance and memory optimizations for B-Spline curves when using OptiX.
- NVIDIA: Minimum driver required is now version 495.89
- AMD: Support for Vega in Cycles AMD HIP backend has been removed.
- Import: Enable Draco mesh compression
- Import: Fixed importing Vertex Color on point/edges
- Export: Set UDIM material names with tile number.
- Export: Manage Quaternion & Matrix attribute types for custom attributes.
- Export: Better logging
- Export: Enable exporting joint leaf at tail of leaf bones.
- Hook UI: distinct import & export draw code
- Several bug fixes
-
Handlers: Added new
blend_import_pre
andblend_import_post
called before/after any linked-data-related operation. - Grease Pencil Python API migration guide
- Data-Blocks: New rename function
- New functions for Curves
-
Added
bpy.app.python_args
to support calling Python in an environment matching Blender’s Python environment. -
uiLayout.template_search()
now supports a custom text label - Breaking changes
Plus hundreds of bug fixes, code cleanups and refactors.
See the full list of changes.
CREDITS
List of developers that contributed to Blender 4.3
Blender is a community project.
Learn more on how you can contribute to Blender.
Splash artwork and Geometry Nodes demo files by Blender Studio.
Features recap video by Jonathan Lampel from CGCookie, Harry Blends,
Christopher 3D, and Aidy Burrows from Creative Shrimp.
Huge thanks to everyone involved ❤️
The Blender team. November, 2024