The Blender Foundation recently announced the release of the new Blender 3.0 version, which introduces a large number of changes and improvements, including new interface elements, improvements to the rendering engine, and more.
For those unfamiliar with Blender, it is a free 3D modeling package suitable for a variety of tasks related to 3D modeling, 3D graphics, game development, simulation, rendering, compositing, motion tracking, sculpting, animation creation, and video editing.
Main news in Blender 3.0
In this new version, the user interface has been updated with a new skin. The interface elements are now more contrasting, and the menus and panels have rounded corners. The appearance of different widgets has been unified, and the thumbnail preview and scaling implementation has been improved.
Also noteworthy is the addition of a new editor: the Asset Browser, which simplifies working with various objects, materials, and additional environment blocks. It provides the ability to define asset libraries, group assets into catalogs, and attach metadata such as descriptions and tags for easier searching. You can also attach arbitrary thumbnails to assets.
The Cycles rendering engine has been redesigned with significant improvements in GPU rendering performance. It is claimed that thanks to new code running on the GPU side and a change in the scheduler, compared to the previous version, the rendering speed of typical scenes has increased from 2 to 8 times.
Additionally, support has been added for hardware computation acceleration using NVIDIA CUDA and OptiX technologies. New AMD HIP backend added for AMD GPUs (Heterogeneous Interface for Portability), offering a C ++ runtime and C ++ dialect to create portable single-code applications for AMD GPUs and NVIDIA GPUs (AMD HIP is currently only available for Windows and cards discrete RDNA / RDNA2, and for Linux and older AMD graphics cards will appear in Blender 3.1 release).
The quality and responsiveness of the interactive viewport rendering were also significantly improved, even with blending mode enabled. This change is especially helpful when adjusting lighting. Separate presets for the viewport and sampling were added. Responsive sampling was improved. The ability to set a time limit for scene processing or to process until a specific number of samples is reached was added.
The Intel OpenImageDenoise library has been updated to version 1.4 , making it possible to increase the level of detail after noise removal in the viewport and during final rendering. A new pre-filter setting has been added to the pass filter to control noise reduction using auxiliary and normal albedo.
The Shadow Terminator mode was added to eliminate artifacts at the edges of light and shadow, which are typical of models with a large polygon mesh pitch. Additionally, a new implementation of the shadow hunter is proposed, supporting bounced light and backlighting, as well as settings to control the coverage of real and synthetic objects. The quality of colored shadows and accurate reflections when blending 3D with real-world frames was improved.
The Eevee rendering engine performs 2-3 times faster when editing very large meshes. It implements the "Wavelength" and "Attribute" nodes for defining custom mesh attributes. Full support is provided for attributes generated by geometry nodes.
The interface for managing node-based geometric objects (Geometry Nodes) has been expanded, with a redesigned method for determining node groups and a proposed new attribute system. Approximately 100 new nodes have been added for interacting with curves, text data, and object instances.
Video Sequencer adds support for working with images and video tracks, previewing thumbnails, and converting tracks directly in the preview area, similar to how it's implemented in the 3D viewport. Additionally, the video editor provides the ability to assign arbitrary colors to tracks and adds an overwrite mode, allowing you to place one track on top of another.
It is also worth noting that scene inspection capabilities have been expanded using virtual reality headsets , including the ability to visualize controls and navigation through teleportation across the scene or flight over it. Support has been added for the Varjo VR-3 and XR-3 3D headsets.
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