The Blender Foundation has announced the release of Blender 3.4. Headline features of this release include the addition of Intel’s Open Path Guiding Library, adding support for path guiding in CPU in Cycles; auto-masking tools in Sculpt/Paint mode accessible from the 3D Viewport; several updates to the UV editor in addition to new operators to align UV rotation, randomise islands, support for non-uniform grids, and more; an overlay in the 3D Viewport when using Geometry Nodes, making it easy to debug and test parts of a node tree; new Geometry Nodes that can retrieve mesh and curve data, sample UV surfaces and more.
Other improvements include a new Grease Pencil outline modifier and better Fill tool, support for PBR extensions in .mtl files, animation editors improvements, major performance speed-ups, and much more.
See a full list of what’s new in the online release notes or see an overview video on YouTube.
yep. looks like a bunch of crap honestly. Something wrong happened?
lol. imagine being so insecure you need to disparage free software. jfc, that is funny.
Yeah, this doesn’t look exciting. There are other more juicy things being cooked, I guess they weren’t ready for this release.
But, hey, we still get some speed improvement with subd, which is always welcome.
One thing I can’t really stand, though, is that hideous splash screen. The pose, the compositing, the cloth… everything feels off.
First time in a long time I turned the splash screen off. What’s more concerning is the quality of the next animated film they’re about to release: if that’s the quality, I don’t expect anything special.
Yes, speed improvements are always welcome:). I remember the troubles with 2.8 performace being much worse than 2.79:)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXqq0ZvbOnk
I don’t know. It was rendered in EEVEE, realtime (or close to). I find it good but maybe I don’t have as good eyes to judge. 🙂
EEVEE is amazing, I use it very often, because it’s so much faster than doing a full-on render and still looks good enough when the deadline looms. However, a common misconception is that EEVEE is working in realtime on everything, which is just not true. Sure, you get realtime feedback on a lot of lighting and shader settings while working in the viewport, but for a final render, with 128 or 256 iterations, at 4k resolution, with a lot of lights and complicated shaders, you are still looking at render times of 10 seconds per frame. Yes, that is a lot faster than path tracing a (noise free) image, but that’s still 4 minutes for one second of animation, which is nowhere near realtime.
Want to try to make architectural render with it. I had a problem before with vegetation. No alpha stencil for leaves. It’s still the case? Needed to do pure transparency with 256 ray depth.
there is definitely an issue with transparency.
it seems there always remains some data i. the transparent bits. best fall back until its solved.
If you are using cycles just use the stencil in a mix shader that blends your main shader with a transparent shader or if you are using the principled bsdf, just plug it to alpha slot, but I think you are right, you’ll need to manage transparency depth.
I’ve seen Cycles used to render archviz and forests, probably an arch viz person will have a better answer.
Yes, but if the leafs have a shape that is near to the real leaf shape the transparent alpha area is so small that you never need a lot of transparency bounces, usually with the default 8 bounces it’s more than enough.
If you use a rectangle for the leaf shape then you have a bit more of overlapping area, there you may need some more bounces, but we never required more than 12 bounces.