By - Blender 4.3 is on offer now
- Grease Pencil now supports pixel and real-world brush sizes, and light-shadow linking enhances Eevee’s real-time rendering control
- Metallic BSDF node adds hyper-realism with lab-grade data
Blender, the world’s leading open source 3D creation tool, has released version 4.3.
The update brings improvements that enhance everything from visual rendering to performance and user experience.
With this update, Blender continues to close the gap between itself and the best animation software, further cementing its place as an alternative for 3D artists, animators, and developers.
Grease pencil enhancements for 2D and 3D artists
Blender 4.3 adds new upgrades to the grease pencil, allowing users to draw and animate directly within the 3D environment. In this update, brushes are now independent assets, meaning users can easily transfer them between projects. Users can also define brush sizes in pixels or real-world units, which improves precision in drawings and animations.
There is also a new fill gradient tool that makes it easier to create smoother gradients. Perhaps most significantly, all grease pencil operations are now multi-threaded, leading to faster performance, especially in complex projects that demand high computing power.
Blender’s Eevee rendering engine has received significant upgrades in version 4.3. One of the key improvements is the introduction of light and shadow linking, which gives users more control over how lighting affects different parts of a scene, allowing for finer adjustments and more dynamic lighting effects.
The user interface has also seen changes to make it cleaner and more user-friendly. Icons are now fully scalable SVGs, meaning they can be resized without losing quality. The maximum resolution of the interface is now only limited by the system’s memory, giving users more flexibility in configuring their workspace.
Furthermore, this update introduces a glowing edge around the active window, making it easier to identify which window is in use while the color picking has been optimized for faster performance, further streamlining the workflow for users.
Connecting and disconnecting video strips has been simplified, and snapping has been improved. Multipass compositing, a feature also introduced in Eevee, allows users to apply multiple layers of effects. Colour correction tools have been expanded, providing additional options for fine-tuning the visual tone of scenes.
For those working with metallic objects, Blender 4.3 introduces the “Physical Conductor” mode within the Metallic BSDF node. This feature uses lab-grade data to more accurately simulate how light interacts with real metals, resulting in more realistic metal surfaces. The addition of the “Orn” slider, which adjusts surface roughness, further enhances the realism of materials like wood and brick.
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