All You Need to Know in Blender 3.4

-Akash Rigel Kujur

We have another great new update today with Blender 3.4. This is the most anticipated release, which promises to feature a good set of improvements and quality-of-life features for sculpting grease pencil rendering modelling and UV geometry nodes with a few clean-ups here and there. This new release is more of a complementary release to prepare artists for the next phase of features coming to Blender 3.5.

In modelling, the subdivision surface modifier and nodes performance have been improved to avoid quadratic runtime for loose edges when meshes with open edges are subdivided and for UV 3.4 also ships with some nice updates for UV editing a new geometry base relax brush has been included to help improve the quality of UV mapping by making the UVS more closely follow the 3D geometry and to support this new brush there have been updates to the UV sculpting and UV relax tools with an additional update to the UV grab tool which now helps live on wrap there's also a new randomized island and UV align rotation operator alongside these there is a show UV grid over the top of the image a new option to use pixel spacing for UV grid with some other additional improvements to UV packing selection and a couple of bulk fixes.

The sculpting section, the sculpting Branch backs Improvement to Performance and memory usage when face sets hiding and masking are in use along with this there's a significant performance Improvement for the projecting attributes when using the voxel remesher with these the major release for sculpting deals with masking, Auto masking to be specific there's a new Auto masking menu that manages all of the auto masking options with various options to choose from sculpting artists can now rest easy with these for example instead of manually creating a cavity masks the auto-masking feature provides a faster way of painting and sculpting with cavity with additional controls to invert, blur and also make a couple of changes, there's also some other Auto masking features that includes the view standard and aerial normal something else that is critical is face set and now opt-in meaning that primitive object do not have a face set attribute by default as a result when things are being joined together or model changes are made within the edit mode any new geometry will not automatically be assigned a face set this in turn will be improving performance and removing visual clutter when not in used.

With a grease pencil pioneering the way for 2D and 3D content interaction within a single DCC app blender 3.4 makes a good Mark with a nice new set of features and this includes SVG Imports which now allows importation of several files in one single operation, a new outline operator that converts stroke to Perimeter, the new outliner Option at brush level that converts to outline the last stroke drawn, a fresh start Point operator to define the start point for cyclic strokes and the fill tool have been improved with a new algorithm to close gaps and the feel tool just works in a very interesting way so you no longer need to go all complete cycle to sort of make that Perfect Circle this is definitely going to be very useful for Greece pencil artists so instead of going one after the other making sure that you have all of those tiny gaps closed you can simply use this new fill tool to get things going for you; and for modifiers there is a new outline modifier to generate perimeter stroke from camera view this is going to be very useful for 2D artists that would like to integrate 3D models within their shots - there's a new chain mode in the the time offset modifier, Additionally the python API now have a new Trace frame parameter in Trace operation.

As geometry notes continue to advance with more features development and note a good number of robust nodes and implementations are with Blender 3.4 offering a newer and faster evaluation system with the new Viewer node giving creators the ability to preview geometries and attributes in the viewport, as well as the spreadsheet as users can Now preview specific notes by clicking and linking them up to the viewer instead of the final group output node. The transfer attribute node has been removed and split into multiple more specific nodes. These include: the sample index, Sample nearest, and Sample nearest surface, and in the node editor, assets are now visible in the add menus, and the user interface of the node editor has also had a couple of face-lifts, including the addition of duplicate linked operator and user preference options for Node tree duplication. Several improvements can be seen within the mesh core volume instance and performance of the geometry node in addition to the new evaluation system. A good number of nodes would be helpful for a couple of users, including the face set boundary, Edge to vertex, Face to Corner, self-node, offset point in the curve, distribute points in volume, and so much more.

For rendering enthusiasts walking with Cycles, path guiding is now here. This feature improves the sampling quality of individual Parts, reducing the noise in complex lighting scenarios such as long indirect light bounces, indirect illuminated Shadows, or reflected light sources. At the moment, the pot guiding is only available for CPU rendering. It can be enabled in the under-sampling rendering properties panel, where you find the path heading. This current implementation supports guiding on surfaces with the diffuse BSDF components as well as inside volumes; and for GPU rendering, there is now support for Apple Metal, AMD hip, Nvidia, and Intel one API; accompanying these updates for cycles, there's an upgrade to the Open Shader language which has now been updated to version 1.12.6 there is also some sampling Improvement in the new baking option and some updates to the attribute notes and with this release Evie has just one tiny update the update has to do with headless rendering which is not supported on the Linux and this simply means the Linux users can now render on servers or systems without a display setup this feature is currently only available for Linux as egl is not used on both Mac and windows.

Taking a look at Blender score pipeline input and output, there's a good number of features that are now in Blender 3.4 meatballs are now evaluated as meshes, the obj important now has a global scaling Factor option which is pretty impressive, there's support for extracting frames from webm videos that dramatically change resolution. Font loading and thumbnails have been improved as this new release now avoids loading fonts that are not used. And for video rendering, there is support for FFmpeg AV1 codec encoding. The GLTF Import and Export also got a nice overview Improvement and for thumbnails, you can now create preview thumbnails of webp images a little quicker while using less Ram the obj export now supports PBR extension in the .mtn file and this adds some Channel parameters of principle BSDF materials which can be toggled on or off while exporting and playing with the settings Additionally the Wayland window in environment is Now supported in addition to X11, windows now allows Windows Explorer thumbnail of blender files at maximum resolution at the same time there is also some very nice improvements that deals with animation and rigging and in this case we're looking at the NLA with this release adding an action clip now fails immediately if no NLA track is selected and once you push down an action to a new NLA track this now automatically gets the name but I did try this for some reason that doesn't seem to be working but hopefully this might either be an error from me or probably there's going to be an update to this there's a driver mute within the driver editor and at the same time there is a redo panel which should exist within the NLA dope sheet and timeline editors.