Blender 4.0 adds smarter geometry nodes, improved rigging, light linking, and new hair shading that push photorealism further. The free software now handles glossy rendering more realistically and gives artists finer control over materials and lighting.
Yes, now we can create better virtual worlds, movies, avatars for video conferencing, you name it. Why? Because the new version of blender, the popular 3D modeling program 4.0, is now here and it can now do so much more. And you will see today that it is one, completely free for all of us. And two, over the years it has become an absolute powerhouse. Dear fellow scholars, this is two minute papers with Dr. Zsolnai. Well first have a look at the quality of movies that you can create with this system. These are eye poppingly beautiful scenes, all done with a free tool available right now for all of us. What a time to be alive. So what's new? Well first it now has smarter geometry nodes. What is that? Well, these enable us to create new 3D objects where we don't really sculpt them, but instead build them with logical patterns, if you will. Now, geometry nodes have existed in Blender before, but now they are smarter and can create more interesting patterns. And now they can become incredibly detailed. Now get this. The crevices of this surface are created from random numbers. All this beautiful stuff is built up from noise. You have to try it. It's real good. Also, a better system for managing the bones of these virtual characters is now available. And thus we can create more realistic and and natural deformations for these characters. They also added a better principled BSDF model. This is a mega material model, if you will, where we can create diffuse surfaces, metals, translucent objects, light refraction and whatever you can possibly wish for. The new version is now more physically accurate and there was a velvet material that that is now so much more useful it has been renamed to Sheen. But that's not the point. The point is that you can now use this beautiful microfiber shading model and assign it to an object that is not a piece of cloth, but a digital camera instead. And model how tiny pieces of dust sit on the object. Does that make a huge difference? Oh boy, look at the difference. Loving it. And just think about it. A free tool enables you to model virtual 3D objects down to the level of specks of dust and make them come to life. This Sheen node can create a huge variety of objects. Look at how sterile this looks and now how much clothier it is. And as light gets scattered more around the edges of the object. So good, so tasty. Also, you can now add a nice layer of coat to your materials, creating an even more realistic scene. And it gets better. There is a new hair shading model which takes a bit longer. You can see from the noise here, but it is way better than the previous one. It is definitely worth waiting a bit more for this new one to finish. And now, one of my favorites, light linking. We have a scene here where the lighting is Chef's Kiss. But there is a problem. What is the problem? Unfortunately, that light creates a strong specular reflection in the eyes here. We want that gone. However, if we disable that light source, we. The entire effect of that light is gone. We don't want that. And thus Blender 4.0 now supports adjusting which lights should influence which objects. That is huge. You see, to be able to create your artistic vision, sometimes physics is in the way. Sometimes you need to make decisions that are impossible in physics. For instance, asking a light source to not have an effect on a set of objects. And now we can choose which objects should cast shadows and from which lights, or if they should be receiving light at all. This is now possible. So why is this huge? There is one more reason. You see, approximately 750 episodes ago, we talked about an incredible light transport simulation technique where we could do the impossible. And that is to bend the laws of physics. Yes, you could recreate these incredible photorealistic simulations and pretend as if physics worked differently to serve your artistic vision better. This is literally bending physics to your will. So good. These beautiful refracted caustic patterns which are not only everyone's favorite, but. But with this paper, they could be reorganized. So much so that they can even form an object on the wall that you wish. And hold on to your papers, fellow scholars, because it even worked for animation. If you are one of the OG fellow scholars who was around at this episode, I tip my papers to you, make sure to leave a comment. And today some of these concepts are making their way into products that all of us can use for free. I love to see it. Obviously this is not as advanced as this paper was, but steps are being taken in this direction. And who knows, perhaps one day this paper will end up in blender too. I'd love to see that. But we are not done yet. Not even close. Glossy surfaces are also now rendered more realistically. My favorite. Here is this part once again. The papers coming alive in the hands of millions and millions of users all around the world. So cool. Color profiles have also been improved. Standard used to be the default one. And then Filmic came, which supported a much higher dynamic range look. Bright areas became much more natural, less blown out. And now even Filmic has been replaced by a new color profile called agx which looks a bit more natural, a bit more like what a real high end camera would create. And there is so much more. It is an unbelievable release. And don't forget all this is free, free, free, free for all of us forever. You can download it and play with it. Right now it is one of the best open source projects ever. The link to it is available in the video description. And don't forget it has a bunch of demo showcase files so you don't have to start from a small cube and create everything from scratch. Look, there is so much to explore. I will also recommend that you check out BlendSwap for more free project files and and of course my friend Andrew Price, the King of Donuts, also known as Blender Guru. He has legendary tutorials on how to make the tastiest donut the world has ever seen. It is aimed at complete beginners and is now updated to Blender 4.0. As fresh as it gets. Check it out. Experiment tracking, model evaluation and production monitoring for your deep learning projects and and LLM apps. This is what weights and biases does and it is the best. Everyone is using it. Try it out now at WNB Me Papers or click the link in the description below.
