Dr. Zsolnai walks through Blender 4.2's major upgrades. Eevee now has ray tracing, volumetrics, soft shadows, and subsurface scattering. Cycles got faster light convergence and blue-noise sampling. All free.
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 4.2 is here and I was stunned by its new capabilities. And to think that all this is completely free for all of us, it really gives me goosebumps. I am so happy. Dear fellow scholars, this is two minute papers with Dr. Zsolnai, a place of peace and joy. And the star of the show for me was eevee, the real time render engine. Now hold on to your papers, fellow scholars, because this is simply unbelievable. It can now do five things that. How do I say. Real time techniques are not supposed to do things that they were historically bad at. So what are those five? First, it does a limited version of ray tracing for more detailed scenes. But it is super fast and its quality is often very close to the real deal. But the real deal is a full light simulation that takes from minutes to hours per image. But not here. Wow. Second, it can render scenes with a participating medium like fog, haze and smoke. This gives you volumetric light scattering, which is an absolutely stunning phenomenon that mostly only full light simulation programs could do well. And it took hours if not days to compute. Third, it. It can also give you beautiful soft shadows. Just look at that. It really takes me back to the times of my PhD studies when I computed these things by hand. Loved every minute of it. Fourth, my favorite subsurface scattering. Goodness. To the best of my knowledge, it is based on the separable subsurface scattering technique. This is a paper that is able to simulate you these beautiful translucent objects in a matter of milliseconds. Once again, something that used to take hours. And now real time available for all of you fellow scholars for free. The link to the paper is available in the video description. Fifth, better depth of field and motion blur effects. We all love them and just getting any one of these would have been amazing. But. But all five. My goodness. Loving it. And if you think that's it. Nope, not even close. We are just barely getting started. If you choose to use cycles instead, this is their fully fleshed ray tracing render. Now you can do this mad science with ray portals that create scenes that feel like they kind of bend space and time. It can even create these beautiful trails for this sword. Super cool. Also, more material models. The thin film interference on the surface of soap bubbles can now be simulated more accurately and it truly is a sight to behold. And the rendering of individual hair strands is also now more accurate, especially if you zoom in closely. Scenes with spot and area lights now converge quicker, which means that the noise will clear up faster than before. And talking about noise, it also uses blue noise sampling. Super happy about that. You see there is extensive research work going on on this. So what does it do? It creates less jarring noise patterns during the early phase of the rendering. All this cleans up over time, but when we start out it makes a huge difference. Super happy to see research work like this also make their way into the hands of millions of you fellow scholars all around the world. So cool. And it also has better denoising capabilities to give you a usable image earlier without waiting a lot. Image compositing has also improved. These are the things that you do to an image after it is done rendering like fiddling with exposure or adding a bloom effect to it. It also knows more formats for importing and exporting scenes, geometry can create better fracturing simulations and so much more. And don't forget Blender also has a built in video editor with a more streamlined interface and better text rendering. This thing just keeps getting better and better and it never stops. It is one of the best open source projects ever. Just grab it for free in the video description and I put a link to the demo files in there as well. So you don't just have to start from zero. So are you fellow scholars excited? What would you use this for? Let me know in the comments below. We need new tools for the era of LLMs and weights and biases. Now has weave a lightweight toolkit to confidently iterate on LLM applications, use traces to debug how data flows through each step of your app and use evaluations to measure your progress. It is the best. Try it out now at WNB Me papersllm or click the link in the description below.
