Dr. Zsolnai walks through Blender 4.3's new features: volumetric ray tracing for realistic fog and smoke, a physically-accurate metal node, light linking to target lights to specific objects, and geometry node improvements. The software stays free.
Blender 4.3
November 22, 2024
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 4.3 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. They have an incredible set of improvements across the board. Let's have a look first at my favorite. Not just ray tracing light simulations, but oh baby. Ha ha. Volumetric ray tracing that is creating realistic simulations for fog, haze, smoke and any medium that scatters light. Now they have more phase functions to choose from. This describes how light scatters off of a given material. And you now have a lot more flexibility with that. And atmospheric, underwater, interstellar scattering, anything you want. And all of these now look more realistic. Absolutely loving this. Especially that this is also coming from research papers. Chef's Kiss. Now onto the rendering of metals. Blender's node based system is really amazing. For artistic control you can dream up almost any material you want. For instance, when rendering metals you can just choose a base color. Great for creating goldish metals and an anodized materials and more. However, you know what's coming of course. Haha. Now we graduate to the actual physically accurate metal node which thinks in terms of indices of refraction and extinction coefficients. Ok, I hear you asking Karoj, but what does that mean? It means super accurate metallic materials. And if you are done with that, you can also edit the white balance of the scene giving it a cooler or warmer look depending on your artistic visual. You can go from fluorescent lab lights to super cozy inviting interiors with just a couple clicks. So good. Now let's proceed and break the laws of physics. What? How Dear fellow scholars, this is two minute papers with Dr. Zsolnai. Well, through a new feature called light linking. Oh yes. Finally this solves an age old problem where artists are looking to make changes to the lighting of an object. For instance this boulder, which is of course impossible. Now hear me out. This is ray tracing, a rendering algorithm based on physics. So you can't just change the lighting of an object. What you can do is change the lighting of a scene. The whole scene, no exceptions. But that is too much. Unfortunately physics doesn't care about art. It just tells us what is in reality. Well, not anymore. Light linking allows us to perform the impossible. That is to ask this light source to only illuminate just this boulder and nothing else. Bravo. Or we can even try to brighten up the eye of this creature. But wait, not the skin. The skin is good as is just the eye. Can we do that? Yep. Perfection. Geometry nodes are also getting improvements. These can help you make these lines dance and over time form a really cool Blender logo. This also made use of Grey's pencil, a feature used to draw in 3D space, which now plays better with geometry nodes. Now while we are talking about brushstrokes, more stylized non photorealistic rendering is possible by adding noisy or other artistic effects to an otherwise really sterile scene. And now you can do it right from the viewport. I wrote a brushstroke synthesizer for an animated movie a few years ago and I love how tools like this are now available for everyone on the planet for free. So cool. And when you choose a texture for an object, it needs to be put on the object, which inevitably comes with some stretching. Now with the newer technique you will see fewer distortions which is particularly apparent around the nose here. So good. And this also comes from a research paper. Yup, the papers make the world go around. The user interface is one of the areas that is perhaps the most criticized in Blender, so I am delighted to see that it is also getting many small improvements. For instance, docking and undocking parts of the interface can now be done like this. You can get previews for images and oh now hold on to your papers fellow scholars, because there are improvements for the video editor. Yes, it has a video editor too. What a time to be alive. So try Blender for free and if you don't like it, just ask for your money back. And you don't even have to start with a sad little cube because they have a treasure trove of example projects where you can start out with something really cool and play with it. Just get it through the link in the video description. So what do you think? What would you fellow scholars use this for? Let me know in the comments below. Fellow scholars, if you're like me, it takes takes you a while to truly understand the paper, especially when it's not right in your area. 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