Blender 4.1 introduces numerous enhancements across its core areas, emphasizing efficiency, artistic flexibility, and performance. Here’s an overview of the major updates:
Core Updates
- Python Upgrade: Blender now uses Python 3.11, offering improved performance and compatibility with modern libraries.
- OpenImageDenoise on GPU: Accelerates rendering by supporting GPU-based denoising for Intel and AMD GPUs (NVIDIA and Apple GPU support is pending development).
Animation & Rigging
- Bone Collections: Reorganization of bone collections through a hierarchical structure in the outliner, simplifying rigging tasks.
- Motion Paths: Enhanced to display relative to the active camera, streamlining screen-space animation processes.
Geometry Nodes
- Introduction of new nodes like:
- Bake Geometry: Speeds up complex geometry workflows.
- Split to Instances: Optimizes the handling of large-scale data.
- Menu Switch: Offers conditional adjustments based on input.
- Geometry Node tools are now more accessible directly within Object Mode.
Shading & Rendering
- Unified Noise Node: Consolidates features of the Musgrave texture node into the Noise texture node for simpler workflows.
- Cycles Rendering Improvements:
- Performance optimizations for Linux users (5% boost).
- Adjustable bump map smoothing for more artistic control.
- Enhanced Viewport Compositor for real-time previews.
Video Sequencer
- Smoother playback and rendering performance improvements, with updates to effects handling and scopes for video editing.
In addition to these major changes, Blender 4.0.2 also includes hundreds of bug fixes and other improvements. You can download Blender 4.0.2 from the Blender website.
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