Blender 4.3 Is Here - How Is All This Free?!

Now we can create better virtual worlds,  movies, avatars for videoconferencing,   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  volumetric ray tracing! Oh baby! 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. Atmospheric,   underwater, interstellar scattering, anything  you want. 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 gold-ish metals, anodized materials and   more. However, you know what’s coming. Of course,  now we graduate to the actual physically accurate   metal node, which thinks in terms of indices of  refraction and extinction coefficients. Okay,   I hear you asking Károly, but what does that  mean? It means super accurate metallic materials. And if you are done, you can also  edit the white balance of the scene,   giving it a cooler or warmer look depending  on your artistic vision. 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. Károly Zsolnai-Fehér. 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. Well, 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,   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? Yup, 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 grease pencil,   a feature used to draw in 3D space, which  now plays better with geometry nodes. While we are talking about brush strokes, more  stylized, non-photorealistic rendering by adding   noisy or other artistic effects to an otherwise  really sterile scene. Now you can do it right from   the viewport. I wrote a brush stroke 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 a newer technique,   you will see fewer distortions, which  is particularly apparent around the nose   here. So good. 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 user interface can 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.