Blender 4.3 combines animation, sculpting, and rendering upgrades

Blender is an open source software for 3D modeling, rendering, animation, post-production, interactive creation and playback. Available for Windows, Linux, Irix, Sun Solaris, FreeBSD or macOS.

Modeling

A range of 3D object types including polygon meshes, NURBS surfaces, Bezier and B-spline curves, metaballs, vector fonts (TrueType, PostScript, OpenType)
‘Smooth proxy’ style catmull-clark subdivision surfaces
Boolean mesh functions

Animation

Armature (skeleton) deformation with forward/inverse kinematics, auto skinning and interactive 3D paint for vertex weighting
Non-linear animation mixer with automated walk cycles along paths
Constraint system
Vertex key framing for morphing, with controlling sliders
Character animation pose editor

Realtime 3D/game creation

Graphical editor for defining interactive behavior without programming
Collision detection and dynamics simulation
Supports all OpenGL lighting modes, including transparencies, Animated and reflection-mapped textures
Playback of games and interactive 3D content without compiling or preprocessing
Audio, using the fmod toolkit
Multi-layering of Scenes for overlay interfaces

Rendering

Very fast inbuilt raytracer
Integral support for the famous Yafray render engine
Oversampling, motion blur, post-production effects, fields, non-square pixels
Environment maps, halos, lens flares, fog
Various surface shaders such as Lambert, Phong, Oren-nayar, Blinn, Toon
Edge rendering for toon shading

What’s New

EEVEE

It’s (real-)time for Light Linking

The real-time renderer EEVEE now supports Light Linking and Shadow Linking-features previously available only in Cycles. With light linking, lights can be set to affect only specific objects in the scene. Shadow linking additionally gives control over which objects acts as shadow blockers for a light. This is now feature parity with Cycles.

Shaders

A new Metallic BSDF node has been added to the shader editor. Metallic BSDF

This new node exposes existing, but hard to access metallic material configurations in a small node.

F82 Tint

The F82 Tint approximation is artist friendly, taking colors as inputs. This is currently in use by the Principled BSDF.

Conductor Fresnel

This method is more complex to use, requiring IOR and Extinction coefficients per color channel as inputs. However, it can produce subtly more accurate results for real-world metals, previously achievable only through custom OSL scripts.

EEVEE does not yet support the Conductor Fresnel type, so it internally remaps the IOR and Extinction coefficients to colors and uses them with the F82 Tint approximation.

Textures

Make Some (Gabor) Noise

A new texture node was added that can create procedural Gabor noise for random interleaved bands with controllable direction and width.

Compositor

Forget F12. EEVEE passes are now available for interactive compositing.

Read the complete release notes here.

Previous Release Notes:

The next generation of the render engine EEVEE is here. Completely rewritten from scratch to allow global illumination, displacement, better SSS, viewport motion blur, and so much more.

Read the complete release notes here.

Sunsational Lighting

Lighting is a breeze with added support for screen space global illumination. EEVEE can automatically extract intense lights from the World environment and treat them as Sun lights, improving the lighting quality and casting real shadows.

Bump up your game

Real displacement is now supported by EEVEE. Just like in Cycles, setting your materials to “Displacement and Bump” will combine true displacement and bump mapping for finer details. Vertex position is modified.

SSSuperb Scattering

Subsurface Scattering now doesn’t leak between objects and has no energy loss. The subsurface translucency is now always computed, and the associated option has been removed.

Turn Up the Volume

Dithered volumetrics provide a much more stable result while navigating the scene.

Blurry Vision

Motion blur is now visible in the 3D Viewport through the camera view and supports a custom Shutter Curve, matching Cycles.