VULKAN is here! 🖖 Blender Today LIVE #257

Summary

In episode 257 of Blender Today, the focus is on a major update with Vulkan no longer being an experimental feature, signaling a new era for Blender users. The episode also covers significant advances across various modules like sculpting, compositing, and modeling over the past month. The update brings improved performance, new nodes, and enhanced functionalities that cater to both aesthetic and technical needs in Blender, enhancing the overall user experience and tool efficiency.

Highlights

• Vulkan's stable release marks a significant leap for Blender's performance 🚀
• Blender's 4.4.2 patch not recommended due to compositor crashes 🚫
• Introduction of bundle and closure nodes expands functionality in geometry nodes 🔗
• Grease Pencil advancements provide new ways to handle animations and renders 🎬
• Blender's UI sees significant updates for ease of use and functionality 🛠️

Key Takeaways

• Vulkan is officially supported, making Blender faster and more efficient 🎉
• New animation features improve usability like the mirrored pose mode selection 🎨
• Grease Pencil gets its own render pass, making compositing more flexible ✏️
• New nodes and optimizations in geometry nodes boost creative possibilities 🧙‍♂️
• Highlights from Blender's conference and community updates keep users engaged 🌍

Overview

Welcome to this lively episode of Blender Today, where Vulkan's graduation from experimental status is our headline story. This episode reviews an exciting month where Blender underwent significant enhancements across its modules. Following a slight hiatus, get ready to explore the updates that include many awaited features and performance improvements targeting artists and developers alike.

Users are advised to skip Blender 4.4.2 due to bugs but can look forward to Blender 4.4.3 which is ripe with stable enhancements. The Vulcan update promises a notable improvement in GPU performance, adding robustness and flexibility to Blender's creative workflows.

Further, the episode dives into improvements in the graph editor, enhancements for Grease Pencil rendering, and the introduction of new geometry nodes, ensuring creators have a wealth of new tools to explore. Along with significant UI improvements and community news, this episode is a rich resource for anyone looking to stay updated with Blender's continuous evolution.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction The chapter introduces the episode of Blender today, marked as episode 257, and begins with greetings to the community. It notes that an episode was skipped, indicating a continuity in the series. The background includes music as part of the introduction.
• 00:30 - 01:00: Host Health Update and Episode Introduction The host begins by discussing their health issues, explaining they were not in good shape to stream previously but are now well enough to provide updates. The host introduces the episode by mentioning significant updates in Blender over the past four weeks. They hint at various exciting developments, including the noteworthy transition of Vulcan from an experimental stage. Additional updates pertain to improvements in sculpting and compositing tools.
• 01:00 - 01:30: Blender 4.4 and Updates Overview The chapter discusses the enhancements and updates in Blender version 4.4. Improvements include more powerful nodes in the compositor and enhancements to popular nodes. The modeling tools, particularly geometry nodes, have new experimental settings. Almost every module in Blender has received updates since the previous version. The chapter highlights that today marks the announcement of Blender version 4.4.
• 01:30 - 02:00: Blender Social Updates and Community Posts The chapter 'Blender Social Updates and Community Posts' discusses a forthcoming corrective release, although the exact date is unknown. It might happen later this week or next. The speaker encourages following their social media channels for updates on the release. Additionally, the speaker mentions that Blender frequently posts news on their YouTube channel, including in the community posts section, suggesting that it is a good source for the latest news and updates.
• 02:00 - 03:00: Blender Conference and Susan Awards Festival The chapter discusses the upcoming Blender Conference scheduled to take place in Amsterdam in September 2025. It states that tickets for the conference are halfway sold out, indicating high interest and anticipation. The conference is described as the biggest and coolest event related to Blender, highlighting its significance in the community.
• 03:00 - 04:00: Updates on Blender Today and Animation Features This chapter discusses the current status of ticket sales for an event, noting that halfway through the sales 300 out of 700 tickets have been sold. There is a message encouraging people to secure their spots if they plan to attend. It also mentions the opportunity for individuals who wish to present at the conference, directing them to use a 'submit talk' button available on the homepage for proposal submissions.
• 04:00 - 05:00: Assets and Library Updates The chapter titled 'Assets and Library Updates' discusses various participation opportunities at a conference where attendees can present. The formats available for presentation include theater talks, studio talks for those using Blender in a studio environment, classroom settings for educators, workshops, and more technical presentations for developers. The chapter notes that unexpected audiences might understand the technical presentations. Additionally, it mentions a change in the user interface where an option in the header has been moved for the first time, likely due to updates related to 'Susan', though it does not elaborate further on what 'Susan' refers to.
• 05:00 - 06:00: Build System and Manifold Library The chapter discusses the Build System and Manifold Library, focusing on the opportunities and entry criteria for the Susan Awards festival. It highlights that while attending the talks requires physical presence at the conference, entries for the festival can be submitted from anywhere globally. Additionally, it mentions that participants can receive a discount on their conference tickets.
• 06:00 - 08:00: Compositor and New Features The chapter discusses the timeline and deadlines related to some awards, specifically mentioning the Susan Awards. The deadline for submissions is June 16th, but the actual awards are given out two weeks later to allow time for voting for the nominees.
• 08:00 - 09:00: Core Updates and Experimental Options The chapter introduces updates and new experimental options in Blender between April 1st and April 29. The speaker mentions a long list of topics to discuss, suggesting significant developments over the past four weeks. The content appears to cover the latest trends and changes in Blender, although specific details of the updates are not provided in this transcript.
• 09:00 - 10:00: Curves and Performance Improvements The chapter "Curves and Performance Improvements" discusses a selective overview of recent updates, covering only 10% of over 800 commits. The detailed list of covered commits is available on Blender Today, accessible via Blender's community section or the provided description link.
• 10:00 - 12:00: Cycles Updates and Camera Shaders The chapter "Cycles Updates and Camera Shaders" begins with a reflection on a previous discussion about 'Blender Heads,' presumably an event or release that occurred at the end of March. The speaker recalls having already mentioned it and decides to focus on the latest updates in Blender, particularly starting with animation updates. They choose to present these updates alphabetically, hinting at a substantial list of changes to cover.
• 12:00 - 14:00: Eevee and Shadow Improvements The chapter discusses improvements in animation pose mode, specifically focusing on the mirror function. It explains a feature where options that cannot be mirrored remain selected, enabling easier manipulation of models. For instance, users can select the spine and the left arm, and then select the opposite side, with the spine remaining unchanged due to its non-mirrored nature.
• 14:00 - 21:00: Geometry Nodes and Grease Pencil Features The chapter discusses changes in usability regarding snapping options in Blender's graph editor. The changes, which happened relatively recently in Blender's timeline, untied the snapping options from being specific to each editor or area. This means that if a user enables snapping in the graph editor, it applies universally rather than being confined to just that area. The description emphasizes the improvement in user experience with this update.
• 21:00 - 23:00: Grease Pencil and Rendering Options The chapter discusses the global snapping feature in the graph editor of a software, explaining that changes made there will affect the entire scene. However, the driver editor did not share this feature and now has its own snapping flag. This distinction is important because the driver editor lacks a timeline of keyframes, working instead with driver values, hence necessitating its independent snapping function.
• 23:00 - 24:00: Internationalization and FBX Importer The chapter discusses the generation of multiple F-curves and their application in USD import. It highlights a significant performance improvement, with the process now taking 9 seconds instead of 2. This reflects broader performance enhancements being made.
• 24:00 - 25:00: Image Buffer and ProRes Codec Support The chapter discusses improvements in animation and graph editor tools, specifically focusing on the unification of the key frame jump operator. Previously, this jump operator had separate behaviors in the graph editor and animation tools, which caused issues in its functionality. By unifying it, users can now assign a consistent shortcut to jump between key frames, resolving prior operational discrepancies between the two tools. Additionally, the chapter might touch upon other technical aspects related to image buffers and ProRes codec support, but these are not detailed in the transcript provided.
• 25:00 - 27:00: Mesh Optimizations and Manifold Library This chapter discusses various optimizations and improvements made to mesh and manifold libraries. It includes fixes related to usability and functionality, such as assigning a single shortcut to all key frame operators in the dope sheet and marking unsaved changes when a texture changes on a brush, ensuring better asset management and user experience.
• 27:00 - 29:00: Modeling and Boolean Improvements The chapter discusses improvements in modeling and Boolean operations in a software update. A notable bug fix prevents settings from being lost due to unsaved changes not being tagged. Additionally, feedback for dragging collections has been disabled in certain instances, specifically when linking collections without collection instancing, as it previously made no practical sense. Overall, these adjustments aim to optimize user experience and functionality.
• 29:00 - 31:00: ProRes Codec and Video Features This chapter discusses issues related to the ProRes Codec and video features in Blender. It mentions specific problems like unnecessary snapping and excessive feedback. Additionally, there's a focus on audio issues, such as problems with the audio library in Blender where audio may freeze or hang, and efforts to fix these issues.
• 31:00 - 36:00: Node Changes and User Interface Enhancements The chapter titled 'Node Changes and User Interface Enhancements' begins by addressing an issue with audio playback in Blender that has been fixed, encouraging users to try it again if they experienced problems. The discussion transitions to an overview of B for build, teasing a future topic on the manifold library. The chapter seems to focus on improvements and upcoming features related to Blender's node changes and user interface enhancements.
• 36:00 - 37:00: Point Clouds and Vertex Painting The chapter discusses a new library in Blender, which is focused on robustness and mainly deals with manifolds. Manifolds are meshes that are enclosed and watertight. This library, which is described as super fast, has been used in various areas that will be explored later in the course. The emphasis is on understanding the significance of manifolds in the context of Blender.
• 37:00 - 41:00: Sculpting and Performance Enhancements The chapter discusses the use of Nomad Sculpt, emphasizing its popularity and performance on iPads, which are now faster than most regular computers. The transcript briefly touches on CMake changes and improvements in Blender.
• 41:00 - 43:00: Shape Keys and Spreadsheet Improvements The chapter discusses a change in approach to how updates and changes are presented. Previously, only a short list of important changes was shared, but now, all 800 changes from the past week are shown in full. This comprehensive overview aims to give credit to all contributions, even the small ones like space cleaning or format trading, highlighting instances of rewrites or improvements made. The focus is on ensuring every update is acknowledged, regardless of size.
• 43:00 - 52:00: User Interface and Toolbar Customization The chapter discusses the cleanup of a feature related to Blender's development during the open movie project called 'Durian' (Cintel). It covers how this feature, added between Blender versions 2.5 and 2.56, was a part of testing and improving the software and includes details about an option known as the 'durian switch'.
• 52:00 - 54:00: Sequencer Tool and Video Editing Updates In the chapter "Sequencer Tool and Video Editing Updates," the focus is on updates to the video editing capabilities within Blender. The 'bind camera' hack used in previous versions is now obsolete, marking a farewell to an old memory in Blender. However, the excitement is around the improvements in the compositor, which was already enhanced in version 4.4 with a new CPU compositor full frame. The current updates bring significant usability improvements, making it even more powerful and user-friendly.
• 54:00 - 55:00: Vertex Paint and Viewport Enhancements This chapter introduces new features in vertex paint and viewport enhancements, particularly focusing on the changes that provide more flexibility to users. New options have been added to the scale and corner pin nodes, such as the interpolation option. These changes enable users to customize and adjust their workflows effectively, enhancing the overall user experience with greater control over scaling and pinning operations.
• 55:00 - 58:00: Vulkan Backend Update The chapter discusses different interpolation modes such as nearest, bilinear, and cubic, and the trade-offs between quality and speed when scaling. It also mentions that users can choose based on their preference for look. A notable feature discussed, which has been in demand, is 'GPU open.'
• 58:00 - 60:00: Conclusion and Farewell This chapter seems to discuss the implementation and benefits of a GPU-based denoising algorithm in Blender, referred to as 'Open Image Denoise'. It highlights that it has been a much-requested feature and is considered one of the best denoising options available, providing high-quality results with great detail, likely attributed to AI capabilities.

VULKAN is here! 🖖 Blender Today LIVE #257 Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] [Music] Hola community. Welcome to Blender today live at episode 257. We skipped one. I
• 00:30 - 01:00 couldn't uh I wasn't in a good shape to uh to stream, but that made it so I was sick basically in a good shape. It doesn't mean I am in a good shape now, but I'm able to let you know about everything new in Blender since the last four weeks. And oh my gosh, there are like at first I wanted to call this episode Vulcan because that's like the big thing that is now no longer experimental. Spoiler alert. Then there are updates in sculpt or composite. The
• 01:00 - 01:30 compositor like almost all nodes of like the most popular nodes are now are much more powerful. Um the modeling tool modeling oh my like geometry nodes there is new experimental settings. there is like almost every module has had its own uh its own bits of update since the last um since the last time we saw each other. Today it was going to be a day to announce a new version of 4 4.4 uh a
• 01:30 - 02:00 corrective release but that will have to wait until uh maybe later this week. I think there's no final date yet, but uh probably soon, Thursday or next week. Follow the socials. We're going to let you know how how it goes. Um, by the way, on YouTube, I usually posting, we are usually posting as Blender on this channel like uh news. I don't know if you check the community posts um section
• 02:00 - 02:30 on mobile. It's I know it's pretty easy to to access, I don't know, on desktop. But other than that, we have some uh news as well. This is related to the Blender conference 2025 tickets are halfway sold out. So the conference um the the the biggest and coolest conference related to Blender uh the Blender conference here in Amsterdam t going to take place in like less than five months in September September 17 to
• 02:30 - 03:00 19 for the very first time. The tickets are halfway sold out. There is all the way already like 300 and something. I just checked uh tickets sold out of 6 700. So just make sure you uh you you save your spot. And also if you're going to be uh presenting at the conference, if you want to present at the conference, you can already in the homepage. You're going to find the uh submit talk uh button which takes you to
• 03:00 - 03:30 the call for participation. You can present at the conference. You can make a theater talk, a studio talk if you are using Blender in a studio um environment classroom if you want to teach, if you want to do a workshop or the attic if you're a developer and want to go full developer like unexpected people in the audience are going to understand what you're saying. The um um this option also is available here in the header. Now for the first time we moved it up here because there's also the Susan
• 03:30 - 04:00 Awards festival entry. So if you have a short film that you are um you want to present at the Susan Award, if you can't make it to this is this is worldwide for the presentation the talks you have to be here at the conference and you get a little discount on your ticket as well but the uh Susan Awards festival entry can be anywhere from anywhere in the world. So if you have any shorts films um make sure that you submit it. The
• 04:00 - 04:30 deadline I think it's later this year. So you have you have some time. Uh it must be somewhere here on the on the on that page. The deadline for the submissions though that one is June 16th. But the Susan Awards is like late almost a week. No two weeks because we have we need some time to um yeah they committed some time to vote for the nominees. So there will be um there is time. Okay. Um, what else?
• 04:30 - 05:00 Another thing I wanted to mention. Yeah, is I think Vulcan Susan Awards content. I have here my my list of things we're going to talk about, but there's so many that let's let's just get started because it's it's a lot. So, let's see what are the uh what's new in Blender today. So this is between April 1st and April 29 because it's it covers the last u four weeks because I didn't do we do render today every other week and every
• 05:00 - 05:30 yeah and I skipped one 800 over 800 commits but I'm only going to cover like 10% of that 80 something only. Um the ones that I'm going to cover by the way this list is available on um on Blender today. So, if you go to uh Blender um blender.com community the uh Blender today, there is a link. It's also on the description. Uh you can see the whole list of things that I'm going to be um
• 05:30 - 06:00 talking about today. All right. What else? Um was Blender Heads out last time I we we we talked? Yeah, end of March. So, yeah, I probably already mentioned this. Let's move on to the um yeah what's new in Blender today. Let's start with animation. So animation there is um we start in order the this list is huge but I'm going to start in alphabetical order. The ones that I'm
• 06:00 - 06:30 going to talk about that are highlighted with this this little icon here. So animation pose mode select mirror keeps and mirror selected. So uh when you select the mirror um options the ones that cannot be mirror are going to stay selected. So it makes it easy to um for example you can select the spine and the left arm and then um you can select the the the opposite side because the spine doesn't have a a mirror mirror a ball.
• 06:30 - 07:00 You know what I mean? So nice usability change. [Music] The snapping options in the graph editor were um changed a long time ago in Blender in Blender time. So, not not really that long ago, but the it made there was a change that made the snapping options not tied to a specific editor. Uh and by editor, I mean like area. So if you had the graph editor, you turn on snapping and then you open
• 07:00 - 07:30 another graph editor, snapping will be off. It will be different there. So that change made it so it's global to the entire scene. So you only enable it once. Great. However, the driver editor didn't have this feature. So now it has its own snapping flag because the driver editor doesn't have key frames and as in like a timeline of key frames. It's a separate thing, right? these values of your driver. So it makes sense. Next, you can uh there's a new function to
• 07:30 - 08:00 batch create um many f curves and that is in use in the um USD import. It's also uh quite fast and it's actually been improved and performance has been improved to something I used to take about 2 seconds now 9 seconds. Nice. we're going to see a lot of performance improvements uh today. The other update that is relevant to you regarding
• 08:00 - 08:30 animation and graph editor is that the key frame jump operator um it's now unified. So maybe you didn't notice but in order to fix a back report the key frame jump operator. So basically when you press what is it up and down to go to the next key frame um you can tag that to any shortcut you want but there were some issues because it was two operators because the graph editor works differently than the um
• 08:30 - 09:00 than the than the dope sheet for example. So that was fixed and now that is fixed too. So now you can assign one shortcut to all the um the key frame jam operators. Let's move to A4 assets. As a set assets um the tag a brush for unsaved changes when texture changes. So this is a bug fix kind of usability improvement. So when you change the texture the brush
• 09:00 - 09:30 wouldn't be high wouldn't be tagged for um um unsaved changes. So it would look like nothing changed. So yeah, you could lose some settings. That has been fixed. Nice. Then uh the snap feedback for dragging collections um has been disabled for collections without um when you're linking a collection without collection instancing because it doesn't make any sense. You just bring the entire collection and it uses the object origin. It's not
• 09:30 - 10:00 instance. So the snapping was an issue there was was giving you bad feedback. too much feedback. Okay, next uh autopace. Yeah, the the audio library in Blender has a it's a fix, but I just wanted to mention because if you notice anything strange with the uh audio, I think this there is an issue there was an issue where this is trying to fix where um the audio would freeze or hang when using when
• 10:00 - 10:30 playing audio. Um so that has been fixed. So if you notice anything where or if you had issues playing back audio where blender will hang try give it a new give it a try. All right we move to I shouldn't double click on things. Okay. If you we move to B for build and this is a little sneak peek of the um the topic we're going to be covering later today which is the manifold library. So the manifold
• 10:30 - 11:00 library, we're going to cover it uh later, but basically it's a new library in Blender. It's new. It's been around for a while that is focused on uh robustness. So it is focused mainly is on meshes that are uh non sorry that are manifolds. So they are enclosed, they're watertight, and it's super fast. So, it is being used in other areas that we're going to see later. But just a heads up, manifold is a library that is being used in um I
• 11:00 - 11:30 think Nomad Sculpt uses it. It's very popular there. And it's it works on an iPad. So, imagine how fast it is. Well, I mean, iPads are much faster than most regular computers nowadays, I think. So, that's not a that's not a a um benchmark. All right, let's go past the CMake changes, the cleanups. So many cleaner. Blender is so clean. Um you may notice that I have uh
• 11:30 - 12:00 again um in the past I used to just skip those and just have a very short list of things that I would talk about. And now I'm not skipping any of that. I'm just showing you roll all the 800 changes that happened during the last week because I want to give credit to everything that has happened. Even sometimes developers um I mean there are cleaning space sometimes it's just format trading space but sometimes they're like rewrites and trying to make
• 12:00 - 12:30 the code more easy to understand. This one is huge. This is a cleanup is a feature that was in I mean it's huge. It's not it's not huge. Nothing will change for you but it's a hack that was added during durian the open movie durian which is Cintel. The project was Cintel was was used to test uh 2.5 basically to improve Blender 2.5 take it from 250 to 256 out of alpha and beta and all that and there was an option there called durian switch which was a
• 12:30 - 13:00 hack um was um to to use the the bind camera to to markers to make them work as you're used to. Basically that was a hack from back then and now it's gone. So piece of memory is leaving Blender. However, you know what else what what is what's cool? It's the compositor. The compositor I mean it was already cool in 4.4 with the new CPU compositor full frame but now there is so many usability
• 13:00 - 13:30 improvement. I look at this list is just yeah this the changes that are uh now here available are give you so much flexibility. Let's start with the new nodes, right? Sorry, new options in nodes. Something that is new, the interpolation option is now available in the scale node and in the corner pin node. This allows you to change for example the change
• 13:30 - 14:00 between usually interpolation modes like nearest, bilinear, by cubic when scaling. So you can choose to go for quality or for um speed or maybe just you want you just like one look or the other. Now brace yourself because this is a feature that people have been requesting for a while which is GPU open
• 14:00 - 14:30 image. Okay, enough. Yes, people have been requesting this for a lot uh for for a long time. It was only CPU but now it is GPU. Open image D noiseise provides like the best I think the best one of the best um denoising algorithms in uh in Blender right now. So it's it gives you quality if it gives you detail in the in the tiniest and most um I don't know what they what they do AI that that's that's that's the one part
• 14:30 - 15:00 that Blender has AI open image deninoiser is now available in the GPU. So uh let's let's see it in blender actually since we are here the option is available under performance and compositor and here you will see the noise noise nodes why the noise nodes could be just the noise right we are in the compositor but anyways um the option is uh here now
• 15:00 - 15:30 it used to just give you just be CPU but now it's auto which will basically follow whatever device you're using. So, if you have this to GPU, then this should go to GPU, but you can always force it to be GPU. And um yeah, you will notice the difference. There's also a few options, but you are probably familiar with this. Um the preview quality and final quality for um for this final is when you press F12 and you render. And the preview is what you see in the um interactive mode.
• 15:30 - 16:00 Let's um see what else gives. Well, there is a you can read the blog post if you want to see all the um the intricate points of uh of this all the definition descriptions. The next is UI stuff gizmo for the box mask node. You can now edit and interactively the box mask. So you select the node and the gizmo will show up here in the
• 16:00 - 16:30 background and you can just um use it to adjust your mask. Very intuitive. And Blender already has uh gizmos for these kind of things for the uh backdrop and for other max mask nodes. Um but yeah, nice user friendly features. And I lost your chat by the way. I'm looking at the chat. I have it here on the on the on the side. Salud Miguel and everyone. Thanks for dropping by. I will try to
• 16:30 - 17:00 um Is the soundbar uh too loud? I can lower it. Actually, I have it 30. Okay, there. I just lower it. Sorry. Next. Implement gizmo. Oh, okay. Another note that implements the same gizmo, which is the ellipse mask node. This is a circular ellipse and uh you can just move it around like you would expect like a modern software from
• 17:00 - 17:30 the from the past century. I think they were doing this in the ' 90s too. But hey, look at this nice antias. Let's uh continue. All right. So, you will notice here that the last item has a the only item that has one star, but basically this will go to everything because let's just tackle one of them. There are a lot of them. Um, let's just
• 17:30 - 18:00 tackle one. So, make rotate start 45 option as an input. What's that? Let me show you. In the compositor, there is a node called glare, which you may know and may love if you've been using Blender and the latest uh the most recent uh options in Blender and uh especially if you miss the bloom because that's the only way to get bloom nowadays. All right. So the glare node
• 18:00 - 18:30 if you use the simple start mode there is an option uh called well it was called 45 degree 40 no not press it was called 45°ree but now that option um that was hardcoded to basically take the star and tilt it 45° so it was very nonflexible but now that is an input So you can uh no it shouldn't be this should be
• 18:30 - 19:00 somewhere else. Where is it? Here let's look at the code. Pull request and there is not a single image. Why rotate star 45 option in the glare node into an exposed input. So basically you can connect there anything and it will rotate the input. So if you go to diagonal star, it's a but if it's a boolean I thought it would be a value.
• 19:00 - 19:30 Okay, so it's not align the star diagonally. So it's an input, it's a boolean. So you can you can make it I guess you can rotate this with another node. Okay, makes sense. But this is a boolean that now it's no longer just a toggle. And you probably notice that most options are a an are sockets now since the 4.4. And this is the one that was missing I believe. So this concept of turning an option into a socket for flexibility is now applied
• 19:30 - 20:00 to the whole planet. Bokeh image options time core mask switch split node see combine and invert tone mapping even pixelate dilate inpaint kuara node. Let's let's see the Kwahara just because I want to say that word multiple times. So every option in Kohara except the the typo um is now a socket. So you can go crazy with this.
• 20:00 - 20:30 The uniformity, the sharpness, eccentricity. Um pixelate. This one is also nice. I've I I had I had this in the past where I wanted to have some control over what to pixelate and try to um drive this. So yes, we love our inputs. Like Pman says, we love inputs. Then um the speckled D noise, anti-alias, vector blur, channel, chroma, a bunch of all the key nodes,
• 20:30 - 21:00 um ID mask, plane track, color correction, and lens distortion. Okay, lens distortion is one of my favorite nodes. So let's see it. Nice. So you may notice what is this drop down? Well, this lets you choose between two types of them. Before it would be just you can just choose to make it horizontal or not. Now it's an enam. So, it's an option and then you can just have this as inputs. Before it only the image used to be an input and now you can can turn
• 21:00 - 21:30 on and off things via inputs. So, so cool. Um, another feature that will ease the workflow for people coming from Eevee and missing the bloom is that the bloom option. So, okay. So, let's see. So what is the workflow right now? If you wanted to have um if you wanted to add some bloom to
• 21:30 - 22:00 your image, you have to first search for glare. That already not very user friendly because you Yeah, I want bloom. I don't want a glare. So okay. And then you have to change to bloom. Searching is still not possible. Sorry. If I search for bloom, it's still not possible. That should be tackled. However, what is tackled is that the when you drag a socket when you drag like a color socket
• 22:00 - 22:30 that is compatible, you can actually now search for bloom and it will connect it. Oh, it will automatically choose the bloom option and any other option go tricks foglow simple stars. If you want to feel like a star, you just do star and then you get simple star. So this is possible and for the same for Bloom. The search Bloom is still not there. But hey, one step at a time. Yay. Cool. Let's
• 22:30 - 23:00 see. Actually, this one change the uh this bloom is a reason why 4.4.2 was crashing. So if by the way, this is I need to go full screen for this. If you use Steam, Microsoft Store, if you get Blender from Steam, Microsoft Store or um one of those apps that like launcher apps that get Blender from places, you may notice that Blender 4.4.2 is available. I do not recommend
• 23:00 - 23:30 that you get it because there is one crash when you um when you try to do any compositing. If you don't do compositing, yes, but why even bother? Wait a day or two and you're going to get Blender 4.4.3 and well, now I'm using 4.5 alpha, but um 4.4.3. And actually, I can I can I I could show you. I could show you. Let's Let's be completely transparent. Here is
• 23:30 - 24:00 Blender 4.4.2, 2, which is not released officially, but it wasn't announced because it contains a bug that you will see right now. Drag, drop, and Blender crashes. So, yeah, it's um it's a known issue and you will get Blender 4.4.3 soon um soon. you know that uh yeah it's a pity but um
• 24:00 - 24:30 that's what happens when you try to add feature uh like features that are not just spec fixes like this thing of the bloom thing it was so nice that developers wanted to add this to 4.4.2 because it's just tiny however this uh there was a a bug and it crashed and now we have to wait for 4.4.3 4.3 development. Yay. So, we skip 4.4.2. Yes, please skip
• 24:30 - 25:00 4.4.2. Um, just just ignore it and wait a day or two and you're going to get 4.4.3. Okay, time to move on. The other changes. Let's go to core. There are a few core changes as in core it's everything is like libraries and blender saving blend file data and stuff. The core changes this time are two. One well
• 25:00 - 25:30 that I find relevant to to tell you. One is the option to relocate your this is has to do with library linking like library override library linking when um you know in the outliner we have a list of um of um libraries that objects that you are linking and you see the library and you want to relocate that you want to move it say you you imported something from the desktop really bad and you move
• 25:30 - 26:00 it to the downloads folder which is even worse but yeah well you And there is an option to relocate. You right click on the library and you can relocate it to somewhere else. This would work for the entire library. But now you can actually relocate individual ids which is fantastic. Um it's very maybe it's a bit technical maybe you're not never linked stuff but a lot of work has been put into the um the library system and then you know
• 26:00 - 26:30 there are productions that use it like the ones downstairs okay why are people saying fulcen ful bulen yeah sorry I am So I live in the Netherland and the V is P sometimes. So I I often say fulcan. I say bulan because in Spanish V and B are the same. Like we we they're not the same. We we
• 26:30 - 27:00 just say the same wrongly but we say the same. So sorry if I mix if I uh mix stuff. Okay. All right, new experimental option which maybe you shouldn't turn on yet or unless you really need it. Okay. Ever um ran into the limitation that Blender
• 27:00 - 27:30 could not save files with buffer um data like inside of the blend file that is larger than 2 gigabytes. Very niche. Very niche. Ever run into that issue? Well, if you have Blender now has an option to allow writing data in the uh experimental settings. So, you go to developer extras experimental write large blend file blocks. However, let me let me go full screen just to get your attention. That
• 27:30 - 28:00 one option if you really need it, turn it on. In Blender 5, it will be on. So, it eventually will happen. However, this means that files will yeah, we're going to get a lot lot more data than two gigs, which means that older Blender files, Blender versions, older as 4.4 and older are not going to be able to um to save that. Blender 4.5
• 28:00 - 28:30 LTS will um support it. That's why it gets added now in even though Blender 5 is uh a few months uh away still we are uh this feature gets added now. So Blender 4.5 and 5.0 files are compatible. However just a um just know that if you save files with this uh option then um they're not going to be compatible with
• 28:30 - 29:00 the with Blender all the Blender versions are not going to be able to open them. Okay, next curves. Oh my, we haven't seen the word nerves in a while. The commit goes as follow. So curves. So this is a new data block custom nerves nuts basically. So nuts. Um this option it's a attribute basically that
• 29:00 - 29:30 it's stored in the blend file in the curves geometry. It's not exposed yet and it's only used by the OBJ import uh importer. So it is to support meshes that nerves that come from other software and into Blender just to read them. Um eventually this will be um exposed but the for the time being it's just added support and this there's an optimization there are multiple
• 29:30 - 30:00 optimizations one of them this one by Matias Frederickson is related to curves and the evaluation of tangent tangents uh info data so there's a performance improvement that on a single curve with around with over 800,000 points. So quite a beefy curve. The performance was around 1.43 times. So an example something that used to take 33 millconds to calculate now is 23
• 30:00 - 30:30 milliseconds. So yay for optimizations. Next let's switch into cycles. In cycles there are also optimizations for the noise texture of 3D and for the noise. In this case the optimization brings it's a um modest optimization about 10% on Mac OS and on Linux it's about 18%
• 30:30 - 31:00 um faster to calculate 3D and for the nose it is only limited to 3D and 4D nose. No, noise. Nice noise. All right. You know what else is nice? This feature and this again. Oops. Um, this kind of a a really cool feature. I want to get your attention again. OSL open shading language allows you to write shaders of all sorts of stuff. These uh shaders are not just
• 31:00 - 31:30 materials. They can be pretty much anything, including cameras. Ever been limited by the cameras in Blender? But the depth of field, you you don't get that nice realistic depth of field that some people even made their own cameras using shaders in Blender like glass shaders and just to get the fully realistic. Anyways, with open uh shading language cameras, you can get pretty much
• 31:30 - 32:00 anything you want and also make it compatible with other software. [Music] And this opens up um possibilities for interopability and make cycles um yeah have a similar look with um cameras that are imported from other places for more real for example. Let's see what what this um what is the problem. For a long time, cycles had a fairly fixed set of cameras,
• 32:00 - 32:30 perspective, autographic, and a few panorama options. But now, um, is no longer sufficient. Just during the 2024 conference, I've been asked about adding new panorama cameras. The central cylindrical projection was added some time ago. And there is a new request for adding fish i624 model and new distortion models. for VFX workflows, you want to distort it in different um ways, different models that are applied to specific camera like in real life,
• 32:30 - 33:00 you know, real cameras um realistic lens models for example. So there has been many many many requests and the solution is to basically add open shading language, a generic shader type that allows you to achieve this. And there are limitations of course open sh language is not new but it's only supported on CPU and optics but I think there was some work being done and has a
• 33:00 - 33:30 reputation of being slow in cycles. Yep. And it's technically not intended for this sort of application. Me it just works fine what the developer said. And there are some examples here. And there are some examples too like this is how for example a a depth of field look would uh does now in blender in cycles. So this is the depth of field and this is the new like this is by using
• 33:30 - 34:00 um so this is with a camera shader as you can see it's a lot more realistic I would say where cycles one is a lot more homogeneous I guess like and writing a shader actually makes it but basically the the limit the sky is the limit Right. It's actually pretty nice. This looks almost fake. So why why
• 34:00 - 34:30 did you why are you making like look fake? But yeah, you can tell the difference. Okay. Oh, I mean there's a different amount of of um dep field but looks so cool. Um and I guess it's also easier to share because uh open shading language is is this. It's just text. So if it it's just very easy to find examples online of people um sharing these kind of
• 34:30 - 35:00 shaders. So cool. Are open shading language files assets or could they could they be assets? Nice. So Rand render times the camera shader is actually faster than the native camera. Okay. So, it's not a penalty apparently. Nice. I need to read this entire thing. So, make sure you check it out as
• 35:00 - 35:30 well. Next, we continue with cycles. And there's some inter interup with Vulcan and um metal graphics optimizations. uh not optimization but like code under the hood between CUDA and Vulcan. The add support for automatic bump mapping on open optics OSL. This is actually a bug fix where when using uh open sharing
• 35:30 - 36:00 language then displacement and bump uh setting was not working. That should fix it. So nice. All right, let's continue. Let's uh there's a bunch of dependency changes with the new libraries with the dropped libraries in Blender with depth graph changes some is there any optimizations here that I missed yeah littleizations from 1.18 times for the depths graph the depraph
• 36:00 - 36:30 depths graph dependency graph in blender that's the heart of blender so anything that you see related to optimizations there is Always a good new good news no matter what you do animation modeling tech like every it's always good news to see improvements in the dep graph it's also scary because being the heart if the heart fails let's continue um more optimizations you know the draw code now
• 36:30 - 37:00 uh blender will skip the empty passes which could provide small um performance improvement switching to Eevee, there are improvements to shadows. They removed the shadow ray horizon clipping which basically was making these kind of issues. I don't know if you get to see it, but if you ever run into this like artifacts where you see
• 37:00 - 37:30 um the shadow comes this way and then it's like broken and then back or these glitches where there were like light spots in the what should be shadows. Well, that has been um fixed. It's a it's a bug fix, but I like to mention it just in case you run into these issues before the shadow terminator normal bias. This is a new option which implements a task from a long well not that long
• 37:30 - 38:00 actually but shadow terminator issues have been around for a while. The shadow terminator is what um mostly when you have low resolution meshes. This also cycles also has a shadow terminator setting and this should improve this basically bad shadows or transitions between the light and the shaded part which is that that's a terminator not related to Arnor Fener this part. Go.
• 38:00 - 38:30 Nice. Next. Fixes. So many fixes. Crashes. Grab pants. Like these are all un reported. I guess by this one, but these are all unreported fixes. It's just they just found them and fixed them. And then we arrive to the list of And
• 38:30 - 39:00 then the amount of fixes. And then we arrive to the list of of actually reported issues. Wow. Crazy. Okay, what else? GPU improvements. But we're going to move past them because otherwise I'm never going to finish this episode. Let's talk about geometry nodes. There are a number of new nodes and improvements to existing nodes. So the new node many new nodes one of them
• 39:00 - 39:30 is match string node basically search and match it will give you a boolean as a result if it matched or not. So if it starts with a string or ends with a string or if it contains a a uh string. So it's one node with three modes. nights. How far are we from a if then if
• 39:30 - 40:00 check? Well, this is kind of an if statement. Actually, it is basically for attribute names. Um, set grease pencil color is a new node that allows you to set the grease pencil color. It was already possible to write it to write to the color and opacity attributes, but this required some user to know the names of the built-in attributes than this one doesn't. So, so nice. I I knew folk would make nice pictures and
• 40:00 - 40:30 screenshots for me to show you here. So, nice. I can show you here how it looks. set grease pencil color had a drop down as a an input for grease pencil selection and color itself and the opacity of it. They're all fields and maybe this could even be inlined the or maybe it is inlined because there are changes related to that the grease pencil in and out these two sockets. If you don't know what I'm talking about just hang on for a bit. New nodes build statistic nodes. There
• 40:30 - 41:00 is actually are three new nodes in Blender geometry nodes for statistics similar to attribute statistics. This is the field version of the of those three new nodes. One is called field average, field min and max and field variance. Three nodes. So cool. You see people are happy about the screenshots.
• 41:00 - 41:30 Yay. That's more screenshots to the people to the power to the add no another note grease pencil related to set the depth order of your layer I guess I know of the grease pencil um two options layers and 3D location so the actual location in 3D and the 2D layers themselves so you can
• 41:30 - 42:00 uh you can set the in the order for your layers in the grease pencil object. This is a a must. Nice. The other new node is called instance bounds. This one by Cartial Cartisian Caramel, which if you follow them on social media, you know that the this this person knows what they're
• 42:00 - 42:30 doing. and uh not only with great art but also code apparently. So the current issue is the bounding box node does not output the minimum and maximum vector for each instance but only realized geometry. So basically this is the current workaround very user friendly you have to remember all this but now there is a new node for it and this um is a new node that calculates the instance bounce
• 42:30 - 43:00 from the geometry sets. So one node and it gives you the bounce minimum and maximum as vector fields. Nice. So the performance is 19 milliseconds faster than the workaround. Not bad. And instance stacking is greatly uh simplified with this I guess by just having the instance bound because it's a field. I guess you accumulate the field
• 43:00 - 43:30 add and set the position for each one of them in the collection. Nice. So cool. Awesome. Thank you, Cartian Caramel. And more nodes. However, these are experimental. So, use uh handle with care and use on at your own risk. So basically there's new two new types of uh of nodes of uh one of them are
• 43:30 - 44:00 bundles bundle of nodes and the other one actually two sockets socket types and the the other ones are closures which are like functions that you can pass around as data. How do I know that? Well by reading the blog post that was posted in November last year after the uh Blender conference. They had a workshop here at the the Blender HQ where they discussed that and you can read more about closure and bundles. So
• 44:00 - 44:30 basically here bundles you can bundle up geometry in this case you have a cube cylinder do multiple domains makes a bundle you can pass it around and then separate it similar to separate and combine XY Z or vector uh nodes. Super nice when they use Blender lingo and you learn things only once. And closures are in programming
• 44:30 - 45:00 the term closure refers to functions which may be passed around as data and can capture variables from where they are created. We have not found a good alternative name yet. So what would you name it? what are the what was the industry standard name for this sort of um sockets. So in this case well this is not the most exciting um example just set setting a position but basically this is one function that
• 45:00 - 45:30 you pass around as data. Let's continue next. Oh, by the way, if you want to turn this on and try it for yourself, you can from the user preferences experimental bundle and closure notes. Once you add this in, you should be able to see um to try the where are the notes utility maybe or just search for it.
• 45:30 - 46:00 Close maybe you need to ah I'm in the compositor. Maybe a geometry nodes setup is not going to show up in the compositor. I have a feeling. Um the combine and uh the bundles are here and the closures are here. Closure evaluate and nice. Okay. There's even a new theme option. Actually, I found out about it because of the theme options. I was
• 46:00 - 46:30 updating the light theme and I saw, hey, there's a new theme option for closures. What are closures? Okay. um the zones. So, simulation zones, repeat zone, all the zones now uh support link, drag, search. So, you can what I show you before with the um glare node, but now also supported for the geometry nodes zones. Grace pencil layer name search.
• 46:30 - 47:00 You can now search um grab pencil layers. know you don't have to type them by hand anymore. Yay. Um usability feature the layer selection UI slightly updated and uses a slightly larger default width for the uh name layer selection node uses the layer icon in the field to as and uses the layer placeholder. So all the nice and expected UX improvements. Thank you,
• 47:00 - 47:30 Faulk. And more UI changes. So, this is a mostly a Wow, it's mostly a I candy. However, you will notice how it makes notes a lot easier to read and they they more compact. They use less space. So, this is before and this is after. And this is before and this is
• 47:30 - 48:00 after. So can you tell the difference? The geometry nodes uh sorry geometry sockets in this case when for example when you have mesh in mesh out instance in instances. So when when the domain doesn't change it doesn't make sense to have this in two separate spots. You can just collapse them and now you have one socket um well inline socket. So it's easy to read. It's uh makes it much
• 48:00 - 48:30 nicer. The same for values, the same for for sockets where it makes sense. This has to be done one by one. So it was done with care by one of the main developers of geometry nodes. So they know what they're doing. And there's three more nodes that actually um were missing from oops from this scale elements case instance and the set grease pencil color which is the one we just we just mentioned.
• 48:30 - 49:00 Nice. Much is much easier to read. Okay, let's move to wrist pencil. A bunch of changes. Actually, all of them are very relevant and two of them are my favorite personal ones. Well, this is also pretty cool. Ever noticed Grace Panzil having not the best anti-alysising ever? Like sometimes there were some edges that were a bit jaggy. Uh well, that has been proved. There is a new anti-aliasing uh algorithm for grease
• 49:00 - 49:30 pencil accumulation anti-aliasing. So yeah, it's a new more accurate anti-aliasing to the ren grease pencil render engine. So you see this alone would have been the a name the name for the grease pencil actually no the feature that I'm going to show you later for this episode would have been a great name. Um this new anti-alising algorithm doesn't replace the existing one. It's uh it's still used the the old one is still used
• 49:30 - 50:00 for the viewport and this one is used for rendering. It's only available for rendering actually. So that's where you're going to see the difference only when you render the you can read more here in the in the in the pull request. And next when switching to uh when smoothing when you hold shift to smooth when you're using respencil and you hold shift to smooth now we'll use the smooth brush
• 50:00 - 50:30 setting when uh when you use this. Nice. Thank you, Ying Wu. Next, the Python related. The Bessier handle selection is now exposed in the Python API for all the add-on developers there. All right, my two favorite changes this week. They come u from Yiming Woo. One of them, well, they are both related to compositing. Have you ever wanted to composite grease
• 50:30 - 51:00 pencil like have it as a separate entity? Now, if until now it was always just the one thing and you had to do all sort of tricks to to be able to to hand to manipulate them in the compositor. Not anymore. There is a new option now in the filter of the view layer. This all compositing. So, it's in the view layer settings filter. There's a new option called grease pencil which allows you to and there's a way that you can
• 51:00 - 51:30 disable volumes, curve surfaces. Now you can disable or enable the rendering of grease pencil which means you can have a let me open this here view layer so filtering you see now you can have say you want a view layer that it's only grease pencil now you can or the other way around you want another one that is just everything but grease pencil so you can have like h or respencil and then you
• 51:30 - 52:00 make another one, you know, you copy the settings and then you just call it respencil and then you only have respens. So the possibilities are endless and the reasons to use other compositors shrinks. You know what else you can do with respencil now? You can render it as a separate pass. In the passes se um panel you can enable or disable grease
• 52:00 - 52:30 pencil. So say I have this beautiful cube and I'm going to add a beautiful Susan Grispensil Susan and now say I enable grease pencil as a pass and then I render and this is ah I need to enable C pass. Maybe it should always show up anyway pencil. Now I have this a se separate pass and I can disable I can have just a a pass for grease pencil. Still shows up
• 52:30 - 53:00 in the combine. So you can you can turn on all the other ones and build your own separate view layer for this. But this is awesome. I love it. And of course this is available as a of course ah I'm in the the other view layer. There you go. As a view grace pencil. So I can just see it here. So so cool. Can do anything. So this is the entire grease pencil pass.
• 53:00 - 53:30 But in the future there are plans of maybe you know splitting this in parts. Maybe you could have a new panels here that says grease pencil and then you can have grease pencil strokes, fills or effects. You name it. Could be. Oh, so so cool. Rocket horse says, "Hey everyone,
• 53:30 - 54:00 I'm late. Did I miss anything big?" Yeah, well, yeah, you miss some. Well, depends because there's so many areas like compositor. Well, if you like the compositor or if you use grease pencil, now you can composite grease pencil as a separate pass. That to me would have been enough for an entire blender today talking about just gpens just calling it greasepensial. Anyway, let's move into huge news such as there is a new language supported in Blender. You know which one?
• 54:00 - 54:30 British. Yep. British English is now supported. So the English option in the menu now is called American English. And there is now a new British English option. Um, where is the British English? Like let's let's see if it's translate.blender.org. If I go here, do I see already blender UI in how far is it in B? Uh, there English
• 54:30 - 55:00 UK 99%. Um, are they cheating or was it already there and it was now exposed? As in I did they just copy the American one and then search and replace for all the Wow. So cool. Yeah. All right. So Aussie Australians, it's your time now to uh Canadian English. Um to
• 55:00 - 55:30 uh to add your own. Okay. Um how which how many Spanish we have by the way? You have Spanish, Spain, and Latin America or not? Um American English. Like it doesn't even fit now. American English. Okay. Uh, we have Yeah. Yeah. This doesn't fit. So, in the We only have English, Spanish from
• 55:30 - 56:00 Spain. At least we don't have Spanish US, which is so weird to me to see that when when in the app when they let you choose Spanish US, Spanish. Time to pirate. Oh, yeah. pirate translations. Okay. Uh let's move on. Image buffer section. Yes, that is a Oh, wait, wait, wait. I'm missing actually something pretty pretty big. I
• 56:00 - 56:30 Oh, there is a new FBX importer. Raise your hand if you use FBX because and there is a new experimental which I think it should be maybe this should be the the or maybe for 5.0 I know this could be the default and the other one called the Python one uh called legacy or deprecated maybe because the new FBX importer is C++ based so it goes from two to five times
• 56:30 - 57:00 faster and um yeah just just better in pretty much every way. There are a few features that are missing but it seems that based on community feedback um these options were not really used that much anyways so they were not ported. So if you try it out. Um if you are going to import something go to file import and then you will see FBX. Well let me
• 57:00 - 57:30 here file import FBX experimental and try it out because um maybe the description could show. I think the description is the same. Load an FBX file. I know it's called import FBX into the current scene. Yeah, maybe maybe the the tool tip we could change it to actually explain why it's experimental like what what what makes it experimental and what
• 57:30 - 58:00 to expect maybe um like you could say faster overall. I think we can assume it's going to be faster. But anyway, try it out please. And if you find anything missing, report it as a as a bug. it's going to be addressed or maybe there is a thread on de talk about the FBX FBX [Music] um or maybe just reported or or coming to the chat.blender.org
• 58:00 - 58:30 work. Anyway, pretty big. So, a lot of people use FBX still nowadays. Unfortunately, they have to use it instead of more open source uh formats. All right. Image buffer. Two new changes in the image buffer. So, basically what how Blender handles uh images. One internally. So one of them the um EXR images now support aspect ratio as in they are written into the EXR image
• 58:30 - 59:00 itself um when you render the um when you press render going to save the aspect ratio. So if you use it in other software and you had issues where the aspect ratio was a bit mixed now they should uh this should work. And then I know everyone has been waiting for this. BMP images now support alpha transparency. So what year is it? Yes.
• 59:00 - 59:30 Um okay maybe I can take this moment to explain maybe why this kind of things why render developers investing time that I'm paying with my donations to add alpha to BMP images. Well, thing is this is actually a cleanup. Blender in the past used to have its own BMP um format bitmap image for u like a importer exporter basically its own code to
• 59:30 - 60:00 handle those and that code didn't support alpha. So there was a setting to write alpha or like to to basically to to address this. Not that long ago, a few years ago, Blender changed that to to a library to to leave all the image loading and saving um to a library, an external library called open image io. This open image io libraries actually supports alpha. So by removing the code
• 60:00 - 60:30 that was added because Blender's old system didn't support it, um now um yeah, Blender has a new feature. So by removing code you have a new feature. So that's that's why sometimes you see these kind of things. It's like why are Blender adding these kind of things. Yeah. Now you know. Now you know. You know that person that that guy on social media is awesome. Now you know. Okay. Next. Um library
• 60:30 - 61:00 override. Improve reync when relocating linked data. Um this is also related to relocating feature that I mentioned before. This is um yeah improved resyncing [Music] basically. Next, oh Linux. There are two small changes to Linux. If you had a folder that was called boot that started with the name boot as in B, there were some issues because Blender would exclude that um the the
• 61:00 - 61:30 /boot point mount point and it would not show it. So yeah, that has been fixed. And also the EFI the FE um mount option is now hidden in the file browser. So you don't you don't because the FE um partition is usually somewhere you don't want to write into especially from Blender anyways. Okay. Now this is pretty big. Also, this could have
• 61:30 - 62:00 been the name of another Blender today episode. We're talking about mesh. Mesh in general. There's some optimizations and a new feature that a lot of people have been waiting for, which is basically free custom normals. So free as in freedom and they can go anywhere. The free normals they are direction vectors in the object local space rather than the existing smooth corner fan space. Basically
• 62:00 - 62:30 they're free they can go anywhere and they can be set with nodes. So if you go here there is um set mesh normal node and the normal input node and we have some pictures here where you can specify this basically which is basically custom nodes custom normals um handling in geometry nodes which is someone something that people have been requesting for a long while. Set my normals free says Mr.
• 62:30 - 63:00 cuddle fuzzle. Nice. All right. Um, pretty big and yes, this is a you can see the love that this pull request is getting and uh it's actually it was around for a while and now it's been finally like three months ago started in January 3rd. So right starting the year as a new year
• 63:00 - 63:30 resolution hand started this PR and now it's in blender 4.5 LTS. Okay, next two optimizations um by Matias Frederickson. Well, one of them is by Matias, one by Hans. This one um it adds parallelization. So nice multi-threading to the point uh the cornerto point domain adaptation which means and on a mesh with around 16
• 63:30 - 64:00 million vertices and a 4x4 matrix attribute interpolation there is about a 4.5 times like over four and a half times performance improvement. Something that used to take 10 seconds now is 2 seconds or so. Not bad. Not bad at all. Thank you Matias and um thank you Hans and Jack for reviewing this super nice this there is just there there is people
• 64:00 - 64:30 out there who just love performance and we should be grateful for that because probably takes a lot of headaches and need to know what you're doing such as hands who knows what he's doing and parallelize face-to-point domain adaptation similar to the previous commit it. And this has uh in this test for example are over nearly seven times faster improvement in overall FPS for a um 4x4 matrix attribute in this this
• 64:30 - 65:00 test. So so nice a bit less for um float attributes and booleans. All right. Now let's talk about modeling. We don't talk about modeling much. Well, this is related what we should mention. However, modeling how tricky made added a new option to the boolean geometry node and
• 65:00 - 65:30 the boolean modifier. How about the operator also? Like it doesn't doesn't mention it here. So, I'm just just checking. So, if I get this thing and I search for boolean, is there a new option? No, it's not there yet. However, it is in the um in the modifier. So, if you uh add a boolean modifier, you'll notice that the solver has three options which the order
• 65:30 - 66:00 is a bit because it starts with float, exact, and manifold. Plot is the old one that you know and love because it was super fast and it's good enough for most some cases. Exact is slow but it gives you really good results. It's very precise. Uh although sometimes I had better results with float than the exact and the new one is called manifold. And this is what
• 66:00 - 66:30 I mentioned before with this new library that Blender has, which is a manifold library by Elish. Uh, Ethan, I think EMTT. No, sorry. No, EMTT Lish, the same person who also brought us the Kronos uh tone mapper um the PVR tone mapper that was added to Blender a few versions ago last year. Now this person also made manifold library which is in used in
• 66:30 - 67:00 many places many fold many places uh blender one of them but also nomad scul as I mentioned before God engine also adds it um some versions ago and other popular 3D apps and uh frameworks polygonjs balance 3D um many of them so not bad this is focused on performance and topological robustness.
• 67:00 - 67:30 [Music] So I I like the word robust. It's like it's like the word robust is already robust. This new uh option in the boolean modifier is uh not on by default. Actually the the default is the slowest one exact. I wonder if we should change this default to be something else. Which one should be the default? Maybe manifold because manifold is actually fast is the fastest one. It's faster than float and it should work.
• 67:30 - 68:00 Well, I'm not going to use Susan here. Um but um but it it is the fastest one of of the of the bunch. And I don't know how can I test this with how can I how could I test this thing? Um, anyway, I it would be wouldn't it be nice to have an option here to make this object like to change the draw type of
• 68:00 - 68:30 this object from the modified itself. So, you don't have to come here and change it to be wire so you can actually see what you're doing um when you have some specific types. But yeah, basically um super nice as long as your mesh is watertight. I think it also works without it being watertight, but it's just the um yeah, the results are different. Um and it's not guaranteed as in the
• 68:30 - 69:00 um the manifold meshes. It's in the name manifold, right? Yeah, Susan is not manifold. That's why I'm not going to use Susan to the demo. And Tusan is not manifold because the eyes, you may be familiar with this, that the eyes are uh yeah, the eyes can pop out. And to make Susan manifold, we would have to like close this with like with like grid fill or something and just it's not even going
• 69:00 - 69:30 to work because ah I need to use the edges from different sides and this doesn't work. That's why I love Susan because it's a good primitive to show what how things can go wrong. Um, we're going to hear more about this manifold um library soon. Next, let's talk about movies. Blender or or like this is also very core completely changing
• 69:30 - 70:00 theories. Okay, movies as in Blender now supports ProRes codec videos. It can write codec uh ProRes codec videos. So again, more interoperability. I think 4.5 is going to be an amazing release for this like so many additions already. And this is another one just so good. Progress is a common intra intraframe codec postp production work. You can use
• 70:00 - 70:30 um on your phone you can record ProRes. So not bad. Alpha is supported along with 8 bit and 10 bit channel images. Cool. So nice. ProRes in lender. Is that legal? Is ProRes? It's not open source for sure, but I guess it's legal because it comes from FFmpeg. So if ffmpeg supports it then blender too.
• 70:30 - 71:00 Okay. Um next nodes. Yeah. Okay. Let again the type because it's a completely different topic. Nodes. The snapping of nodes um changed recently. Actually horizontal snapping was added to the uh to the let's see maybe I can open it in a new tab. Yeah. So recently horizontal snapping
• 71:00 - 71:30 was added to the um to the notes. However, vertical snapping wasn't. You can see snapping vertically just well doesn't really work until now when Leon made it work. So now it snaps correctly to the grid as you can see. Beautiful. Beautiful.
• 71:30 - 72:00 Next. Make spacing for panel toggle properties consistently with that of boolean sockets. Yes, this one um it's just um a visual um improvement, but basically before and after makes it more slightly tighter. Um just to connect values together and the reference is uh this in this case. So thank you Quakaruni.
• 72:00 - 72:30 um and more alignment of other nodes and no nine rotation nodes have been um added. So in this case it also makes it very clear rotation rotation vector vector and now this is before after for so nice. Next 04 over like overlay. Again, this alone would have been the
• 72:30 - 73:00 title of a Blender today episode. It's just a feature that people have been requesting for ages. Allow drawing of UVs in image editor in any mode. And actually now that I think of it, um this must be somewhere in right click select as in UV like object mode. There must be somewhere UV editing multiple objects display object. Okay, we marked it
• 73:00 - 73:30 already as done. So Oh yeah, I did probably. And I added this and emoji. Now I remember. Yep. This feature has been requested like it had a over 100 likes and up votes on right click select and it had multiple other um duplicates. So yeah, this has been implemented and it's a very lengthy not even clip. I know. Okay. I don't think
• 73:30 - 74:00 it's clipped to the right length, but it is a post by Tommyson that it just shows how much love and patience comes from the community. You can see the support 22 because this developer from the community um yeah just went through this lengthy uh two months of reviews and testing and going back and forth. So super nice. The um the final result is
• 74:00 - 74:30 something that people have been requesting and it's almost expected that you are in edit mode and you see the your layouts. You are in object mode and you also see the layout. It makes so much sense. Plus if you select another object, you get both. Isn't that amazing? This this this is huge. This is people have been requesting this. Of course, if you don't
• 74:30 - 75:00 want this, you can always disable it. It's an overlay setting where you can choose the face opacity or just hide them completely. No, no UVs. So, so nice. Thank you, Tommyson, for working on this and your patience for uh with this and hope to see more things from you. Actually, I'm just going to stock your profile. H, what are you doing? crashes sculpt texture paint as sand fix. Oh, you're even fixing blender like
• 75:00 - 75:30 Thank you. Thank you. Thank [Applause] you. All right. Next. Oh, Jonathan Lample proposed a change well together with the uh sculpt module um to reduce the default distance for the red topology overlay. And basically what uh how it used to be before and after. So before it used to be like this and now after is like this.
• 75:30 - 76:00 And you say hey this is overlapping. Yes, sometimes you want things to overlap. Actually, when you do retology, you want the mesh to the overlay to to overlap sometimes so you know where that your mesh is close to what you're working on. Um, the default was 0.2 and the new default is 0.01. The thing is that is metric. So 0.2 m, so 20 cm. So if you were modeling
• 76:00 - 76:30 a average human of 1.7 m 1.8 m 1 point I don't know what the average is if you're in the Netherlands higher the average um yeah that that was like a human person then 20 cm is it's a long distance to have that overlay on your mesh. That has been uh changed and now it's 0.01 01 which makes it work better
• 76:30 - 77:00 in this case. You know what works well with 0.2 like the old um the old value 0.2 works well in Susan or the default cube. So that shows um yeah that that shows that the testing was maybe done with a default cube or a susan which is fine because things happen and that's why it's important to have artists
• 77:00 - 77:30 involved in the testing of these features. So thank you Jonathan for making the PR and uh Sean for uh reviewing it and the old module and the community for testing. All right, next basics. All right, don't get too excited. Basics improvements UI related two. Um, basically when you are baking fluids,
• 77:30 - 78:00 for example, um, Blender would would just show you when you finish the bake, it would say, oh, all complete and then a number. But the number didn't specify anything. Okay, now it tells you that it's our seconds. It's always in measuring seconds. Also, uh when you cancel the bake, it would tell you bake cancelled. Yeah, but where when? And now it tells you frame 19. Yay. So, small UI improvements by Bartos. Thank you. Um these changes are
• 78:00 - 78:30 always welcome. So, thank you. Um what else? Oh, changes topic again. Point clouds. The point clouds first again. Would this be the title of a new Blender today? Point clouds have been around for a while in the shape of experimental features. If you go to preferences, you would have
• 78:30 - 79:00 seen in under experimental, you would have seen here point cloud object for many many versions ago. Like it's been around for a while. Not anymore. As you can see, it's no longer here. It is a new item in your shift a menu. So, the shift a menu that we look at every day is now a bit longer because point clouds are there. By default, it adds like a a a default cube worth of
• 79:00 - 79:30 points. And um now there is a um there are more tools for it. So, basically, first you can go into edit mode. Amazing. You can select box, select, move, rotate, like everything you would expect. But even proportional editing. So you can select one point here, enable proportional editing, and then move these points proportionally. Isn't that amazing? Point clouds. Yay. Nice. So,
• 79:30 - 80:00 welcome point clouds to the family of objects, official objects in Blender. 4.5, again, another reason for 4.5 to be huge. I'm I'm happy to see all these improvements in an LTS release because I bet many people are going to stick with 4.5 LTS before switching to five. Five is going to be a big release. Like, I think five unlike well 3.0 was also fairly big. 4.0
• 80:00 - 80:30 0 was maybe a bit less big. It has pictures, but it wasn't like Blender 4 like 3.6 still used in many productions and not not that many reasons to to switch to Blender 4, but I think Blender 5 um it's going to be big as an impact. Uh although I expect people to switch from 4.5 LTS to 5.2 LTS. Maybe takes give it some time for 5.0 to to settle.
• 80:30 - 81:00 Okay, let's uh move on. What else? We are in letter P already. Pi API, Python, doc, RNA, refactors. So many refactors always welcome refactors, but um scary to release changes and time to move on. All right, who here uses raise your hand an emoji if you use Blender for printing? It's not 3D printing but
• 81:00 - 81:30 actually like like printing. So where you need like pixel density information, you need to save your renders with a specific PPY PPI uh DPI um setting. Well, now you can from Blender because Blender now supports setting pixel density as part of the render pipeline. So you have a new setting. Let's see it in Blender. So I'm going to No, not not not the old buggy Blender. Let's open this Blender. All right. So, I have Blender
• 81:30 - 82:00 here. I'm going to save an image. Oh, well, on the output settings, I should see somewhere here in the output panel. Output pixel density. Pixel density now has two options. by default is the 72 pixels uh per inch but now you can also choose pixels per meter, pixels per inch uh per cm or even custom and you need to specify a base um for that.
• 82:00 - 82:30 So this this is basically an inch in metric. This is huge like note spaghetti says this is huge. This is at least 300 ppi right? So nice. So ping ping and then this will be saved in lener as part of your settings. So when you open it in or Gita or any other software and should all work
• 82:30 - 83:00 nice spaghetti I had to set pixel density with image magic before. Thank you Blender. Yay. Thank you Blender. And thank you Campbell Barton which was this the developer behind this. and Campbell Barton have been working for Blender since 20 years maybe I don't know at least I don't know for is he's one of the the longest work like developers that have been working for Blender and uh you can contribute to keep Campbell
• 83:00 - 83:30 on board and everybody else if you help funding freedom for Blender so I never actually plug in the the development fund but it's a nice segway and people having comm have been donating. Look at that. Six minutes ago, someone donated 25 bucks. Half an hour ago, 100 bucks, five bucks, 25. Like people are donating. So, we're really grateful. Um, but as you can see, the corporate
• 83:30 - 84:00 actually went down. It used to be 36 or 35. I think for Blender the in the press release I usually mention the press release I mention 35 organizations and 7,300 individuals but now we have three less organizations corporates supporting lender but we have 200 more individuals which is not enough to cover
• 84:00 - 84:30 the corporates because one corporate I don't know donating I think 50,000 35,000 is not the same as many like this could be anything right this could be people donating 5 from so anyways um if you can donate this is what keeps this alive and this show alive I'm actually paid by the Blender development fund because I work on not just this is my side quest I work on the UI and many other parts of Blender communication and
• 84:30 - 85:00 websites and all sorts of things. Okay, let's continue. Um, sculpt. Yeah, we are we have news for sculpting. Um, manifold again back manifold. This library is now used when using the trim tool. So, you can actually trim, you know, the trim tool like when you when let's let's see
• 85:00 - 85:30 it in action. Come on, we're live. Why? Why? Why else are we doing this live? This is just too for for showing things here. So, okay, I have my mesh. It's super detailed. And not long ago, if you use the trim tools, for example, um let's see, a line trim. So, if I draw a line, this would have, you know, be a bit slow actually depends on how many vertices you had. But now, this operation is now using the manifold. You
• 85:30 - 86:00 can change back to the other ones like exact. You can see how long it takes. I'm I'm I'm release the mouse. You see how long it takes. Float one. It's slightly less. So I release the mouse. Okay. Sometimes it is fast. Okay. But you see how in how manifold I mean I could remsh and make this my life hard but I don't want to do this while streaming it is awesome. The
• 86:00 - 86:30 trim the manifold library is now within a few weeks is now everywhere. Sculpt trim tools mesh boolean the boolean modifier and the the the boolean geometry node. So cool. So cool. Next, um more sculpting improvements. Um the list of brushes that can use the tilt functionality. Actually many many
• 86:30 - 87:00 changes that are related to tilt when you yeah tilt. Um now there apparently there were a few nodes uh notes brushes that didn't support it and they were in the list. So now they are clay thumb was actually a case the strength factor of the tilt value you you could use negative values which yeah it wasn't it wasn't the case
• 87:00 - 87:30 basically there is a task about moving pel tilt support out of experimental is one of those features started by Paulo do five years ago November 2020 gee That's those are the days. Where are the days? Okay. Next. Uh optimizations. The what is this? When sculpting high resolution meshes. Oh yeah. And performance when sculpting basically is
• 87:30 - 88:00 now faster. the an example with a sculpting a small portion of a mesh with multi-res with about 12 million vertices went got improved between 1.25 and 145 times faster. So nice. So you should be able to sculpt a bit faster now on high resolution meshes. Then another BBH improvement related
• 88:00 - 88:30 also to to this this uh we can look at the table here by Nicola Desi and the radius of the brush is what it will define how much faster it is but overall about 1.2 times faster. Nice. And if related to tilt again if the tilt is not supported or the cursor is inactive you're going to see it in the cursor itself. Um the calculation of the clay strips brush has been um has
• 88:30 - 89:00 been refactored because there was a bug report actually where clay strip brush leaves cracks on a mesh. It apparently it would leave like um sculpt crashes uh cracks. So if you run into this where you will be sculpting on your mesh and you'll have the eek cracks on your mesh. Well, that
• 89:00 - 89:30 should be fixed. Look at this eek. almost looks like one of those hard ops add-ons that uh make these kind of tech shapes. Anyways, uh more optimizations. The clay strips brush is now about 1.2 times faster also thanks to Nicola. So, thank you Nicola.
• 89:30 - 90:00 Nice. And more improvements. Shader. All right. Again, this is a different topic. So shader the experimental node previews um are now limited to the node trees because they were they were everywhere and only the experimental option was only tied to material shading nodes. So that's a that's a that's a fix actually. All right. How often do we see the list never ends. We even reach haven't even
• 90:00 - 90:30 reached UI changes yet. How often do we see changes to shape keys? Not that often. There is a new operator to duplicate a shape key. Um, yeah, it just adds a copy of the active shape key with it data and the settings including the lock status. Um, it will apply it would appear right below the source and it would may be made active. So, new operator for shape keys. Nice.
• 90:30 - 91:00 Um, another UI improvement in this spreadsheet is that some um, well, the domains that are not present in your geometry, such as, I don't know, if you're working on a mesh and you're not using grease pencil or volumes or instances, the um, items are now going to be grayed out in the spreadsheet. So you can see at a glance what matters basically what what
• 91:00 - 91:30 has data or not. Super nice. [Music] And what else? Also I noticed a glitch the other day. It is not a back report but but maybe no it's not a back report but I noticed maybe someone knows why but you can you can't click on uh oh I don't have yeah you can click on curve grease pencil point cloud but you can click on volume grids or instances
• 91:30 - 92:00 for some reason so I think I need to report that I think we need also need to make the disabled but uh text not have shadows because it makes it more muddy and harder to read. I think without shadows are easy easy to read because the disabled text makes it 50% transparent which lets you see through. Okay, next. That one was by Faulk, by the way. Thanks,
• 92:00 - 92:30 Faulk. All right, user interface changes. Um, there's no item that has a like emoji here because I think pretty much everything in the UI module needs to have some needs to be mentioned because it's UI. You see it? So, how are you holding? We're good. Nearly two hours. This is what happens when I skip one. I'm not going to skip the next one. I hope the next
• 92:30 - 93:00 one is um it's going to be the 6 next week. There is a holiday actually here, liberation day. Interesting. And then the one the next one was going to be the 13th of May, which no, I'm going to be here of course. So, we're going to have a regular render today. That's just wanted to check just in case. Um save some confusion there. And let's continue
• 93:00 - 93:30 the user interface. Several changes Mac OS when the cursor when when the it has this I this cursor when the app is busy but it's not not responding. It's not unresponsive. There's a specific cursor for that. So now Blender will let you know that it's it's expected to be waiting for something. the status bar. Um, it's going to show
• 93:30 - 94:00 you now some information when you're splitting. It's going to actually show you things. Before it would it would be just empty. And now, well, as you're splitting, you get some information. You get to see like shortcuts that you can press to duplicate into a new window to to snap. Many people don't know that they can actually snap these um transforms. You know, if you hold control, you can cluck cluck cluck snap it. Um, next curves and grease pencil. Okay,
• 94:00 - 94:30 this is a fix but also a feature. [Music] The let's see. So the curves data block didn't show any um so you maybe they're not going to notice this but basically the values the transform values here um were incorrect for the new data block well new it's been around for years but the new data block corpse
• 94:30 - 95:00 in Blender now this works and also the stats which I'm probably going to show in a bit um the operator called hide collection is now renamed to hide other collection which is what actually does. It's kind of bit counterintuitive. It should hide the it hides the other collections, not the one you have active. Um the panel header grip now uses an icon. Probably not going to notice a difference now. It should work as should look better in
• 95:00 - 95:30 some theme um combinations because now it's an icon. So it should look just an icon. Before this was hardcoded actually. There was a little function that would loop through eight times and drove eight tiny well 16 triangles because it would be once for the um the not triangles cubes one for each and then the shadow overkill total overkill. The outline width of the editors can now be scaled. So now you can specify how wide
• 95:30 - 96:00 you want the separator the separation between the the editor. So border width basically the PR has a wrong name. Um, there was a glitch where if you save um I think I mentioned in on Blender today before that in the add-ons um yes. So you basically if you choose um like you change the theme and then
• 96:00 - 96:30 you reset it would still show the theme there even though it was reset but now it show now it tells you preset. So it goes back to how it is. So nice. Um, let's see. Filter. Oh my, this is a feature. I wonder if any user is going to use it now because this was introduced
• 96:30 - 97:00 for a change in the sequencer editor. I already want to use it somewhere else for Blender 5. But now, have you ever run into, I don't know, a situation where you have too many of these tabs and you just don't want to see them? Well, now you can hide them. You have two ways of hiding them. One is with the drop down up here, the popover. You can just hide the tabs you don't want. You can even have no tabs at all if you want. Just
• 97:00 - 97:30 bare bones or just have the tool or just have the scene anything basically whatever it makes sense. Right? So if I delete this object I shouldn't see anything because I don't have any object selected. But you could have it very specific and I guess if you if you couple this with the pinning then you yeah then you know that uh now you can have the object here and you can always have the light tab there open. Or you can do that with object data or
• 97:30 - 98:00 just object and object data. So it allows you to to organize your your um your scene a lot better I think because here you can have just go back to the default just turn on everything and then just continue your your work. Um this um I think for well this was introduced I mentioned for the video sequence editor because the video sequence the in the future not not that far future the video
• 98:00 - 98:30 sequence editor is going to have its own section here for strips. The idea is that there will be well also for sequences but that's a prototype still um but strip. So right now when you select the strip you see the settings here the the current strip um but usually everywhere else in Blender you see it here. So if you have this this way you can make this kind of setups where you can have a whole section just for the strip the current strip you can
• 98:30 - 99:00 have modifiers you can see them here. So the the overall UI can be improved than this right now. This looks a bit of a hack, right? And if you have a strip selected, you could use the regular UI. So, super nice. Um, but yeah, something I would like to propose maybe for Blender um 5 is to even hide the um tool. Uh the second way that you can edit this is by
• 99:00 - 99:30 right clicking on the place where you want to hide it, which is the navigation bar, and then hide it. So the tool having the tool duplicate is you you're still going to be able of course to tweak it from uh from here. Um but here this would be optional because sometimes it gets on the way people are confused. Um so yeah what else? Um region scale highlighting.
• 99:30 - 100:00 Yeah. So now when you have a region that you want to scale you Blender is going to show you a indicator of that region so you know what you're doing. Before it would be just blank. You don't know what exactly what you're changing unless you change it. So nice. The scroll bars um were completely hidden in the past even though there was content in the sidebar here. And this this sidebar I think I mentioned it. Uh no I mentioned
• 100:00 - 100:30 it on a module meeting. So this is a an yeah quality of life improvement basically because before yeah there will be no no scroll bars. Now there is they're very hard to see by default unless you have something bright but that's just the theme thing that we need to we need to address. But now you see now you see the the scroll bar there so you know if you're missing content or not.
• 100:30 - 101:00 Okay. Oh, this one is an improvement from uh right click select. It was uh proposed there. So, basically the you probably run into this in the past. You are using Blender and then you open a menu for the um editors for example. And the moment you leave this area, Blender will just like remove the like disappear. The menu
• 101:00 - 101:30 will disappear. The menu will be closed. Now, Blender is a lot more forgiving in this thing. So, if you're Yeah. You see, you can go like all the way to here. Yeah. So, it's a lot more forgiving. So you can you can with the pen especially you notice that the now you can especially for these menus that are super wide blender will not auto close so quickly. So that's super nice. This was actually on right click select. Someone mentioned it and then I
• 101:30 - 102:00 looked it up and then I mentioned to Harley and he worked on it. Um if the menu is already open the padding also is going to be a lot a lot bigger. So the area around it is going to stay open uh a lot more. Next. Ah, yeah, there was a one pixel pix um when you were full screen, which is very annoying. Not anymore. The active spline uh panel has been moved into the
• 102:00 - 102:30 viewport. It used to be on only on the properties on the sidebar, but um yeah, it's it's just confusing. Um now it was a back report actually. So now it's been moved to the viewport, but it makes more sense and there's no picture and I approved it without a picture. H anyway, I I compiled it. Um the contrast of the uh ah yeah in
• 102:30 - 103:00 the light theme, the contrast of the scroll bars has been improved. It was just basically really really bad. Um the auto run script setting was off was on by default. So it was off if you open Blender but if you reset the value it will be turned on again uh off and that's really bad. Auto run script should always be off by default. So that has been fixed. the geometry panel apparently was uh being shown when
• 103:00 - 103:30 viewing the render result which you don't want that you're viewing a render result. The gizmos uh have a action zone which is now slightly bigger. So this is how it used to be very close to the gizmo and now there is a lot more forgiving. You can, especially when you work with a pen. It's a lot bigger. This change, by the way, is only
• 103:30 - 104:00 when you're working with a with a pen, when when Blender detects that you're using a pen. Um, include button type comparison to reserve the UI. Ah, no. This is this is internal stuff to redraw or not redraw the UI. Hide relative path in the file selector when it's not supported. Hey, that's nice. I missed this one. It didn't have a pull request. It was just Yeah, the
• 104:00 - 104:30 relative path option shouldn't be showing up when when there is no when it's not supported by in the file browser. Um what else? Minimum height for the timeline marker operators operations. Yes, the um minimum height was just too much. And I mentioned this on the live stream. I think that's this is where it comes from. I mentioned it in the in the previous live stream. Um when using the when on on a Mac, the
• 104:30 - 105:00 option um key and the command arrow input movements are now allowed. So, yay for better support for Mac navigation in your inputs. This one is a eye candy basically. So have you ever noticed that Blender when you open Blender it would well depends depends on your on the speed of your computer but
• 105:00 - 105:30 on older computers Blender was just get stuck on a window like this basically gray and until recently it was light gray. So if you were working in the dark, um yeah, Blender would just open and blast you with light. And uh now this is no longer the case because now Blender would actually display the color of the theme. So if you're looking at if you're using a dark theme, this is the default. Now Blender will just show dark, the
• 105:30 - 106:00 light theme will show light, and the any color of a theme will show you the um color, the background color. So it blends with the with the window border. Super nice. And this is shown on a Mac, but it's also should be uh for Windows uh 11 as well. [Music] The Yeah, this looks like a big block of white, but I made a um task that maybe
• 106:00 - 106:30 we could show actually the the Blender logo in it. Um, this also I mean I don't somebody suggested to have a progress bar but Blender should not show you progress bar because should be fast to open. It should be fast. It should be blazing fast. You shouldn't even see this window. [Music] um which I think most people don't well I don't know most but mo a large amount
• 106:30 - 107:00 of people don't even see it like I I don't see it for example on this on this computer if I um close blender well I'm not starting call right but if I open blender it's instant um so yeah let's uh [Music] continue. You probably see it if you use
• 107:00 - 107:30 a lot of add-ons, maybe. Or if it's the first time opening Blender since you restarted, rebooted, maybe. Um, where are we? minimum height, theme, colors, um the tablet drag threshold. So basically what how long it takes you when you click and drag on a on a on a gizmo or in general in Blender is now different between if
• 107:30 - 108:00 you have a pen or if you have a mouse. So with the mouse, it gives you some room because because it's the mouse is more precise usually and the pen is not so much. So the threshold is different. A lot of work has been put into um pen support lately by Harley and now the sculpt module pen tilt values consistent pentil values across platforms and device drivers.
• 108:00 - 108:30 Nice. Because Blender is preparing for tablet support apparently geometry nodes. Use viewport icon for viewer node. Small change, just cosmetic change, but it makes more sense because the this is what you use like this is what Blender usually uh uses. And the I icon is usually for the preview inside of the um of the in
• 108:30 - 109:00 geometry nodes. Everywhere else is for the preview of the node itself. Whereas geometry nodes viewer only works in the viewport. So actually makes sense to use this improve the default position of shader nodes. Apparently the Yeah. Ever noticed that when you open Blender it will be like met with halfway the um half half of the node? No, no longer the case. The viewport
• 109:00 - 109:30 icon is now used to indicate the active viewer. Nice. On Windows, you may notice that speaking of this startup screen that there will be a white flash during startup. And uh sorry, I'm opening the window because it's just running out of air here. It's actually pretty warm for the Netherlands these days. you would see on Windows a white flash
• 109:30 - 110:00 during startup because Blender would um yeah would try to draw eagerly without even getting some content somewhere like okay what is it what is my theme what is what's my content um so yeah that should go um what else also small tweak but light themes now should see a better indicator on these type of scrollers that you can
• 110:00 - 110:30 resize. Then the pen y tilt expected direction now has it been inverted which should match all uh wind tab windows ink wayand and Mac OS I guess um direction nice for consistency then the default position of the shaders in the startup node as I I already mentioned but this is for the startup
• 110:30 - 111:00 node then the label of asset browser parameters has been it's now more clear. So basically it used to be called like this and I mentioned this in the I think in in um couple episodes ago um instance collections would say link or append. What do you think this feature does? I I'll let you think about it. Well, this has nothing to do. It doesn't link or or append. Basically, it's going
• 111:00 - 111:30 to instance the collections if or when linking or when appending. So, this is what it does actually when linking and when appending. So, now this is a lot more clear. So, thank you Nika for this improvement. The speaking of labels, this is um also pretty pretty nice. The positioning of the labels and the icons is now better. Um I I don't know if you're going to
• 111:30 - 112:00 notice notice it's subtle, but it's related to another improvement. So be before the tool will be like the the spacing horizontal spacing would be too wide, the vertical spacing will be wrong. uh no padding around the text but now there is actually padding that is consistent across the grid. Nice. Um some other changes related to that coming soon such as two line. This this sounds
• 112:00 - 112:30 like something small, but it's some it's a is a quality of life improvement that Blender needs since whatever because labels in general in Blender didn't was never really supported to line but now it does. So basically before you were just only see the beginning of the of whatever was the
• 112:30 - 113:00 name of this asset and that's it. You you were limited by that. It wasn't even going to show the how how it ends like usually Blender does. Not anymore. Now it's going to wrap into two lines if it's if it if there is enough space. So you can actually read the content of your assets. Yay. The name of your asset. So super nice. And when the for example especially when you have items that have like
• 113:00 - 113:30 um um extension for example here you see license and what is what is this? Okay, I can guess it's a text file because of the icon, but now you can actually read it's a text file. And when it doesn't fit, Blender is smart enough or Julian Isel is smart smart enough because he implemented this. The first line will always show so in this case license and the second line is going to show the
• 113:30 - 114:00 beginning an ellipses and then the actual ending. So you always get to see the extension. Brilliant. Again, another example here. How do you know which format this is? Well, now you know. Now you know. This would be like screencast. And what is the ending on this? Now you see first line always full, second line ellipses, and you get to see the extension. So cool. small things. But
• 114:00 - 114:30 this this took so much work. So much work. Thank you Julian and Harley and all the and Andy and everyone for that is involved in testing and giving feedback. Next compositor in the well this is UI/Cmpositor. the compositor. So when you h click on the viewer node when you actually click on the icon now it's going to activate
• 114:30 - 115:00 the viewer node related to what I mentioned before. Another UI change is on the save startup dialogue the name the the label is going to be a bit more descriptive. The label used to say override main startup file and it would say make the current file the default startup blend file. for a new user the word default startup like it's a lot confu a lot more confusing than
• 115:00 - 115:30 just telling you what it will do which is blender will start next time as it is now clear so nice one also the template will start next time as it is now so it's much more there. Next, speaking of descriptive and nice tool tips, this one by Loy Do Lok and a
• 115:30 - 116:00 user that is very active on right click select and um is now making PRs for these kind of improvements in the UI. So the tool tips and the description for the modes the different shading modes has been updated instead of saying um like some of them were like display render preview. What does it mean? So now it actually tells you preview materials using predefined environment lights. Hey, it's actually
• 116:00 - 116:30 descriptive. Um, and the same for it used to be called just preview mode and now render also has a definition and the wireframe mode. The light theme was fixed. Well, one of the main issues that it had it was like this is the light theme and it had it's not first it's not really light like it's gray and I'm not going to
• 116:30 - 117:00 change that for Blender 4.5 because it's 4.5. It should look like 4.4 4.3 and the rest. For Blender 5, I want to give it a pass and make it actually light. Um but one thing that was bothering me is that um it was actually a missing it was missing an oversight when the option to color the editor border was added. It was never added to this theme. And this color border is supposed to match the same
• 117:00 - 117:30 color of the top bar and the status bar. So they blend in and now they do. So before after small thing and a few other tweaks but small tweaks clarify boolean solver descriptions. Yeah, make it clear the um just fixing some tool tips on the booleans which we already seen. Another tool was renamed by me. I was uh using the t well
• 117:30 - 118:00 I was making the release nodes of the of blender 4.4 and there was a change to this to the trees to quads. I know trees is short for triangles quads short for quadrilateral quad something but the user will have to search for trees tree tris not very convenient. So now the tool is actually called triangles to
• 118:00 - 118:30 quads which is the name that it that it had before. Oh now I don't get the I don't get the link to the PR. There was a PR here. Anyways um this uh was renamed to triangles to quads. You can still search t to quads because that's the name of the operator. The API hasn't changed. So that will still yell this result. Um, Harley made it. So, the
• 118:30 - 119:00 line breaks to into new lines can also happen on conditional punctuation. Some specific um characters that will make a line break. Nice. And here we have some of them. Comma, colon, semicolon, Greek, question mark, Armenian, full stop. Nice. And a few more for path breaking. line characters so the tool tips don't
• 119:00 - 119:30 go forever but they actually line break where they can um remove gizmo 3D part hit space scaling ah this is related to the gizmo but it's all part of the same change and expose yeah know this is not really UI is it read attributes change no for some reason it's in UI And Jesus do so we still have okay let's let's continue let's do everything today
• 119:30 - 120:00 USD that was it for us for user interface USD animated camera property imports in the following animated data from USD GM cameras focal length dove distance dove f-stop clip start and end tilt shift X and Y and aperture sizes with some caveats so read the description Let's talk about the video sequence editor which also seen a lot of improvement this week. First, we have a
• 120:00 - 120:30 completely refactor sleep operator. So the S key in the video sequence editor now has uh what has been rewritten which some new features uh not just the rewrite one there is it's a model key map that shows you uh interactively what you can do with it in the status bar. So let's open this in a new. So you can see in the status bar now it shows you things that are going on. In the top it shows you the more information. Before
• 120:30 - 121:00 you should show you uh it used to show you just a value. I think now it shows you the frames and the seconds on which is offset. So it does really important when you are dealing with audio. You want to keep that in mind. Also [Music] the overlay, the offset overlay, even if you have it disabled, it will always show now when you are transforming. So you know how much more you can uh you can
• 121:00 - 121:30 go. There is a new option for clamping. You can turn it on and off by pressing the letter C for clamp. And it will basically allow you to go further or like over the limits uh or limited to the content. As you can see here, the moving the mouse over to the limits at the very beginning. If you see it doesn't it doesn't let you go into empty
• 121:30 - 122:00 space. Nice clamping in the new. So that's that's it, right? fixes molec overlays for offsets and clamping. So cool. Thank you, John Kir Swenson. Also, John, thank you for making an icon for the blade tool. Yep. The blade tool. Do you um do you this tool? There was no indicator that you
• 122:00 - 122:30 were in this tool. You just need to click and it was just happen. something would be cut somewhere under the mouse. Now, there is a custom cursor for it. So, great. However, it still doesn't show you where is the cut going to be, which can be a bit confusing. And this is being worked on by um so basically I'm I propose to have like a line where the cut is going to happen because it could happen that the
• 122:30 - 123:00 cut is u very much um somewhere else, right? like not under the cursor. So, as you can see here, it just I click here and it cuts here because this is where the frame is. Um, anyway, actually, maybe we could the grid could when you zoom in, the grid could also be a bit more useful. It could actually show you frames in a more subtle and then seconds like an
• 123:00 - 123:30 adaptive grid for the zoom. Um, next, hide reveal strip operators in the sequence preview. Yeah. Um, the preview of the sequencer now supports more operators. In this case, the hide or uh reveal. So, you can just press H. No, H. No. Uh, mute. No. H. H. Yeah. Yes, it makes sense. Mute is for notes and makes all
• 123:30 - 124:00 sections in Blender. So yeah, you can hide and unhide them from the preview. Super super nice. Also, the mirror operator is now available in the preview um thanks to Rammon cloak and you can now mirror. So when you use the operator the the the model operators for mirroring then a small UI change that would be would make things a lot
• 124:00 - 124:30 more clear. So basically when you ah I mentioned this in the in the last uh live stream in the previous episode that the text could be improved to it's a bit more compact and the the result of what happens earlier in the tool tip uh or on the text because that means that if we don't have much more room like if the window is small and you don't have much room to show the entire label then you can at
• 124:30 - 125:00 least see what happened. So that's why I I think having those values at the beginning of the the reports or operators or labels is always best. And another one which you maybe are not going to notice but you will now that I mention, let me uh let's see. Do you notice anything strange in here?
• 125:00 - 125:30 You see scaling up, scaling to the side. Do you notice anything strange? Well, if you were not a sequence user, uh you probably wouldn't tell, but now scaling the editor, the video sequence editor doesn't mess up your zoom anymore. Previously, and maybe I have I have 4.4 for here. Um, if you had a strip basic,
• 125:30 - 126:00 well, not even without a strip. You see how scaling would affect. So, if I had, let's say I had a text strip here, right? Beautiful. I have it here. And then changing this would like mess my zoom and not anymore. Now, send editor. So
• 126:00 - 126:30 nice. Anyway, love this little change. You're probably not going to notice, but now that I told you, probably you will. Um, unless you are a really big fan of the editor changing zoom when you zoom in and out. I mean, isn't that how the viewport does? No. Yeah, the viewport is as expected, right? He just well horizontally he tries to fit the content there but vertically it doesn't interesting h anyways let's completely switch topics
• 126:30 - 127:00 to vertex paint these are one of the few latest few changes vertex paint now allows you to uh create undo steps that is awesome we all makes mistakes so thank you Sean Kim allow the editor actions to create and do steps then in the viewport. Two changes. One, show extras um now works uh to uh show you the space texture space and bounce. Before the um show extras
• 127:00 - 127:30 wouldn't do anything. So now it does. And a performance improvement on the calculation of object box selection. If you're in object mode, you box select. This change made it around 100 times faster. So if you had a if you ever notice how box selecting objects was slow, try now. Something I used to take 6 seconds to select, now it's 60
• 127:30 - 128:00 milliseconds. Nice. Filipe asks, is 4.4.2 out? No. Well, depends it. If you're using some providers, you will see that it's out, but it's not officially out. It um contains one crash that is very easy to get in the compositor. So, I don't recommend using
• 128:00 - 128:30 4.4.2 unless you Well, no, wait, because a 4.4.3 is coming either tomorrow. Uh yeah, I'm using 4.4 4.2 actually yes I am using 4.4.2 and actually I can show you the crash I already show the crash here so basically this is uh this is 4.4.2 as you can see here and in the um compositor I can close blender by simply dragging this t that's it blender quit
• 128:30 - 129:00 unexpectedly don't use it just wait for 4.4.3 4.3 is coming this week. Probably Thursday or yeah, I don't think they're going to wait another week. All right. And speaking of crashes on Windows, if um you are if you've been using the the daily bills, you may have noticed that when you get a crash in the really
• 129:00 - 129:30 unexpected, unusual case that you get a crash, you will see this window which allows you to restart Blender. Nice. Um view the crash log or report the bug. This is basically the same as it's not going to send the back right away. It's going to open uh the browser and it's just probably the same as doing this. Basically, it just text you here with some more information about Blender, your Blender, your operating system, your drivers, and that's it. No personal data, of course. And that's it.
• 129:30 - 130:00 Actually, the last change I wanted to mention is that fulcan ful it's no longer considered experimental and I wanted one of them. [Applause] uh yeah the the the back end I can't show you basically because I'm using a Mac so it doesn't apply here but if you go on Windows or Linux you go to
• 130:00 - 130:30 preferences system you will see a panel here called display graphics I think and you can change OpenGL to Vulcan and if you love Blender if you like Blender if you want to see Blender improve and you don't mind testing things, consider changing it. And I'm going to uh I'm going to share a uh real use
• 130:30 - 131:00 case, a real uh scenario what happened. Yes. a few this weekend I was um changing something on my Blender at home and I really uh haven't noticed that I've been using Vulcan experimental for weeks now and I haven't noticed any I I have a good computer at home so I I didn't notice any slowdowns or like crashes or anything weird no especially no crashes but also no slowdowns I've
• 131:00 - 131:30 been using geometry nodes and hair tools and things like that And I didn't notice that that I was actually using Vulcan at home. So, so far for me it was actually pretty pretty pretty neat. Um, but yeah, I would recommend if you would like to help Blender improve uh Vulcan to use it because the developers developer the one main one that is working on it your own mentioned that he's not getting enough back reports. We're not getting enough back reports on Vulcan. So
• 131:30 - 132:00 either Vulcan support is already awesome or not enough users are um using it and that's an issue because Blender 4.5 is going to have it as an option but Blender 5 or 5.1 might have Vulcan as default. OpenGL will still be there of course but might have it on as a by default um because so far
• 132:00 - 132:30 it actually m seems to make Blender uh load faster has more potential for improvements in performance. Um it doesn't seem to have any drawbacks. So might as well be um on by default. But that's for Blender 5 or 5.1. Hasn't been decided yet. It's up to you to test it and provide feedback. If you have any feedback, you can go to the DevTalk forums dev talk.blender.org or you can also just if
• 132:30 - 133:00 you find an issue, you can back you can report the bug on dev talk. there is a thread called feedback and testing where you can mention if things are going well or not or I mean I guess just posting it goes it's works okay then it's not that I mean it's useful but it's not that but if you notice that it's much faster and you can actually prove that it's faster that would be a nice thing to uh to give some life to this feedback and testing I think someone here uh did it and I already use
• 133:00 - 133:30 it very fast and enjoyed I did some test. But yeah, uh some users here actually uh reporting that they but this is I don't find any any issues. I like I open a variety of files. I did not find any any issues. The build was stable. The render image looked correct. Um yeah, I suspect that you if you did a blind test, I would not have been able to tell you which back end was
• 133:30 - 134:00 Coke and which one was Pepsi. Excellent work. Super nice. Thank you, AA. Anyway, um that's it. That is all uh for today. I think it's been over two hours, two and a half hour. Um I Well, there probably some questions in Blender community. How many are they? Oh, wait. Let's see. There's six comments on Blender community. So, let let's see.
• 134:00 - 134:30 Are there any? Okay. So, all right. Nice. The one of them is thank you actually by Paul. Thank you. Prince of FL says, "Hola, Pablo. I will really I would really like nested the electrics in Blender for some realistic glass. Lucas Tner is working on it here." Good news because Lucas Torman is actually a paid developer of the of Blender development fund. So, that's uh that's good. From the draft, it looks
• 134:30 - 135:00 like we have to wait for material X updates until he implements it for Blender maybe. For which Blender would this be a milestone for? You probably are more aware of where this uh is at the moment because I I'm not following this task in particular. I just know that material X is gaining more and more traction in Blender. So uh shouldn't be that that long, but you can always add emojis of support there. Next question. Hello Pablo. I was compiling
• 135:00 - 135:30 my render in VSE the other day and when importing image sequence I was not importing it the order of the frame number. It was weird. Should it respect the frame number rather than the date modified? Um yes. Although no wait there is an option for that I think. Is it isn't it? Um by add a image sequence. Um, use placeholders, set view transform, replace selection. Um, no,
• 135:30 - 136:00 there's no option. Use placeholders. Um, if it doesn't, this this means that it will add placeholders when it doesn't find the um the frame numbers, but this should work. You can always report it as a bug. Next, Pablo says, "I just wanted to thank you for inspiring me to get into Blender. My journey began when I first saw Cintel that is 14 years ago and after hi I use her for VFX total lurker
• 136:00 - 136:30 on the dev channels for the best part of the decade but blender today made the blender devs starting with you a lot more approachable nice I still work here until I found just something I couldn't live without fixing it took a year and still learning C++ for this but I hope to keep contributing maybe something a little more normal next possibly normal correction Nice. So, yes. Um, actually we've seen some of uh your patches here in the show. So, congrats on that. I'm happy to hear that it had an
• 136:30 - 137:00 influence. Um, Sadex says, "Hola, Pablo, is there any reason that relative shape keys and absolute shape keys are mutually exclusive? You can use one or the other, which translates to giving up on the latter because the former is basically mandatory." Um, no. But I always wonder why even bothering with absolute shape keys. Um, especially if you if you could have
• 137:00 - 137:30 this as like attributes, we wouldn't even need that. Uh, right click menus don't follow the you the OS convention of staying open no matter where the mouse is. And the same for the buttons that open menus. Uh yes, the here are examples. Yeah. Well, I mean I think this is a a Blender feature. Uh it's not a bug. It's a feature. It's a
• 137:30 - 138:00 um it's it's meant to it's a Blender thing. It's a Blender thing. So it's it's um it's by design. It's not a it's not a bug that Oh, no. No. No. It's by design. finishes. It's a way to dismiss things. In the same way that Blender, you can dismiss things by right clicking. That's not very industry standard. You usually escape. In Blender, you can do escape and right clicking. And I kind of like it this way. Maybe it should be an option. Um, but yeah, like a user
• 138:00 - 138:30 preference. Um, and the last question. Hello Pablo. A few years ago, there was a blog post about handling Hypoli through a separate editor that was discussing. Is it still happening? I don't think so. There hasn't been any uh I think it was on the asset creation pipeline by Pablo Daro, right? Was it? Yes. Pablo Devaro no longer works uh for Blender for since many many years. And that work hasn't been u taken over. Some
• 138:30 - 139:00 of it has actually we we've seen some improvements today. Um but not not this one in particular of the high poly large scenes. Um oh yeah this is related to this but no not. Um all right that is all. I think it's way over time two and a half hour and it's almost getting dark here. So uh thanks everyone for staying until the end. Thanks for
• 139:00 - 139:30 the camera to not fail today because I was expecting I already had my the um the backup camera um just in case but no it wasn't didn't break. All right. Um I will see you again in just a couple weeks, two weeks. In the meantime, please um if you're using Blender 4.4 updates when 4.4.3 4.3 comes out soon in a couple of days. And if you see 4.4
• 139:30 - 140:00 people using 4.4.2, let them know because um it's like, "Hey, I heard from the Blender HQ that they shouldn't use it because it crashes the compositor." And they can test it for themselves. Um I think that's it. Thanks for the nice messages about the my um me with me disappearing last time. Uh last last week, I was I was sick. I had a small medical uh inter intervention and I'm fine now. So, thanks for the kind messages and the emails and the emojis
• 140:00 - 140:30 and the everything. I have nothing else to say other than take care and thanks for watching. I will see you again next time, next week. next next week for this this show that we've been calling Blender Today live. Watch your ear holes. I hope you listen
• 140:30 - 141:00 to Thanks. Heat up [Music] here. [Music]