9 NEW Blender Features Coming in 2023!

hi everyone welcome back to the channel today we're going to take a look at new things coming to the blender ecosystem in 2023 Tom rosendahl the chairman of the blender Foundation has just released this blog post on the official blender website which basically outlines all of the exciting things coming this year so I figured we'd sit down take a look and have a little talk through what's coming some of the projects talked about in this blog post are things I know a lot of people are excited for there are some things in here which I think might have been pushed back or we just didn't hear much about since the original announcements so let's take a look the upcoming year is going to be interesting for blender aside from the blender or Community effort to keep core functionality stable and up to date several high profile projects have started already that fingers crossed might get realized this year now I take this last bit with a pinch of salt you know how things change project priorities get shifted around things don't always get finished on time so just keep that in mind while taking a little look through this post so first of all Vulcan and metal opengl currently Powers user interface 3D viewports and Eevee however it's expected to be deprecated by the industry in the coming years blender developers already work for many years to prepare a move away from opengl basically trying to make blender future proof Vulcan is the cross-platform successor to opengl with many opportunities to improve performance and new features like Ray tracing the blender foundation will invest developer time to finish a migration to the Vulcan Graphics API in 2023 alright so that's cool that should be like a pretty big leap this year moving it to a much more future-proof cross-platform Graphics API in parallel and using this development Apple Engineers have been working on making blender fully compatible with the Metal Graphics API on Mac OS this project is also expected to wrap up in 2023 so again from the sounds of it 2023 seems to be a pretty big future-proofing year for blender real-time viewport compositing oh boy I know this is why a lot of people are excited for this project adds a new compositor back end taking advantage of gpux Celebration to be performant enough for real-time interaction so that's one question that's always been rolling around with blender you know comparing it to other softwares why is it that you can stack like 60 post-processing effects in a game engine and it runs really really smoothly all different kinds of weird stylistic effects lens dirt Bloom whatever but as soon as you put one glass air node in blender suddenly oh boy a sinkhole opens up from under your computer and the project is just gone okay that's another reaction they're very inefficient but also CPU Reliant from what I know so that's the important Point here this project adds a new compositor back in taking advantage of GPU acceleration to be performant enough for real-time interaction as a first step this back-end Powers the new viewport compositor which applies the result of the compositing nodes directly in the 3D viewport artists do not have to wait for a full render to start compositing for faster and more interactive iterations that's great especially for people doing stylistic work that rely on their immediate feedback when they're experimenting with different types of visual Styles but also I mean it's just going to be useful for every use case even like super photo realistic work being able to make tweaks especially balancing how the lighting in your scene interacts with any post-processing effects which also make use of that lighting just being able to visualize every step of that workflow in one go is quite important I think so I think this is going to be a big step the initial version of this feature will be available in blender 3.5 five okay that's a promise the next steps are to support more notes and features and in the long term bring GPU acceleration to the existing compositor oh yes excellent if you can get that done this year Well Done blender team I'm sure a lot of people will really appreciate it and of course on this blog post which I'll try and link below for each of these sections you can click through and it will take you to other referenced blog posts about the subject as well so you can take a look through and see like the earlier demonstrations of the real-time compositor here but we're not going to take a look at all of those you can do that in your free time so the next section is brush assets the asset system and browser will fully support brushes for painting and sculpting this makes it easy to use make and share bundles of brushes with others lovely that kind of opens up a whole new world of tools development that creators can share with each other sharing sculpting brushes has always been doable in blender but a little bit tricky you know I never really felt like it was intended for that having a more unified system where painting and sculpting is connected with the new asset browser is going to be a fantastic thing I'll be making massive use of the asset browser with my paid product bugs now especially the procedural material tools and I've even got an entire add-on that's specifically focused around working with the asset browser that's the modular workspaces add-on so I'm glad they're trying to make things more connective around that feature okay blender wraps thanks to blender's very high level of customization using python scripting it's possible to build up blender from scratch with your own user interfaces and editor layouts this combined with bundling blend files assets data you can create it to make custom tools or complete experiences okay so blender apps has always been this little kind of esoteric feature that's been talked about over the past few years actually I think since the blender 2.8 code Quest basically imagine blender being so customizable that you can create your own variations of the software and if I click through to this older blog post you can see in a nutshell blender apps are experiences powered by a blender blender apps can do anything the blender can plus so much more when extended they are designed to be portable and focused on a specific usage so imagine a use case for education for example where there's a more simplified version of blender to teach people how 3D systems work you can see here a very simple way of creating 3D scenes or that could go in the other direction and create versions of blender for much more complex production pipelines or even small games this is something I'm interested in seeing more about because to me it sounds like one of those features where I think ton has a very clear vision for it in his mind but it's going to be one of those things that will be difficult to communicate to the general wider Community that's just looking for more blender features rather than different strange specific use cases for a customized version of blender if that makes sense but I am personally all for customization like the more we can customize blender the better especially from the add-on developer perspective I want to have much more control over the user interface but anyway we'll see more about this project in the future let's move on to the next one the extensions platform so this is what I did a video about a while back that not many people watched basically the extensions platform is going to be a way for people to be able to auto update their add-ons which is something I think a lot of people will really appreciate but it won't be for every add-on so there are a few caveats the blender foundation will launch an official Community moderated website for sharing discovering and downloading add-ons themes and asset libraries the extension site will only offer gnu GPO compliance software or CC bias sharer like compatible content no commercialization will happen on the platform it aims to be attractive for artists and add-on developers to freely share their work on blender.org even if they choose to be using third-party services to generate revenues with the same or similar extensions okay so for example if I took one of my add-ons like hold tools which is a GNU GPO compliant add-on that would be perfect for this website even though it's available in Gum Road and blender market for one dollar you know and I can raise money using donations through gumroad especially that's still allowed you know it's allowed to be on all of these platforms it will fit on the extensions platform and if it's on here it means that people inside of blender will be able to keep it automatically updated whenever I push new releases so it's an interesting idea I think this will be very useful for people and if you click through to the older blog post you'll be able to see some like mock-ups for how this might look on the web I'm looking forward to hearing more about it okay so Evie next this is going to be a good one it's going to be the next stage for the EV rendering engine quite an appropriate name don't you think blender's real-time rendering engine EV as opposed to Cycles has been evolving constantly since its introduction in blender 2.8 the goal was to make it viable both for asset Creation in the way of like being able to visualize your full PBR pipeline for an asset in real time and for final rendering so just to explain that a bit more that's why we have like the material preview mode in blender as well as the final render mode continuing and to support a wide range of workflows however thanks to the latest Hardware Innovations many new techniques have become viable and Evie can take advantage of them expect new features such as screen space Global illumination more efficient shading and lighting improve volume rendering and panoramic cameras okay all of that is great Global illumination is something that's been solely missing in EV screen space Club illumination is great but it would be nice to have or innovate more complex GI methods in EV um something I've been thinking for a while is that it would be nice to have a way to kind of mesh data between cycles and heavy in interesting ways I just I wonder how possible that is wherever any point in the future would be able to have both engines kind of virtually running at the same time maybe even in a limited capacity so we can take some data from cycles and combine it with EV to make the results more accurate but I feel like that's kind of more complex on a tall order don't really know how possible that would be in the future but I'm just thinking more for like Ray tracing and lighting perspectives is would there be any way to kind of use Cycles as like an informative guide for Evie but anyway that's just like my conjecture for future ideas but in the meantime EV next is going to be focusing on screen space Global illumination and I'm also very interested in the improved volume rendering because volume effects and Evie have always been quite lackluster especially when compared to Cycles back in the day there were a bunch of us doing like nebulaic renders using Eevee trying to see how far we could push it what kind of realistic and cool looking results we could get especially in terms of animations but the problem was the evolum system was using like a cards technique where as you were flying through you would be be able to see all this flickering on these very defined layers and it was quite difficult to get good results with that so be interesting to see if the improved volume rendering coming from EV next will be able to assist us with animations like that and panoramic camera is very nice okay so next up simulation nodes this is a really exciting aspect of geometry nodes that in recent blending Community Roundup videos on my channel I've pointed out some really interesting creators making some like cool projects with this basically simulation nodes allows you to run a set of nodes like a function you've created many times practically in real time so that you can simulate a change in data now this will allow you to do all kinds of different animations and complex generative type effects and geometry nodes it basically opens a whole world of potential and can drastically reduce the number of nodes you need to create an effect because before what people would do in Geometry nodes is if they wanted to repeat a process again and again they would kind of bundle it into a node group and just have like hundreds of these node groups running one after the other just to try and simulate a loop now you don't really need to worry about that with geometry notes getting hair support last year this year the focus will be on simulation for physics and Beyond that's another important point being able to simulate physics which is essentially just a change in data the system will be designed for interactivity and experimentation with simulations running in the viewport at their own clock or editing objects and nodes this is going to be really fun one to play with and I know that a lot of really cool tutorials are going to start appearing in the community if you want to learn more about this you can click through on the geometry nodes Workshop 2022 and if you scroll down you will find the simulation simulation node section we can see the general design of how this works but as I also said in a previous video you can actually download an experimental branch of blender now and try the simulation notes for yourself okay this next one isn't really as interesting for the mass blender user base out there it's more for Blended developers upgrade of developer.blender.org with gitier I don't know if that's how you say it blender developers currently use fabricator for project management code review and issue tracking unfortunately that software was discontinued so we are looking for a good replacement the choice was to use gitier which is a fully free open source software project with functionality similar to GitHub the main job was to migrate the full 20 years of development history of blender to this new gitbase software management system 20 years crazy here's to the next 20. all right Next Up character animation animation and rigging is going to get a full makeover in the coming years including making the core design future proof and many ideas to improve the experience for animators a large group of developers and expert animators are involved with it kickoff was at the last blender conference and you can read the report below this is great I know a lot of people get into blender to do animated content in all different forms for video games official effects for actually just making animated films so I think it's great that they're actually putting a significant amount of like design effort into new animation tools of course just like before you can click through to take a look at this blog post here the future of character animation there is a lot of information here to go over so if you are specifically interested in animation with blender then definitely worth doing a bit of a deep dive into that and there's more the grease pencil team will come with ambitious plans there's an exciting texture painting and sculpting speed upcoming and Hydra render delegates and other USD improvements are under development the procedural texturing project we're not having a concrete roadmap and resources yet is still a goal on behalf of everyone best wishes for a great 2023 Tom Rosendale chairman of the blender Foundation all right fantastic so that's what's coming in blender this year a lot of exciting stuff to look forward to and you can rest assured that we will definitely be keeping track of it on this channel so if you're not already make sure to subscribe and consider ringing the notification Bell if you want to stay informed on all that's going on on my side I've been doing lots of different development projects there are some really exciting things I can't wait to show you coming down the pipeline I don't want to speak too soon but over on my second Channel I talk about some of these projects in our little podcast episodes also I'll just throw in a quick note here by gen version 10 is in development but version 9.2 has been released which addresses a Mac and Linux specific issue to do with the pending content that was introduced in blender 3.4 so if you've been waiting for a fix on Biogen then that's available for you to download now there's a backlog of content for the community material packs and new materials are coming and other things but I'll save all this exciting info for our upcoming projects for future videos I also want to say hi to all the new people that came over from Ducky's recent video hi great to meet you feel free to check out all the other videos on our Channel and if you made it this far through the video consider putting a wrench emoji in the comments if you do that I'll be able to see who actually made it this far through the video I love this because I recognize a ton of you in the comments it's always uplifting as well to see there see I won't keep you for much longer you can sign up to my patreon if you want help support all of these videos all of my projects and on Curtis holder online store you can find a variety of free and paid tools that I've created and also some recommendations for Cool Tools that I enjoy from around the community so yeah lots to explore I'll leave it there have a fantastic day everyone and I will see you next time

Channel: Curtis Holt

Views: 33,183

Keywords: blender, 2023, new, features, coming, upcoming, learn, free, tutorial, where to, simulation, geometry, nodes, devlog

Id: r1UhAh4WOKw

Length: 13min 44sec (824 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 16 2023