Blender 3 Released!!! Cycles X, Asset Browser, Geometry Nodes & More

hello ladies and gentlemen it's mike here at game from scratch today is a big day for blender users because blender 3.0 just chipped now there's nothing really significant about that number it's just the next in the versioning sequence we're done the two point x line so there's nothing massively different in this but there's three pretty major features here and one minor one that i happen to really like so we're gonna take a look at those four items in this video then we will jump in and take a look at the release notes so here you can see this is blender 3.0 again released today you should be able to download it right now and we're going to go through those features uh in kind of relatively arbitrary order so the first one we've got is cycles x i think this is probably the marquee thing now the x stands for 10 as in it's the 10th anniversary of cycles and if you do not know cycles is the uh rendering engine in here so if you you render your results out to an image or to a movie it's cycles that is worked on and they've done a lot of things in these cycles render engine for this particular release in fact it was rewritten underneath and what you're seeing here the viewport now it definitely looks slow compared to ev but this is actually substantially faster than it used to be on top of that and it doesn't make for a great video so i'm not going to showcase it here but render speeds for cycles themselves were rewritten in a new core uh now you'll take advantage of your gpus rendered like two to eight times faster i think it was might even be more than that might be two to ten times faster so the new cycles uh core it is definitely nice for people doing renders and for people that are using the interactive viewport uh believe it or not this is fast we've also got some improvements for like opticsd noising etc but cyclex is probably the big new feature here for people that do rendering in blender you should see your render times get substantially faster now quick fyi if you are on the mac uh the gpu accelerated cycles x stuff isn't going to be in until 3.1 now the good news is there are engineers from the apple silicon team working with them to get the gpu support in place but for now uh cycles cycles x is uh nvidia amd only it's going to come to mac 3.1 but you should see substantially faster render times in blender 3. next up we got a bit of a catch-all this started back in i think it was blender 2.93 was the first release of geometry notes might have even been earlier than that but geometry knows have gotten re-architected to a great degree and now we've got uh better support for attributes and properties in place with the way that nodes work they re-architected several of the nodes that existed before so if you are using a previous version i'll show you how to enable the old one so you can follow along to an old tutorial at the same time they've added a number of new nodes including new ones for text and curves that should make life better now if you do not know how geometry nodes work it's basically node based construction of geometry objects so here is a node graph in action that goes together to create these procedural buildings what it allows you to do and this is like a primo thing if you're in game development doing level design watch as i change the size of this building so you've got parametric control over things because all of these things are being driven by these node graphs very cool stuff there and in blender three you had a lot of re-architecting of the way things were done we added curved nodes again text nodes if you want to grab the old legacy nodes by the way come in here edit preferences and then what you want to do is turn on the developer options that can be achieved by going to the interface tab here and then turning on developer extras right there then you'll notice you now have this experimental tab here and you can turn on geometry node's legacy this will give you access to the pre three point x nodes those are all going to be deprecated in blender four but if you want to follow along with an existing tutorial a lot of nodes got re-architected so with the geometry noise changes in blender 3 do beware you may want to turn on the legacy nodes there but definitely a nice new feature in that regard so now we're going to show you probably the more let's say mundane new feature and that is the all new knife tool so the knife tool got a lot of improvements let's go here switch over to editing mode like so and you will notice just expand this one out the knife tool here has a lot of new functionality it just works better on the whole and one of the neat new features of it so we'll get to this when we go through the release notes of what has changed in the knife tool uh but if you're cutting up geometry and so on the knife tool has been a staple bread and butter pun not intended but what you can do now this is actually kind of neat so i'm going back here to object mode i'm going to add another mesh into the world like so i'm going to select both of those let's go into edit mode like so and then now using the knife tool you can actually cut across multiple objects so there's been a lot of improvements to the knife tool in general uh but i i think multi-object cutting is probably one of the coolest things probably the smallest new feature that i really like but i like the knife tool so i'd like improvements to the knife tool now one bonus little tweak to the ui we're going to cover before we get to the final new thing to demonstrate is the change to the way the corner menus work so before in the past if you wanted to basically if i want to bring this window down so it's split here i had to split this window over like so until they lined up perfectly and then i could go ahead and merge it down like this but now what you can actually do is just grab a corner menu and bring it across now that is probably the single biggest beautiful change they have made in this release i have always found the quarter men used to be incredibly confusing and i do definitely like that new feature but finally let's show you the last major new feature and that is the asset browser it's also the pose library so asset browser right here doesn't look all that special what you can do is basically take anything in your scene so for example i can grab this cockpit right here which is cube21 and you can go ahead and mark it as an asset and it will now show up in your asset browser at the same time you can do that for any material so you can go to say vetro here i say mark as asset and it shows up in my asset browser so then if i've got a new scene so let's go ahead here and create a new scene like so um come on lighting where's my lighting all right let's go back here i guess i don't have any lighting in that scene all right so here we got a brand new scene what we do basically i don't have material so i can bring the items into the scene instantiate like that i want to bring material in bring it in like that so it gives you this drag and drop access to your assets but the cool thing about it is what you can do is you can come in here to the um preferences file paths and you can actually set up a directory full of blend files that will then show up if i come in here so if i if i set a folder with a blend file in it i can then come down here and go to my user library so you see here i have to set one up but then you can create these libraries of assets so it makes handling all of your managing your assets your various different textures and animations because this also works for poses by the way makes it really clean and straightforward so that's the last thing that made it into this release this was supposed to be in an earlier version it got bumped back and speaking of bumped back the vulcan refactor for the eevee renderer uh did get bumped back so eevee right now which is the real-time renderer you see in action uh right here this uh it's supposed to have a new underlying vulcan renderer that's unfortunately going to be in blender 3.1 but we got a lot of really nice things in this release again so you've got the new asset browser going to change the way you work with your files we've got cycles x which makes the renderer substantially faster we got the all new knife tool and we've got the other item i'm forgetting oh the re-architecting of the geometry notes so definitely some really nice things there and then a couple of minor-ish things like the new knife tool and again the changes to the way the ui work i really like that change that's going to just make customizing the user interface so much less nitpicky than it used to be before so that one kudos to that change so now let's jump and take a look at the release notes so here we are at the release notes i'm going to say blender have really upped their game in the last couple of releases they've also done uh show show off reels to kind of showcase what's new in each new release which is actually quite nice as well uh so if you want to check those out they're linked in this linked update but you can see here kind of a bit of a top-level summary of what's there we're gonna have some repetition of the things we already covered obviously but cycles is faster okay so the numbers i said earlier were right two to eight times faster real world scenes compared to blender 2.93 on an nvidia quattro with optics denoising turned on so less lag more fun so more responsive viewport due to scheduling and display algorithms um so i'm not really sure what they're showcasing here but as you see they've definitely sped up the cycles viewport rendering we saw that in action as well some updates to the open image denoise so upgrades to version 1.4 you can see the results or maybe you can't actually it's very visible on the uh on the couch in the background so you can see that the one thing it really kind of stripped away a lot of the details so that's definitely nice there shadow terminators new option to reduce shadow artifacts that often happen with low poly game models offset rays from flat surfaces to match where they would be for a smooth surface as specified by the normals um we got catch beyond shadow say hi to the new shadow catcher completely rewritten for blender 3 features include indirect or environmental light support for more accurate composition uh options for lights to be considered included or excluded and new shadow catcher pass to fully handle colored indirect lights and emission as you can see the results again here in action so i really do appreciate their uh updated release notes they really make it illustrating things quite nice uh sub surface surface scattering now supports uh anatra anasotrophy i've always had trouble saying that one an index refraction for random walk you see the results in action there really kind of take a look at his nose that's kind of where it's most profound it's pretty subtle but it gives you a more uh fleshy result and then we can see a number of other minor releases in here as well the asset browser was added in again we kind of saw a very brief demo of this in action it's gonna really kind of change the way you organize things and you can literally start dragging and dropping things out you can break things down into categories really kind of sort things out you can also give things like attributes and tags and search for those tags and so on it should make organizing things quite nice so as you see catalogs and tagging as i just mentioned earlier geometry node updates um so we've changed the way that fields workflow works and the uh named attributes work um they've also added a couple of other advancements such as curves and uh text there so new nodes there as well so there's the text nodes that have been added in uh play with materials inside geometry knows new nodes include set material replace material and so on uh instancing the way geometry nodes work with instances has been improved to make it more intuitive by the way instancing is going to be one of those areas where if you're using a 2.9 x version you're going to see a lot of change we've also got ev attributes mesh attributes are no longer cycles exclusive ev now supports attributes including those generated by geometry nodes which is quite nice as well so geometry nodes is definitely moving forward and it's a nice thing to see user interface improvement so visual refresh the theme was updated again area management i love this this is probably the single biggest or a smallest big change i guess you could say if you want to make sense of that a number of ui tweaks across the board um we got uh strip thumbnail so video sequencer now supports thumbnail previews uh strip transform tools you can use g r and s for quick transforms etc um then we've got this is actually kind of neat i didn't mention this because it's hard to demo uh but vr got better you can now use controllers to con visualize controllers the ability to navigate one's way through a scene in vr using controller inputs so vr support in blender is definitely getting nicer it's still not at the point where you could author in blender but now you can navigate scenes and use vr controllers to do so which is definitely a nice step forward and kind of to you also using the asset library the pose library system got a massive revamp so you create poses directly from the 3d viewport drag blend into the pose and so on again using the same kind of setup as the the asset library that was added so organizing your scenes and your assets and so on is going to get definitely get nicer got some improvements to grease pencil as well dot dash and new modifier allows you generate dot dash lines on strokes automatically um so a bunch of other changes there across the board uh quick saving so loading and saving compressed blend files is now magnitudes faster thanks to the standard algorithm instead of gzip so we are seeing actually there's no numbers here uh so you see loading times that's about two and a half times faster for the blender 2.92 splash screen and like almost 10 times faster for saving that's definitely nice there as well uh usd importer improvements as well usd is definitely going to be part of the future same with alembic um so and yeah on it goes definitely a lot of nice things in this release i i still hold that the ones that i focused on are the biggest ones uh i like the tweaks to the user interface i do really love the way you can resize things and weirdly they didn't mention the knife tool at all in the update as far as i saw but geometry notes continue to improve text and curves there as well the asset browser is definitely nice um the what else do we got in here cycles 10 and so on and so forth definitely a great release and if you want check out the release notes i'll have them in the linked article down below so that ladies and gentlemen is blender three quite a bit there to be excited about uh if you want to go ahead you can download it now uh good luck their servers might be uh melting at this point in time let's see how well that actually does so let's save you how are you doing yeah they're not doing too bad actually actually they are uh so do keep in mind your downloads on release day are always a little fun so it might take you a bit of time to grab this one but it is definitely worth picking up even just the new usability in the interface is is nice for sure so that is blender 3.0 let me know what you think favorite feature etc and i shall talk to you all later goodbye

Channel: Gamefromscratch

Views: 52,741

Keywords: 3D, Blender, Blender 3, Blender 3D, Blender3D, Cycles X, Game Development, GameDev, Geometry Nodes, Graphics, Open Source, Release

Id: 4bO_RlDQH78

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 03 2021