Blender 3.0 - What Are the New Features?

all right hi everyone blender 3.0 is available so in this video we're going to do a quick run through of the features just so you know what you can get your hands on every time they do a major version like this they put out this beautiful web page which has a breakdown of all the major features providing like comparison images and videos and stuff like that so let's take a look at it all right so cycle faster than ever so in several of my videos i've already talked about the cycles x project and how it's improving performance for cycles which is fantastic the performance improvements are so significant and you can see this here on this comparison chart cycle's gpu kernels have been rewritten for better performance rendering between two and eight times faster in real world scenes so this is random within a video quadro rtx a6000 using the optics render device i mean it's all impressive but check out the barber shop and monster scenes here kind of makes you wonder how we actually managed with 2.93 geez check that out i have been trying on my new computer and it's just quite insane speaking of which though people might find it a bit weird but i'm not actually using my new computer at the moment i'm using my old work machine the reason is because i've packed the new one away for when we moved to the new studio because i think it'd be nice to walk into a fresh new environment with a brand new higher powerful computer and just get working straight away all right less lag more fun enjoy a more responsive viewport due to new scheduling and display algorithms so let's take a look at this clip i mean you can see the difference here really is that good again i kind of wonder like how i managed with the 2.93 noise beforehand but with the new responsiveness i have a lot more confidence of using things like volumes in the scenes now there's a saying that stuck with me which is work expands to fill the time allocated for it so it doesn't matter how much time you have the work you have available will always expand to fill that gap and i feel like something very similar applies to rendering like it doesn't matter how much performance you have you will very quickly fill it all up again so now that we have better rendering performance and viewport responsiveness i don't actually know if it's going to make that much of a difference for me like in the long run because i'm probably just going to fill it with like a bunch more volumes and extra objects then we're probably going to get back to something like 2.93 all over again anyway nice noise open image denoise was upgraded to version 1.4 with improved detail preservation a new pre-filter option was added to control the denoising of auxiliary albedo and normal passes so basically the denoising has more clarity and detail and we can see this especially on the cushions here so it's not so bad on the flash surface here that's facing straight towards the camera but the details are quite repeating but as soon as it gets a bit more difficult to understand as we're slanting back the new version is preserving those details so much better there's also some significant details on the glass but the glass is already kind of a subjective surface to look at i suppose so even though it looks different you wouldn't immediately say which one is better or worse unless you look at it a bit more closely the new version is definitely superior and also we can see some contrast differences on the wood down here so the old de-noising kind of dulled out the contrast in the details so if we go to the new one here you can see them a lot better so generally it's just an improvement all around all right so the shadow terminator a new option to reduce shadow artifacts often happen with low poly game models so in particular you can see this here with the pulleys on the shell offset rays from the flat surface to match where they would be for a smooth surface as applied by the normals okay so let's take a look you can see that this is no longer a problem this is something you'll definitely see in a lot of rasterization engines and like all sorts of video games so this is a pretty nice feature to have it means we can display all of our low poly models in a much more presentable way catch beyond shadows say hi to the new shadow catcher completely rewritten for blender 3.0 new features include indirect and environment light support for more accurate compositing option for lights to be considered included or excluded that is if they are real or synthetic objects new shadow catcher pass to fully handle coloured direct light and emission all right that's cool colored shadows and precise reflections make blending 3d with raw footage much easier so we can see this down here as color is preserved in those shadows that's very cool very good for realism all right skin care subsurface scattering now supports anisotropy how do you say anisotropy anisotropy an isotropic anisotropy an isotropic i don't know we'll just go with it an index of refraction for random walk realistic skin has an anisotropy around 0.8 all right so that's pretty cool in particular i want you to take a look at this kind of section of where the eyebrow would be but the regular subsurface we're so used to seeing things that are very like gel like i suppose or like gummy sweets not necessarily great for realistic skin because it's definitely a lot harder for light to kind of re-escape from those surfaces so it's really cool to see that shading improvements have been made in that regard okay some extra cool rendering things we're not going to go over them but just a lot of stuff but now we come to like the big boys so asset browser finally we have an asset browser and i did a video a while back about it it's going to be a really cool feature for like rapidly prototyping artwork and just bring in all sorts of content from your other projects really happy about this one i think it's definitely about time that blender got it easy as dragon drop as you can see you can bring in all sorts of materials and objects and all sorts of content and i think it also adds a kind of gamification element to adding stuff to your scenes so i think potential level designers are going to have a lot of fun with this one so you can have multiple asset libraries so these are basically just folders which contain blend files the asset browser will read through the blend files and see anything that's marked as an asset and then that will be accessible to you in the asset browser you can organize your assets into catalogs and these are independent of the blend file that the asset is stored in so there's great flexibility there and then you can also tag your different assets so metadata can be added to the assets such as author tags and as a description all right then the other big boy geometry nodes the procedural system introduced in 2.92 has been extended with a reimagined method for designing node groups a new attribute system around 100 new nodes for interaction with curves text data instances and more so this is where the introduction of the fields has come in which is replacing the named attribute workflow discover a new concept for passing around data and functions introducing fields operations can be built from basic nodes and simply connected together removing the need for named attributes as a way to store intermediate data and removing the need for special attribute nodes for simple operations now the attribute system for the original geometry nodes was something i struggled with and you might think that's a bit strange because like i'm an add-on developer beautiful the the text-based attribute workflow quite similar to working with variables in a certain way is something that i might have actually been pretty good at not necessarily the case we actually spoke a bit about this on a recent blender nest episode i believe that was episode 55 so comments teaching methods and geometry notes where we talked about like different ways of perceiving tasks and how to teach yourself skills and i talked about the psychology by being an artistic programmer and for me being very much an instructional logic kind of guy having a more abstract workflow like what fields allows for is much more beneficial for me mentally so to keep it simple fields is a lot more similar to the way that the shader nodes work and also something that might be quite confusing but it is pretty powerful is that the nodes actually kind of work backwards in certain ways for what you would call the function flow so say if you wanted to modify like the position value for a certain piece of data or geometry you could plug in that position node further back and then use that to modify different values and then plug that in later on where the geometry connects so it's actually pretty cool you can build up these functions of nodes which you can plug into the geometry later on when you don't actually know what the geometry is yet so i think it's pretty cool and i've been working with it for the new buy gen update of course with fields it's much easier to build node groups for higher level concepts to work together better than before okay some other cool things they've actually added this really cool system where depending on the type of socket that you're connecting to another socket in the node trees each type has a different color and the link between those sockets will become the color or will transition between the colors so you can see that here at a glance a new overlay colors the wires to match the socket they're connected to making it easier to spot their type at a distance and also just looks really pretty also mouse over the sockets to quickly inspect their content know their type and how to talk tip about their functionality has been added to a number of nodes and in order to tell at a glance which sockets support fields single values or both sockets are now drawn with a diamond circle or combined shape so basically nodes have become much more useful than just beautified it's really nice so you can have a look at this yourself there's just so many notes you can play with i'm not going to go into too much detail with this but you know you can do stuff with curves and text nodes and materials instancing all sorts of stuff mesh attributes are no longer a cycles exclusive even our fully supports attributes including those generated by geometry nodes thank god for that then there's a lot of demonstrations here about how it's being used all right user interfaces at a visual refresh the theme definitely looks a lot better now i will say one thing i like in particular is how these panels have these extra boxes around them i will need to update my own personal theme a bit because i've got a theme of my own which you can download from gumroad which is darker because i don't think the blender default themes go dark enough anyway but i want to do some extra changes to it to make sure that i can still see these boxes okay so it looks like the video sequence editor has been updated as well so now supports thumbnail previews strip transform tools custom color tags override overlap mode better snapping maybe one day i'll be able to use blender to actually edit my videos not me technically i could now i guess but might just take a bit too much time blender 3.0 offers a brand new set of vr controller based functionality including the ability to visualize controllers and the ability to navigate once away for a scene in vr using controller inputs so that's very cool so you can press the start vr session and there you go you can have a look around your scene and you can see the controllers there in your hands i do have an old vive but i just don't have the room to use it but i would love to try this out sometime it'd be very cool for like visualizing your artworks so strike a pose to kind of go along with the asset browser they've added a pose library so this will be very useful for animations so grease pencil has improvements the 2d animation workflow keeps getting better with new modifiers a polished drawing experience and lineup performance that's been greatly improved since the last release dot dash a new modifier allows you to generate dot dash lines on strokes automatically assign different materials offset and more so let's take a look at this there's a textured effect demo there you go you can make your lines look kind of textured with the dot dash i think that's very cool kind of makes me want to play around with the 2d more in blender oh wow actually yeah i didn't realize that you can get some really cool effects god blender just has something for everyone doesn't it oh this is really cool as well logo design document being able to generate dashed lines love that so quick save loading and saving compressed blend files is now magnitudes faster thanks to using the z-standard algorithm instead of g-zip fantastic we love that interoperability takes a leap forward in 3.0 with the support for importing pixar's universal scene description and improvements to alembic so there's a proper usd importer here with support for meshes cameras curves volumes materials and lights olympics support for exporting animated uv maps import per vertex uv maps etc and there's more so yeah 3.0 is a massive leap forward so it's very exciting times for blender i mean it feels like every year i tend to say something like you know if you haven't already given it a try and now is the time to jump in and it seems like every year that just gets more and more true so it's going to be very exciting to see how far blender goes in the future okay so believe it or not i think this is probably the first time i actually forgot to do an outro for a video the horror how could he so yeah thanks for watching everyone if you made it this far through the video then leave a unicorn emoji in the comments just so i know that you've made it this far remember you can follow me in other places if you want to stay up to date with information and news and project updates and stuff like that maybe even support my work on patreon or join our discord server but most of all have a lovely day and i will see you next time

Channel: Curtis Holt

Views: 20,927

Keywords: blender, 3.0, features, new, geometry nodes, asset browser, performance, update, tutorial, addon

Id: 8oe7HCGNFvI

Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 09 2021