Five HUGE Features Coming to Blender 3.5

it feels like it's been a long time since I made a new video talking about the updates coming to blender but this one's been worth the wait because blender 3.5 is some of the best features that I remember being added to blender for a long time so here's five of my favorite features come with a blender in the next few weeks so the first thing I want to talk about is Vector displacement Maps this is something that a lot of people in the community especially people who are in the sculpting are really excited about it was actually added by a Community member and it only just made the cutoff to be in blender 3.5 but it basically adds some tools which are quite like what they already have in zbrush to blender so the problem that we have with current displacement brushes is that they can only push the verts in or out which means that you can't have overhanging geometry in a brush but with Vector displacement maps you can now make a new type of brush which can have overhangs which means you can have a brush that does things like ears or curved horns there's lots of vector displacement maps that you can download from the internet and you can actually make your own if you start with a plane and you sculpt whatever you want the brush to be on top there's a material setup that you can download which you can use to bake out your own maps and you can use those to sculpt that's a little bit convoluted at the moment I hope eventually there'll just be like a one-click button where you can turn a plane into a map automatically or something much more simple but it's a decent workaround for now the second feature that I want to talk about today is something that I'm personally really very excited about it's a feature I've been hoping for for a long time that's viewport compositing say when you're working on a scene and you look at it through the rendered preview mode or even the raw render it can often look very different from the final composite I mean that's the whole point in compositing right to change the look of the image but that can prove very difficult if you're trying to set up lights or materials or colors because you don't know how they'll look once all the compositing is applied I made this Blade Runner animation about a year ago and it looked very different in the preview mode to what it did with all the composting applied with color correction and different changes so obviously it would be nice if we could say what the composting was going to do in the render preview and we can now do that at least with some nodes for an example I'll use this Korean street scene that I worked on a few weeks ago for a tutorial if we go into the viewport shading options we can enable compositing nodes right in the viewport you can see we get an instant change here with the color correction pass and the lens Distortion effects like chromatic aberration now we can have the composting effect only the camera view or we can enable it so that's always visible in the viewport no matter how you're looking at the scene most of the midge compositing nodes are currently supported and new Nord types are being added all of the time before we move on I want to take a minute to talk about the sponsor of this video private internet access we'll know that the internet is a very big place with millions of websites that we can access and tons of content online but what you might not know is that the content that's actually Available to You largely depends on where you live streaming services for instance have entirely different libraries for each country and some websites are completely unavailable in certain countries or regions private internet access keeps your connection safe and allows you to access this content that otherwise wouldn't be available because of where you live Pia is the world's most transparent VPN service they keep no user logs and it has a 100 open source publicly available source code Pia even had their entire network and Management Systems independently audited to demonstrate that they keep no logs private internet access works with all major streaming services and websites and it's one of the few vpns that actually allows you to access ticket to pigo file sharing by clicking on the link in the description box you'll get an 83 discount on private internet access that works out to just two dollars three cents a month and you'll also get an extra four months completely for free the third feature that I want to talk about is a big update of Cycles obviously we've had a few big updates Cycles over the last few years and it's great to see how the performance is improving where the Cycle's X Project and we had path guiding which I made a video about a few months ago but this next feature is going to be another big update in my opinion you see when using a path tracing engine we have a problem when we have multiple lights most of the lights in the scene are probably not going to contribute to most of the pixels in terms of bound sliding but we don't know which one of those lights are actually going to contribute so how do you figure that out well we could sample every single light for every pixel which would take an incredibly long time or we could do a random sampling of the lights which will probably produce a lot of noise the way the blenders got around this in the past is to do something called multiple important sampling that basically ranks all of the lights in a hierarchy with brightest first the brightest lights get the more samples because they're probably going to affect the entire Lighting in the scene the chances of a bright light affecting a certain pixel are probably higher than a dimmer light makes sense right the problem is that if you have a scene that has lots of dim lights in it and then you have one bright light all of the samples are going to that one bright light and all the dimmer lights are going to end up really noisy I found this problem out right at the start of my channel and I was trying to make this Christmas tree tutorial and one of the reasons I never finished the video was because I had loads of noise on the Christmas tree itself and the wall behind caused by this really dim little fairy lights I could never understand why these small lights were making so much noise when the room was fairly well lit it turns out it was because of the multiple important sampling and if I turn off the strong lights in the scene you can see that all that blue noise in the background now clears up nicely because the multiple importance is not making it so noisy so if multiple importance isn't the solution well how can we improve that well now blenders can be using a new light tree algorithm I'll spray the details about how that works but basically it's going to kind of build a map which tries to figure out which lights in the scene are probably going to affect the lighting on which pixels this makes it much more efficient if you render something out if you let blender Run for the same amount of time most of the time you're going to get a much less noisy image if you have lots of Lights in the scene or if you have emissive materials anything that cuts down render times always gets a big thumbs up in my book the fourth feature that I want to talk about is an update to blender simulation tools we don't get those very often and I'm always pleased to see them when we do because frankly I don't think blender simulation tools are really up to much so we've had a big update to how cloth simulations work one of the reasons why class simulations are so frustrating is because every time you make a little change to the cloth you have to rerun the simulation which is very slow so the slowest part of the cloth simulation is usually having self-collision where a cloth hits off itself and then obviously it's affecting itself in two different directions so that's been massively improved like 25 Improvement we're talking here which is a really big update the footage that's on screen right now you can actually see that it's running in real time this isn't a baked file this is a simulation just running in the viewport I can make changes to the cloth settings and it will respect those changes and it still runs nice and smooth 24 frames a second this isn't a very complex class simulation obviously and we're certainly not up to like Marvelous Designer Spades yet but it's just nice to say any sort of update to the simulation tools this actually is a really significant performance update the final feature I want to talk about is a big update to blender's hair grooming system now recently we moved over to a new system for hair that uses curves it's proven to be very powerful it was used by the blender studio in their new Auburn movie and the hair looks great one of the problems with it though is that it uses geometry nodes which means that you need to know geometry nodes and even if you do know geometry nodes you have to keep making these same node setups to do things like clumping and child hair particles so two new methods have been added to blender 3.5 which make these a lot easier you can add this new curve type which is called fur which is basically a pre-made geometry node setup that has loads of different controls for the length of the hair and the amount of clumping and things like that or if you want to build one yourself you can open up the asset browser and if you just add a few guide hairs to a mesh like this you can then just drag and drop the different node setups that you need so these are all just prefabricated node setups that will do things like clumping and child particles and frizz for the hair you can do braids there's all of these different effects already built in so even if you don't know geometry nodes it's fairly self-explanatory you just drag and drop these in and the effect will be applied to the hair so let me know in the comments which features in blender 3.5 you're almost looking forward to especially if it isn't something that was on my list I would like to know maybe I've missed out on something I'll see you in a few days with another video

Channel: DECODED

Views: 52,089

Keywords: tutorial, DECODED, Blender, blender 3d, software, computing, classes, blender for beginners, blender online, free 3d modeling software, open source software, 3d software, vfx, blender 3.5, new blender features, blender hair, blender light sampling, blender new tools

Id: BjfVI_FxDtM

Length: 9min 9sec (549 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 27 2023