Blender 3.4 was released this Wednesday! See what’s new in the popular free open-source 3D animation software.
The new release integrates Intel’s Open Path Guiding Library, adding support for path guiding in CPU to help reduce noise in scenes.
It now supports accessing auto-masking settings from the header in the 3D Viewport. And, adds new methods for automatically masking by cavity, viewpoint, and area.
Blender 3.4 also introduced new geometry-based relax brush tool. Which improves the quality of the UV mapping by making the UVs more closely follow the 3D geometry. There are as well several improvements in the UV Editor grid, including Non-uniform grids, Pixel spacing, Draw grid on top of the image.
There are also viewport overlay for Geometry Nodes viewer node, to preview attributes without affecting the final result. And, the intensity of the overlay can be adjusted from the Overlay popover in the 3D Viewport header.
Other features in Blender 3.4 include:
- New options, shortcuts, for the Fill tool, and new algorithm to close gaps.
- Added Sobol-Burley sampling pattern.
- New mode for accessing attributes of the current View Layer, Scene or World.
- New option to bake specular effects from the active camera view.
- ‘Create Mask’ button to convert the auto-mask into a regular mask attribute.
- Extra control options (e.g., ‘Factor’, ‘Blur’, and ‘Custom Curve’) to fine tune the cavity mask.
- Live Unwrap support for Grab tool
- Support for pinned vertices in UV sculpt tools
- Add option to use Blender 2.8 margin calculation
- Constrain to Bounds for UV sculpt tools
- UV selection support in many operations
- A new node to get attribute values based on UV coordinates.
- And many new mesh nodes, curve nodes, general nodes, and geometry nodes.
- Support for PBR extensions in .mtl files
- New shortcuts in Python Console editor
- Support FFmpeg AV1 codec encoding
- WebM videos frame extraction
- Headless rendering support on Linux
- Upgrade driver for Intel Arc on Windows to fix crash issues.
- Support Intel GPU rendering in macOS 13 for Apple Metal.
Videos about Blender 3.4
The Blender website offers a short video about the new feature of the new release, see:
Get Blender 3.4
Blender website offers the official binary packages for Windows, MacOS, and Linux users. They are available to download at the link button below:
Ubuntu user can directly search for and install it from Ubuntu Software, though it’s a Snap package that runs in sandbox. Another universal Flatpak package is also available for choice.
For Linux users do NOT like the sandboxing applications, grab the 215MB “blender-3.4.0-linux-x64-tar.xz” tarball from the link above, extract, and run the executable file to launch the program without installation required.
