Blender 4.0.0 has released the download address of the Beta version on the "Daily Build" page of the official website.
https://builder.blender.org/download/daily/
Blender 4.0 will be officially released on November 7, 2023, enhancing the animation and rigging pipeline, improving modeling and UV tools, enhancing Eevee and Cycles, while adding new nodes and tools for sculpting, painting and texturing, and upgraded software rendering capabilities and so on.
It has been revealed that Blender 4.0 will facilitate the creation of node-based tools by enabling users to set custom operators using the software’s geometry node toolset.
The following is an introduction to some of the new features of Blender 4.0:
Animation and rigging
This version has many animation and rigging updates.
- Bone collection and bone color:
As a major feature, this release introduces named bone collections, replacing traditional numbered layers and bone groups. Traditional skeleton layers and bone groups have been replaced by bone collections. Additionally, with the bone group removed, bone colors are now assigned individually to each bone.
bend bones
Added a new way to map vertices to B-bone segments for curvature-aware deformation. The new mapping is slower to calculate, but will produce better deformations if the B-bone is strongly curved in the resting posture (e.g. at the corners of the mouth).
- Graphics editor improvements:
The graphical editor adds new operations and significantly improves performance when dense critical data is involved.
Cycles
With light links, lights can be set up to affect only specific objects in the scene. Shadow links also allow control of which objects act as shadow blockers for the light.
This allows for breaking the laws of physics and allowing more artistic control over lighting. For example, environments and characters in a shot can have different lighting settings.
Future releases will add support for world lighting links, as well as a more convenient user interface for viewing and managing all light links in a scene.
New hair shader
Based on the paper "A Microfacet-based Hair Scattering Model" (PR #105600) by Weizhen Huang, Matthias B. Hullin, and Johannes Hanika, a new variant named "Huang" has been added. The former Principled Hair BSDF is now the "Chiang" variant.
