Long-time Blender fans and newcomers alike will find a lot to love about Blender 3.0. So here are some of the new Blender features that have already significantly improved our own workflow.
Blender 3.0: New Features, Updates, and Improvements
Blender 3.0 is finally here. While plenty has changed since Blender 2.0 made its debut in August 2000, this latest landmark has the Blender community abuzz with excitement. So much has changed, and yet everything that we love is just as great as it was before.
The round-up from the official Blender YouTube channel is a whirlwind, and it only covers the beginning of everything that you have to look forward to (especially if you’re just getting started with Blender).
A few notable highlights from the video:
Improved shadows, ray-tracing, and subsurface scattering. Faster renders than ever; Blender claims two to eight times faster A vastly-improved Knife tool, as well as tons of small tweaks to many other tools. Enhanced virtual reality tools. An expansion of the Grease Pencil and its capabilities. Over 100 new Nodes, as well as plenty of new modifiers. Better tweening and posing. An optimized UI. New ways to store, manage, and reuse poses, textures, lighting schemes, and other assets.
These more exciting developments come alongside the usual round of bug fixes and minor adjustments in usability, and you can read about every change in full in the Blender 3.0 release notes.
But for now, let’s take a closer look about some of the new Blender features we’re already obsessing over.
New Tools in Blender 3.0 (As Well as a Few Updated Favorites)
As mentioned in the video, the Blender 3.0 Knife tool now supports multi-object editing, among many other additional tweaks of note.
One other tool that received a significant face-lift is the Blender Grease Pencil tool. It has been refined and is now more practically functional than ever; wrangling your line weight and stroke style is now much easier, for example, as is applying modifier effects to Grease Pencil paths.
Tweens in Blender 3.0
Pose Sliding allows you to morph effortlessly between two key poses or in-betweens; an entire family of new Blender tweening tools dedicated to pose breakdown gives you a much finer degree of control over the way that you characterize each pause, breath, and flourish.
The Blender 3.0 Asset Browser and New Libraries
Blender has been hinting at its new Asset Browser for a while now. Blender 3.0 gives us our first official taste of the system, and it’s just as useful as we were hoping it would be.
With the Asset Browser, you’re able to manage objects, materials, poses, and worlds in one of several libraries. The Pose Library is one stand-out feature for animators. All of your character’s most iconic expressions can all be collected and stored on-hand, ready to grab whenever you need them.
Blender Version 3.0: The Future Is Looking Bright
The truth is that we’re still exploring Blender 3.0 ourselves, as there is so much to see and to do in this latest (and greatest) release of the open-source 3D creation suite. Understand all of the changes will take time and patience.
However, we already know that these updates, as well as a number of improved viewport animations, controls, and aesthetic theme changes, make Blender 3.0 an experience more polished and professional-feeling than its predecessors.
