Introducing updates to the software's animation toolset, Compositor, the Cycles engine, and much more.
Following months of development and a one-week delay, the Stable version of Blender 4.1, the biggest update to the software since the launch of Blender 4.0 back in November 2023, has finally been released, introducing a slew of new features and improvements.
With the new release come the long-awaited updates to the software's animation and rigging pipeline, with the highlight being the introduction of a new hierarchical structure for Bone Collections. These collections are now displayed in a tree format instead of a flat list, allowing for easy rearrangement and nesting through drag-and-drop actions.
Visibility is determined by the bone collection itself and its ancestors: a bone collection is visible only when its parent, grandparent, etc., are visible. Moreover, the Bone Properties' Relations panel now indicates the Bone Collections to which a Bone is assigned.
Blender's Compositor has also been enhanced, now incorporating support for Vector Blur, Defocus, Cryptomatte, and Keying Screen nodes. Furthermore, a new Split node has been introduced, replacing the Split Viewer node with identical functionality, except that it now provides its output as a node output.
Moreover, the Keying Screen node was changed to use a Gaussian Radial Basis Function Interpolation, which produces smoother temporally stable keying screens, while the Inpaint node was changed to use Euclidean distance instead of Manhattan distance, resulting in more uniform filled regions. Scaling and Rotation in the Viewport Compositor have been upgraded as well and are now immediately realized, which means scaling up an image will now actually produce more pixels.
Blender 4.1 also comes with improvements to its Cycles render engine, which now features GPU-accelerated OpenImageDenoise, making full-quality denoising available at interactive rates in the 3D viewport. It is enabled automatically when using GPU rendering in the 3D viewport. It can be disabled in the denoising settings panel, to reduce GPU memory usage at the cost of slower denoising.
Geometry Nodes
Modeling
Rendering & Lighting
Sculpting
And much more!
You can read the full list of Blender 4.1's new features here and download the new version of the software over here.
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