Blender 4.1 Is Just Around The Corner

The Blender Foundation has made an exciting announcement revealing that Blender 4.1, the software's biggest update since November 2023's launch of Blender 4.0, is just around the corner and will be officially released next week.

With its brief statement, the team declared that the new and improved version of Blender has entered the Release Candidate stage, encouraging users to test it out and report the discovered bugs and issues so that the developers were able to fix them before the launch. As per tradition, the studio has also offered a look at the new version's splash screen, this time featuring a highly realistic 3D environment by Lynxsdesgin, a talented Interior Designer specializing in creating stunning digital apartments in Blender.

When it comes to its features, Blender 4.1 introduces updates to the software's animation pipeline, making Bone Collections hierarchical, adds new nodes to Compositor, enhances the Cycles rendering engine and the Geometry Nodes toolset, upgrades the modeling, sculpting, and lighting workflows, brings UI improvements, and more.

Unfortunately, the release's most anticipated feature, EEVEE-Next, was pushed back to Blender 4.2 LTS, which recently entered Alpha, and will not be present in the upcoming update even as an experimental option. According to Jeroen Bakker, EEVEE-Next had some performance issues in the new setup of how Shadows and horizon scans are evaluated, so instead of shipping it half-baked, they decided to postpone the release and continue the development until Blender 4.2 LTS' launch, set to take place on July 16, 2024.

Download Blender 4.1 Release Candidate build here and don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel and follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.