— A more streamlined user interface.
— Improvements for the various editing tools.
— Hardware accelerated ray tracing support on Linux for AMD GPUs.
Blender is a powerful open source 3D creation suite used across many creative fields for the production of 3D models, simulations, animations, video games, motion graphics, and even movies.
Popular flicks like Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse have made use of Blender in various stages of production, with countless other projects being made possible by the platform.
After the loaded Blender 4.0 release last year, they haven't stopped adding new stuff to its point releases. So, let's dive in without further ado. 😃
🆕 Blender 4.3: What's New?
As an update to its 4.x series, this release is packed with new additions and improvements.
The actual list of changes is big as usual, so we put our focus on the highlights that include:
- User Interface Upgrades
- Light & Shadow Linking
- Grease Pencil Makeover
- Geometry Nodes Level Up
- Ray-Tracing Support For Linux
User Interface Upgrades
We start things off with the new Area Docking feature, which allows users to tear editor elements from their present positions to other areas for flexible window management. It can be used by dragging the corner of any element, with keyboard shortcuts making the experience more intuitive.
Hover tooltips for the data-block ID selector lists have been enhanced to display more information when hovering over images, videos, and fonts. Additionally, the user interface icons have been upgraded to SVG format, ensuring they scale correctly regardless of UI scale or monitor resolution.
Light & Shadow Linking
Dubbed as having “more control than eeveer before”, Light and Shadow Linking has arrived for EEVE, Blender's real-time render engine. When implemented, lights can be configured to affect only specific objects in a scene, with Shadow Linking unlocking further controls for defining which objects act as shadow blockers for a light source.
Grease Pencil Makeover
The Grease Pencil tool has received a complete rewrite, resulting in more efficient multithreaded performance and the removal of some foundational limitations. There is also a new Fill Gradient tool, which can be used for adding smooth color gradients to designs.
It can be found in the Edit Mode, below the interpolation tool.
Organizing Grease Pencil objects has been made easier with the new Layer Groups feature that allows grouping of layers, with handy toggles for changing the visibility, locking, and onion skinning of layers in the group.
Another thing to note is that there is no backward compatibility for Grease Pencil files created with 4.3 or later releases. Using those with 4.2 or older releases will result in broken files.
Geometry Nodes Level Up
Paving the way for more advanced geometry manipulation, there is the new For Each Element in Blender 4.3. It is a loop zone that can be used to apply the same operation to every part of a geometry, such as vertices, edges, or faces.
There is also the newly introduced ability to add gizmos to node groups, allowing users to edit the inputs of a node tree directly in the 3D viewport. This eliminates the need to constantly switch between the node editor and the modifier stack.
Ray-Tracing Support For Linux
Finally, Linux users can take advantage of hardware-accelerated ray tracing on their systems. This was done by implementing the open source HIP RT library into Cycles, allowing hardware ray tracing for AMD GPUs.
As you can see above, the developers have shared a helpful performance comparison chart showcasing the gains in performance when compared to the non-HIP RT implementation.
🛠️ Other Changes and Improvements
We wrap this up by running through a couple of other refinements:
- Performance/memory optimizations for B-Spline curves when using OptiX on NVIDIA GPUs.
- Introduction of a new Metallic BSDF node that exposes existing metallic material configs.
- The brush management workflow has been improved, along with a redesigned interface.
- Experimental Vulkan user interface rendering for users of recent AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA GPUs
You can go through the detailed release page and release notes to learn more.
📥 Download Blender 4.3
This release can be downloaded from the official website for Linux, Windows, and macOS. If you were looking for alternative ways to download, then you can get Blender 4.3 from Snapcraft and Steam.
For the source code, you can visit the project's Gitea instance, and if you were seeking help setting it up, the documentation is a valuable resource.
💬 Are you going to upgrade to this release? Let me know in the comments below!
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