Blender 4.4 Is Here - Stunning Power…For Free!

A few weeks ago a movie called Flow won  an Oscar award. Okay, that is great news, but movies win Oscars all the time,  what’s so interesting here? Well, the interesting part is that  it was made with Blender.

Yup, Blender. A piece of open source modeling  software that is free for all of us, forever. I mean, just look at the quality of works people  have made with Blender.

From photorealistic to stylized animation movies, it can do anything.  You can even have a proper water simulation and then stylize it to make sure it is still  grounded in reality. It is unbelievable.

Now that’s what I call amazing news! And in  the meantime, Blender 4. 4 has been released, and it has so many improvements in there that I am  lucky if I can tell you maybe about a third of it.

For instance, surprise! It can now be  used in light mode! Wow!

Okay, kidding, kidding. This has existed for a long time now.  Now, let’s have a look together.

And don’t forget, you can download and start using it  right now for free. And I think there has never been a better time to start  using it. You’ll see why in a moment.

I’ll start out with my favorite. Dear Fellow  Scholars, this is Two Minute Papers with Dr Károly Zsolnai-Fehér. My favorite is of  course, ray tracing.

As you all know, images made with most ray tracing techniques are  noisy, and often need to undergo a denoising step. Blender supports it, and it got better too.  Now I am not that crazy about these results, however hold on to your papers Fellow Scholars  and look at these.

Oh my. You can also do this with my favorite, subsurface scattering, or  translucent objects if you will. Those are now so much better.

Also, denoising blurry depth of  field effects are hugely improved. Game changer. They also added better blue noise sampling, this  ensures that when you have a really noisy image early on, it still makes a good preview, and  works relatively consistently along frames if you are rendering an animation.

There are tons of  papers on it out there like this one, and finally, some of them are now coming alive in free software  to benefit the world. Don’t forget, whatever the topic, we are always talking about proper  research papers in some form over here. Loving it.

The image compositor also just got better,  here you can finalize your rendered image. For instance, if you added a glare effect,  when you play around with these parameters, you see their effect better. So you can make  sure that one light doesn’t dominate the scene, adjust color tint, smoothness, everything. 

More artistic freedom. Fantastic. I also loved this grab cloth brush which actually runs a proper simulation when you  start pinching a piece of clothing.

Grease pencil also got better, this is a feature  used to help you draw in 3D space. Enabling sculpt mode has a feature called auto masking that helps  you draw easily even in the presence of a bunch of layers, and you don’t have to spend lots of time  finding the exact layer you want to paint on. And it now has so many small, but meaningful  changes to the user interface, for instance, you can now see mesh indices, and the visibility  has also been improved.

Fellow Scholars, imagine things like this, times a thousand.  More than I can speak about here, amazing. And, did you know that it also has a video  editor?

Almost nobody is talking about it, and it has tons of small usability improvements,  like faster HDR content rendering and more. And if Blender cannot do something that you are  looking for? Not a problem, because we haven’t even talked about the fact that you can extend  its functionality with tons and tons of plugins.

And so many of these amazing plugins exist,  it takes half a lifetime just to try a small part of them. So much so I am considering making  another video just about that relatively soon. I think this is the best free and  open source project ever.

And you don’t have to start from zero, I always  say that you Fellow Scholars should try these amazing demo files that also come for  free. And my friend Andrew Price’s legendary donut tutorials are also available.  Both are in the video description.

I have so many great memories writing my research  works within Blender, and I really hope that it will bring many more to you Fellow Scholars.  Once again, all free for all of us. So good!

A big thank you to all the developers and everyone  who donated to make this happen. If you wish to donate to them, a link is available in the video  description. And now, let the experiments begin!