Blender 4.1 Banner
The Blender Foundation announced a few days ago the launch of the new version of Blender 4.1, which implements various improvements, such as rendering and lighting, as well as the sculpting tool, improvements in the rendering engines and more.
In this new version that is presented of Blender 4.1, it is the rendering and lighting since it has now been implemented a soft drop option, a feature requested by many artists which allows for a more natural and smooth representation of shadows and lighting in the scene. This option, while not strictly physically based, offers finer control over the appearance of light in the scene, avoiding hard limits and providing more visually appealing results.
Another change that stands out is that OpenImageDenoise is now GPU accelerated on supported hardware, making high-quality denoising available at interactive speeds in the 3D viewport. The feature is automatically enabled when using GPU rendering in the 3D viewport and for final renders.
Speaking of the rendering part, the support for converting shaders to MaterialX, including the math node. This opens up new possibilities for artists by providing greater flexibility in creating materials and visual effects, allowing for more seamless integration with other tools.
Furthermore, the node Musgrave Texture has been replaced by the Noise Texture node, which expands the capabilities of the node in terms of texturing and visual effects, since allows the hair representation of the particle system, offering users more tools to create realistic and detailed effects.
Another notable addition is the brush settings for input swatches, which improves the sensitivity and response of the brush when working on fine and subtle details, plus a new scene setting has been introduced to automatically mask the spread step value. This workflow optimization helps users work more efficiently on complex projects, while improving the quality and realism of the sculptures.
On the other hand Blender 4.1 implement improvements with USD workflows (Universal Scene Description), as it now allows users to export trusses and shape keys directly as skeletons and combined USD shapes, streamlining the process of transferring complex animations and deformations between Blender and other software that supports the USD format.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- Option to disable bump map correction
- Added AMD GPU rendering support for RDNA3 generation APUs
- Linux CPU rendering performance improved by about 5% in benchmarks
- All nodes in the Composer work in the viewport, except the render layer passes.
- Improved precision, Kuwahara and Pixelate nodes in the Composer.
- Improvements to Graph Editor and NLA, including baking channels.
- Improvements in the user's interface.
- Python update to version 3.1.
- Alignment with the VFX 2024 reference platform.
- New icons have been added to represent splitting, joining, and swapping areas.
- Wide Enum lists will now collapse to a single column if there is not enough space.
- Changing the UI font in Preferences will now start in the Fonts folder of your operating system.
- The file explorer list view deletes columns and reformats as the width decreases.
- Improved color picker cursor indication and feedback
It is worth mentioning that Blender 4.1 adds some improvements to Evee, but the developers have mentioned that for Eevee Next, the revision of the real-time rendering engine was postponed to Blender 4.2.
Finally, if you are interested in learning more about this new release, you can consult the details in the following link
How to install Blender 4.1 on Ubuntu?
For those who are interested in being able to install this new version of Blender, they will be able to do it from its Snap package.
For the installation, it is enough to have the Snap support in the system and in a terminal type the command:
sudo snap install blender --classic