Blender Foundation Released Blender 3.4

The Blender Foundation released Blender 3.4 on December 7th, which is the first major update since the release of Blender 3.0 for almost a year. This is great news for Blender fans! Features of this update include path guiding in Cycles, new sculpt and paint masking tools, Geometry Nodes viewport overlay, new UV Editing tools, improved performance and much more.

Path Guiding in Cycles

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Blender 3.4 adds support for path guiding into Cycles by integrating Intel's Open Path Guiding Library. This improves the sampling quality of individual paths, reduces noise in complex lighting scenes, and helps render scenes containing simple caustics such as water surface. It is worth noting, however, that it is not designed to be a caustic solver, such as MNEE, which means it may not help rendering scenes containing complex caustics.

Currently, path guiding is only available for CPU rendering and can be enabled in the Render Properties panel under "Sampling->Path Guiding".

Auto-Masking

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Auto-Masking settings in Sculpt mode can now be accessed from the header of the 3D Viewport. New methods of auto-masking by cavity, viewpoint, and area have been added. This auto-masking option provides a faster way to paint and sculpt with Cavity instead of manually creating cavity masks.

New UV Editing Tools

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The new geometry-based relax brush method allows the user to drive the relaxation process, thus helping to improve the quality of UV mapping by making the UVs more closely follow the 3D geometry.

Some of the improvements in the UV editor grid include Non-uniform grids, Pixel spacing, and Draw grid on top of the image.

Geometry Nodes

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When the viewer has a geometry connected to a separate value input, the values can be visualized by a viewport overlay. The opacity of the attribute overlay can be controlled by the Viewer Node setting in the overlays popover. The intensity of the overlay can be adjusted via the overlay popover in the 3D Viewport header.

More Features:

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Read the release notes of Blender 3.4.

Watch the video to learn more about Blender 3.4:

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Source: blender.org