The free 3D software Blender comes with a completely revised rendering engine Evee. Update 4.2, which has been postponed several times, simplifies and standardizes operations with cycles in many places.
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Evee Next: Render in real time
Eve Next aims to usher in a new generation of Blender’s faster real-time rendering engine. It removes many limitations. Global illumination now works as intended with any number of shaders. Theoretically, the number of lights in the scene is no longer limited. A maximum of 4096 can be visible at the same time. Light sources are now visible even behind refractive surfaces such as glass.
Eevee can now also display the offset (displacement) of surfaces. Objects can now also be represented as volume, for example as fog or smoke. Under Eevee, this previously only worked with cuboid objects.
Shadows can now render Eevee with more realism while using fewer parameters. Contact shadows that were previously necessary are no longer necessary. Whether or not objects cast shadows has been standardized between Eevee and Cycles.
When a high dynamic range panoramic image is used to light a scene, Eve Next can scan the panorama for the sun and place a virtual sun as the light source. This creates more realistic shadows.
Evee can now preview motion blur in the viewport. Depth of field will also become visible; this will now require lower settings as well as higher quality.
An Eevee render, left in Blender 4.1, right in Blender 4.2. Because the newer Eevee Next can handle lighting and shadows better, the tubed area looks more realistic.
Render Production-Ready with Cycles
The second render engine in Blender is called Cycles and is based entirely on computationally intensive path tracing, for example for filmmaking. The camera sends rays into the scene, which are reflected many times, just like real light. In Blender 4.2, Cycles can send beams through portals to other areas of the scene, for example to simulate a security camera.
Through portals, the Cycles rendering engine can now simulate a surveillance camera.
(Image: Blender.org)
The Cycles render engine can now simulate so-called thin film interference for non-metallic surfaces. This effect is responsible for the iridescent colors on the bottom of DVDs and soap bubbles.
Soap bubbles rendered with Blender 4.2: rainbow-colored streaks appear due to thin-film interference.
When rendering with Cycles, noise is left in the image, which is then removed. AMD GPUs can now perform denoising on the graphics card under Windows and Linux even if the CPU renders the actual image. The result should also look better.
The purpose of blue noise dithering is to make the noise behavior less noticeable when only a small number of rays are sent and to achieve better results when denoising. Therefore the developers have made this method the standard.
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A car rendered with only a few rays, with the previous method on the left, dithering with blue noise on the right: the result after denoising in the bottom row. Blue noise dithering is better in both cases.
(Image: Blender.org)
Comfortable video editing
The developers have completely revised the timeline of the video editing editor built into Blender. Strips, which can contain keyframes, transitions or sound, among other things, now have rounded corners. This makes the start and end more visible. Selected strips look better in color than before. If Blender cannot find a media file for a strip, it will now be colored red.
In the video editor, Blender now displays strips with rounded corners and different colors. The strip in the bottom right is red because Blender cannot find its image file.
The text tool in the video editing editor can now add borders to letters. Shadows can be offset and blurred.
The video sequence editor can now also render text shadows offset and blurred. The text itself can have a border.
Install extensions from applications
Until now, Blender came with a large selection of add-ons. Most of them are now on online platforms extensions.blender.org Available for download. By default, Blender does not access the Internet. If you allow it, you can access the extension directory directly from the application and install add-ons.
Since Blender doesn’t normally access the internet, you’ll need to allow it to download extensions from the internet first.
Neutral colors with Khronos PBR Neutral
Colors are a complicated thing in computer graphics. A film camera registers colors differently than a digital sensor, which in turn registers colors differently than the human eye. What they all have in common is that colors lose their saturation the brighter they get. If you stop that down, the bright areas become oversaturated. ToneMapper Khronos PBR Neutrals offers color transformations in Blender 4.2 that promise color fidelity without oversaturation.
As seen on the left, the original color renders are oversaturated. In the middle, the same render with a color shift emulating a digital sensor. The bright areas are no longer oversaturated, but rather desaturated. The new color shift on the right is Khronos PBR Neutral: it doesn’t oversaturate, but still stays close to the original color.
Post-processing in the compositor
Blender can also post-process the generated images. This step is called compositing and can now always be done on the graphics card in Blender 4.2. If you continue to use the CPU, you can expect performance improvements.
The Glare node has received a new mode called Bloom. It creates the effect as if someone breathed on the camera lens. Previously reserved for Eevee, it is now available to all render engines via the compositor.
New hardware requirements
On Windows and Linux, Blender 4.2 requires a CPU with SSE4.2. This instruction set has been supported in Intel since 2008 with Nehalem and in AMD since 2011 with Bulldozer. Blender 4.2 is now available for Windows, macOS and Linux, as well as the source code for download.
(AKR)
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