 Hi, I'm Southern Shot and today is a major milestone for Blender because we're leaving the 2.X series and entering the official release of 3.0. So in celebration, instead of less than five minutes, we're gonna do all the features in less than three minutes. Do you think we can do it? No, immediately no. I tried, I gave up halfway through, there's just way too many features. But we can do it in less than five minutes? Actually, also no. It's a really big update, let's just get started. Animation and rigging got a lot of updates this time around and you can see some of these tools being used in the new Blender short, SpriteFright. Check it out. The new post-sliding operator, which allows you to drag in-between poses and create in-between keyframes without losing your pose. The in-between tools have also been improved and now use this new sliding tool. We have a new keying set making it possible to use one set for both characters and props. Custom bone shapes now have full translation, rotations, scale options. F-Curds and all their keys are now selectable by using the box or circle select on the curve itself. Animations can now be made as single users, which is helpful in productions linking assets. Motion Pass Preview has been improved and has a new update, all visible Motion Pass operator. Fogles have been added to the Bendy Bones and several other small options making it easier to control their start and end handles. Constraints now have Apply, Duplicate, and Copy options in their extra menu. Several constraints have seen additional small updates. Check out the link in the description for full details. Staying on the topic of animation, the Asset Browser now houses the Pose Library. The Pose Library allows you to store, apply, and organize various character poses. You can add and access these poses via the Asset Browser window and from the Animation panel in 3D View. Here you can add, blend, flip, apply and save different poses. This is a massive time saver for animators and such an incredible tool. Using the Asset Browser, you can store, preview, and drop assets into your scenes. Even better, you can save these into libraries for repeated use. You can create large material libraries and drag and drop them into your scene quickly to experiment with look development. You can store HDRIs into your environments and quickly drop them into the 3D View to preview various lighting setups. It's fast and easy to use and if you create an asset, you might want to reuse it, just drag it into your library. These libraries can be saved locally and accessed via other project files, allowing you to create an organized repository of resources. This is milestone one with even more features on the way in the future. Gotta go fast, then Blender 3.0 has got you covered. Blend files with many linked libraries now load faster. Blend compression now uses a new algorithm which improves loading and saving times. Rendering is even faster, utilizing the magic of its amazing community, Blender now renders two to eight times faster using powers of love. Just kidding, this is a result of the Cycles X project. It utilizes a ton of hard work from the devs and improved GPU kernels and scheduling. Check out the Blender Fund page if you'd like to support them and show them love for all their effort. Back on topic, Cycles renders two to eight times faster in real world scenes, meaning production ready scenes and not just test render files. In fact, the more complex the file, the more optimized it is. Hair also renders much faster and baking now supports hardware ray tracing via NVIDIA optics. The viewport is also faster and more responsive in render mode. Even the tile memory usage has been improved meaning you will see a quicker preview of your full render if memory permits. The new recommended sampling workflows to set a noise threshold and let Blender determine the sample rates for you. You can also set a time-based rendering element and I found this super helpful when rendering animations. You can control the scrambling distance now in advanced panel. It's two to eight times faster, still too slow for you. Then turn on the new open image de-noise 1.4 update which improves normal passes even more, helping you keep those crisp texture details at lower sample rates. The shadow catcher has been re-rend and it now gives you options to exclude lighting, reflections and its own render pass making it easier to use in the compositor. This should make it easier to de-noise. The shadow terminator has new options to improve low-poly rendering. Subsurface scattering now supports anisotropy and index of refraction for random walk. Realistic screen has an anisotropy of around 0.8. AMD has also received some additional support in 3.0 and now supports RDNA architecture cards on Windows and the back end is based on the HIP platform. Patch notes for more details. AMD support on Linux and Apple Metal rendering support is under development for 3.1. The 3D viewport also got a speed bump with a new update that makes editing huge meshes two to three times faster and EV now supports attributes even those generated by geometry nodes. As a running theme of Blender 3.0 geometry nodes are now faster with a new evaluation system. There are about 100 new nodes and all are in the description but let's cover some of the highlights. First we have fields. With fields it's easier to build node groups for upper level concepts to work together. To help keep things visually organized socket shapes are used to convey which sockets are for field nodes and which are for data nodes. Nodes can be broadly broken into two categories. Field nodes which operate on a data per element and are represented by a dashed line and data nodes which pass geometry. There's an entire page in the manual dedicated to it with visual examples. And with the ability to work on data without needing attributes we can now port texture nodes from the shader editor. So let's take a look at the broader categories of nodes that have been added. New nodes have been added for attributes to provide more options and control over your attribute data. Instances have a bunch of nodes to improve workflow and give you more control on the rotation scale, translation and more. Curves are now supported in geometry nodes including a lot of curve operators and there are also new nodes for text strings, materials and more. The knife tool just got a whole lot better. The constrained angle mode has been improved and it's easier to snap into place. You can turn this on by default now too. Pressing S will toggle measurements for distance and angles and you can now undo your previous cuts. There's an X-ray mode with depth checking and now you can use it for multi-object edit mode. Virtual reality support now has controller support. Currently this allows you to view your controllers in the viewport and move around the scene. We're one step closer to being able to use blender and sight of blender. The grease pencil now has a new vertex weight modifier to generate weights based off proximity or angle on the fly. There's a new length modifier that allows modifications of stroke length even allowing you to extend it based on their curvature. There's a new cool dot dash modifier as well that lets you assign materials to each segment. You can now toggle en masse to use during view layer renders and there are a ton of additional minor updates to existing tools to improve workflow. More of these revolve around line art and operators. Some highlights include speed improvements, camera overscan to help lines extend beyond the frame, baked and transformed strokes into new objects, normalizing thickness and opacity of strokes and select random operators. The default theme got a refresh to celebrate the 3.0 series. This includes improved contrast colors and a new round of settings for panels and menu items. Area management has a new area close operator. The look of corner action zones has been updated to show that you can now create and merge areas in ways that weren't possible before. There's a new view filter in the outliner letting you see all view layers. Material previews have been updated to have better UVs and there are also more options for blender thumbnails now too. The video sequence editor has new image transform tools, strip thumbnails, improved snapping, strip override mode, color tags and more. Packing has new options for linked libraries and external cleanup. Elimic support has been improved, now supporting animated vertex colors and more. USD import is now supported. The Python API has a bunch of updates. I'm too dumb to explain, so check it out below for more details. As usual, there are hundreds of bugs fixes, minor features and improvements, which of course can be seen at the link in the description below. If you like what you see, go support Blender and join the development fund.