 Blender 4.0 is now officially released, and the big number change comes with some big improvements. I'm Jonathan Lampell from CGCookie, and in this video I'm going to cover everything that you need to know before you upgrade. The first thing you might notice is that Blender has embraced the notch design and has returned to a flat background. There's also a brand new interface font called Inter that should be easier to read. The 3D view now has a region called the Asset Shelf, which allows you to access your asset library without opening a separate editor. In this initial implementation, it only works for pose assets and with the Pose Library add-on enabled. You can enable it in the View menu, and then it'll pop up when you're in Pose mode. Paint modes now have a canvas picker in the 3D view header, so it's easier to see and change what image or attribute you're painting on. Color pickers are a bit larger now, which is a nice touch. Wireframe Fresnel in Edit mode is now a preference and off by default to make vertices more visible, but you will likely want to turn it back on if you're working with dense meshes. So the color of wireframes can now be controlled in all shading modes. More polycount info has been added to the Object Mode scene statistics. The Overlays dropdown is now organized into General Overlays in one menu and Mode Specific Overlays in another. In the Outliner, Select Hierarchy now finally works with multiple selected objects. In the Node Editors, previews now sit above the nodes instead of inside them. Nodes can also now have collapsible sections, which makes giants like the principal BSDF much more manageable to work with. The images in the file browser now have a checkered background, and SVG images now have proper thumbnails. Blender supports many languages, but now Catalan joins English, Spanish, French, Japanese, and Slovak as one of the translations with 100% coverage. I didn't expect big news in the File Saving Department, but now when saving a file you can hit Save Incremental or Control Alt S to save a new version of the file with its name incremented by 1. It's the same as hitting the plus button in the Save As menu, which is one of those features that I just wish all software had. A bunch of themes were updated. Many menus were organized a bit better, and many small UI details have been cleaned up. Menus can also be searched. Just open one up and start typing. This is especially helpful in the new Add Modifier menu, which has been organized into categories. You'll see why this is important when we talk about Geometry Node updates. If you want, you can access this menu from anywhere in the Modifiers tab by pressing Shift A. Speaking of modifiers though, let's talk about the modeling changes. There is only one big modeling update in Blender 4.0, but it's a really good one. A new snapping feature called Snap Base allows you to interactively define how you want your objects or components to snap together. To use it, hit B while transforming to edit the snap base. You can either left click on a component to snap with it immediately, or use the hotkey A to add multiple points, which will be averaged between. Left click to confirm and move your mouse towards where you want to snap to. It even works with scaling and rotation. Just be aware that it overrides your snap with and snap to settings from the popover, which by the way has been reorganized to make what and how you're snapping a little more clear. To go along with this, you can now move the view around during transformations by holding Alt. And not much happened with Sculpting in this update, but the Smooth Shading option was removed from Dynamic Topology since it now properly gets that info from the object data. And the Sculpting keymap was updated to make it more consistent with the other modes. There are some big moves happening with Geometry Nodes in Blender 4.0. First, there's a new Repeat Zone, which can be used to loop instructions any number of times. The way it works is very similar to the Simulation Zone, which was introduced in the last version, but instead of looping once every frame, you can loop as many times as you'd like on every frame. Next, Geometry Node Assets can now be marked as Modifiers. Once set, any Node Group asset in your library can be found in the Modifiers menu. Geometry Node Assets can also be marked as Tools. It's essentially a shortcut for adding the group as a modifier and immediately applying it without the hassle of toggling modes and a bunch of extra clicks. Tool Node Groups can use special contextual info such as the current selection and location of the 3D cursor. To create a tool, just switch the Geometry Nodes Editor type from Modifier to Tool. Now, even if you're not a Node Wizard, both of these updates are still really exciting for you because it means that the crazy cool setups created by the Node Wizards are going to be at your fingertips without you even having to touch the Node Editor. There are a few new Nodes as well. You can now finally mark edges as smooth or sharp with Geometry Nodes and a new Points to Curves node can be used to string points together based on their index and grouping. Speaking of curves, the Curve to Mesh node is now significantly faster in some situations. There's a new socket type for rotations, which enables things like mixing rotations or easily working with degrees instead of radians and swapping between Oilers and Quaternions. Just be aware that not everything labeled rotation is a rotation socket. So pay attention to the color of the socket and if you get this red line between them, you probably need to convert from Oiler to Rotation or from Rotation to Oiler. Now, if you didn't understand any of that, then it's probably not something that you're going to need to use. But I promise that it's both cool and useful. The Mesh to Volume node now generates a proper fog volume using OpenVDB and Node Group inputs can now be marked as expecting single values so users know whether or not they can input a field. Bone Layers, which was one of the last remnants of Blender's ancient history, have finally been replaced by Bone Collections, which is a huge organizational improvement because you can name them. Along with this update comes the ability to change the armature color on a per bone basis for both edit and pose mode. Bendy Bones have a new deformation option called Curved Mapping, which is a little bit slower but results in much more natural deformations than the default straight mapping. Bones with inverse kinematic constraints can now use Visual Keying, which is a cool type of keyframe that allows you to enable and disable constraints without your bones or objects jumping around. The Preserve Volume option in the Armature Modifier and Constraint has been improved to better handle simultaneous scaling and rotation. You can now use pointers to data blocks as custom properties. Snapping for the animation editors is now a scene property, so you no longer have to change it for each editor individually. In the non-linear animation editor, the strips can be vertically dragged through other strips and through locked tracks. Also, tapping to enter tweak mode uses full stack evaluation by default so you can see the final layered result. The infinite scrolling issue that I complained about last time has been fixed and duplicating a strip with Shift D does not create a separate copy of the animation inside the strip. For that, you'll now want Alt D. Channel Group Colors in the dope sheet are no longer horrific to work with and now actually look great. The Graph Editor can now handle drawing stupid amounts of keyframes like it's nothing. You can now edit multiple F-curve modifiers at the same time by holding Alt like regular modifiers. A bunch of new operators were added to the Graph Editor as well, including some interactive sliders. Match Slope blends the selected keys to the slope of either the right or left neighbor. Blend to Ease blends the selected keys to an ease in or ease out curve. Blend Offset shifts the selection to the keys in front or behind it. Shear will rotate the selection from the front or back without changing the keys X position. Scale Average scales each of the selected segments individually in the Y direction. Push Pull scales from an imaginary line that connects the start to the end. Time Offset moves the shape of the animation forwards or backwards without moving the keys to other frames. Lastly, Butterworth Smoothing, which was named after the physicist Stephen Butterworth and not the Pancake Queen, attempts to cover the overall shape of the curve while minimizing smaller fluctuations. In Shading News, the principled BSDF got a full rewrite for Blender 4.0, which was focused on making it much more physically accurate. The main difference in using this new one is that the IOR value is used throughout the shader, and the old specular slider is now the IOR level, which acts as a multiplier. Each individual tweak may not make a huge, obvious difference in most scenes, but all combined, this shader is rock solid in a big step up. The Anisotropic shader no longer exists, RIP, and that effect is now just an option on the regular glossy shader. The default distribution method for shaders is now Multi Scatter GGX, which has always been the best looking, but is now the default because it's been improved to be just as fast as the others. The specular BSDF, which many didn't know existed and which supported the specular PBR workflow in Eevee, has been deprecated and will be fully removed in 4.1. The velvet shader has been renamed to the Sheen shader with a new default shading model called Micro Fiber, which is excellent for simulating the tiny hairs of fabric or dust on a surface catching the light. As a reminder, this shader only works in cycles though. A new hair shading method called Huang has been added. It's much more realistic than the previous default, now called Qiang, though it seems to introduce more fireflies and appears flat when viewed up close. The Veronoi and Noise Procedural textures have new options for adjusting their complexity. Normal map strength can now be pushed past a value of 1 without the lower values going negative and causing artifacts. Cycles finally supports light and shadow linking now, which allows artists to specify exactly which objects each light will affect. In the light's object properties under shading, assign a collection for this light to influence, or add a new one and drag and drop objects or collections into it from the outliner. Everything with a checkmark next to it will get affected by this light and nothing else will, but if all checkmarks are disabled, the light will illuminate everything except these objects. Shadow linking works the same way, but instead of determining which objects receive light, it determines which ones cast shadows. Lights look ever so slightly different too, since they've been updated for better energy preservation and compatibility with other renderers. They also now have UV coordinates for easier texturing. Cycles Pathguiding now supports glossy materials, which helps clean up noisy scenes with lots of reflections. The default color transform is switched from Filmic to the new AGX, which handles bright lights and saturated colors a lot more naturally and very similarly to a high-end camera. Filmic was a big step up from standard because it has so much more dynamic range and allows more details to come through in the bright areas. And in a similar way, AGX is a step up from Filmic. Not only does it have a higher dynamic range, it also doesn't skew the colors to the wrong hue as they get brighter, which allows more detail to come through in the bright and saturated areas. If you find your renders to be too washed out, try setting the look to punchy or high contrast. And if the color of something isn't as saturated as you'd like, try adjusting the exposure until that particular area is properly exposed. Blender also supports HDR monitor output now, but currently only on Mac and when using the standard color transform. Add-on developers will be able to use USD Hydro Delegates for implementing external render engines with Blender. This improves performance and compatibility with other 3D apps. This should encourage more renderers to support Blender if they don't already. A new compositing filter node called Kuhahara will allow you to easily apply a stylized painterly effect to your renders. No AI needed. The Viewport compositor now supports the movie distortion, sunbeams, keying, Kuhahara, in-paint, and double-edge mask nodes. The depth socket has been removed from the image viewer and output nodes since it hasn't really been used since the multi-layer EXR files got introduced forever ago. A new re-timing tool in the video sequence editor will allow you to slow down and speed up clips. Multiple control points can be added per clip, so you won't even need to split clips in order to do complex timing adjustments. For Blender 4.0, the minimum OpenGL version required has been bumped to 4.3 for Linux and Windows, support has been dropped for Intel HD 4000 GPUs, and Mac now requires a GPU and macOS version that supports Metal 2.2. And that's all for this release. Let me know in the comments which update you're most excited about, and if you plan to update right away or wait until later in the Blender 4x series. Again, I'm Jonathan Lampell from CGCookie. I hope you have a great rest of the day. Go download Blender 4.0, support the development fund while you're at it, and I'll see you later. Bye.