 The latest release of Blender continues its recent steady pace of quality of life and performance improvements and includes a few new workflow enhancements that you need to be aware of, especially if you're a modeler or an animator. I'm Jonathan Lampell from CGCookie and in this video we're going to check out everything that's new in Blender 4.1. In the Outliner, double-clicking an object or collection icon will now select all of its children, which is a hugely requested feature, and applying modifiers, show hierarchy, and expand or collapse all are also now in the right-click context menu. A chevron is now used consistently everywhere for expanding and collapsing instead of it sometimes being a carrot like in the Outliner. They're also now centered with the text. Operator dialogs now have a cancel button, and all menus have improved corner rounding and fancier drop shadows. Really wide lists now collapse into a single scrollable column if there's not enough space on the screen to fit all of the items. Input placeholders now show a hint of what type of input is expected. New icons were added for splitting, joining, and swapping windows. The interface font can now be shown in any font weight in addition to any size like it could before, cementing Blender as the number one in UI flexibility. Over in the file browser, the list view is now more responsive as columns are collapsed automatically, and tooltips now show important information like Blender version, image dimensions, frame rate, and more. The new color picker handles now look real thick instead of like tiny dots. Text object fonts now use fallback fonts, meaning that non-English characters and emojis are supported out of the box. Also the word text that's default on new text objects now matches the translation, and there's a new Cambodian translation. The color eyedropper can now pick colors outside of Blender on Mac, which was previously only available on Windows. The open recent menu now shows the Blender version and thumbnail in your recent projects and has a new option to clear the list. Color management can now be applied to camera background images without opening up the image editor, which is helpful for displaying camera footage in the viewport. You can now rotate images by 90 degrees in the image editor, and also the scopes in the image editor and video sequence editor now look really clean and are easier to read. When in camera view, there's a new gizmo button to lock the camera to the view, which is brilliant. And if you enter walk mode in the viewport, the R and F keys are now a relative up and down movement. One of the biggest changes in Blender 4.1 is the removal of auto smooth as a mesh property. This is a pretty big change, but it greatly simplifies the workflow, is way more performant in a lot of cases, opens the door to better procedural control over custom normals, and makes Blender more compatible with other apps. The way it works now is that whether an edge is smooth or sharp is now based on the mesh attributes. That means you can set or clear sharp edges directly without having to mess with any other settings. The destructive way to get the old auto smooth behavior is to use the set sharpness by angle operator in edit mode or the shade smooth by angle operator in object mode. The non-destructive way is to now use the new smooth by angle modifier that's actually a built-in geometry node asset, which is the exciting customizable direction modifiers are heading in. The destructive method of actually marking edges is going to be more performant, since the normals won't have to be recalculated so often, but you can also now go to the simplify panel and turn off custom normals in the viewport for smoother animation playback. Besides that, shape keys can now be locked to prevent accidental changes. Voxel remesh can now preserve custom attributes. Changes were made to the mesh theme so that edges are now more visible and text overlays in the viewport now have more contrast. And the new curves system, which is currently used for geometry nodes and hair, now has the draw curve tool, as well as the extrude, duplicate and tilt operators. And lastly, when painting, the auto masking limit and falloff are now brush specific settings rather than general settings. Some pretty important changes have been made to inserting keyframes in Blender 4.1. Hitting I in the viewport no longer brings up the keying set menu. Instead, it adds a keyframe for the active keying set. If there is no active keying set, it'll fall back to the new default key channels in the animation preferences. If you want to insert a keyframe other than what's in the keying set or whatever the default is, then you can use the new hotkey K. To change the active keying set, use Shift K. If the keymap preference pie menu on drag is enabled, holding down I and then dragging gives a pie menu of the common channels to keyframe. This change does mess with my muscle memory a little bit, but making which channels are getting keyed more clear, especially during auto keying, is a welcome improvement. Also, the only insert needed preference can now be enabled separately for auto keying. Motion paths can now be created relative to the active camera so animators can work more easily in screen space. Bone collections are now hierarchical and can be rearranged and nested with drag and drop. The hierarchy is also now displayed in the Outliner. When you're baking actions, you can now bake custom properties and specify which channels to include. You can also bake individual channels in the graph editor. Bone selection in weight paint mode is now a proper selection mode like vertex and face selection if you enter weight paint mode with an armature selected and there's a dedicated selection tool if you don't want to use the control click hotkey. Driver property variables now have a fallback value that they can use if the property can't be found so things will go less haywire if you break them and failed drivers now have a red underline in the channel list to indicate that they're broken. In the graph editor, a new skill from neighbor operator can help you match a pose on either side of a set of keyframes. You can now right click on most animated properties and choose view in graph editor to zoom to that property's curve if there's a graph editor already open. There's also a new option in the graph editor's view menu to automatically lock keyframe movement to a single axis. Lastly, the dope sheet performance is now significantly better when you have hundreds of thousands or even millions of keyframes. There are five new nodes in blender 4.1 that I'm particularly excited about. Split to instances separates realized geometry into multiple instances which is especially great for working with text and motion graphics. Menu switch lets you build custom drop down menus that you can use in node groups. Index switch works like menu switch but with an integer instead of a drop down. Active camera returns the scene's active camera object. And last but certainly not least, bake cache's geometry which can drastically speed up complex meshes. This data is stored with the modifier and not the node itself so you can safely bake separate meshes that share the same node tree. Node tools can now work in object mode. Baking geometry node simulations no longer drops the previous material assignments, volumes can now be baked, and frames with duplicate data are now much more efficient. The rotation socket introduced in blender 4.0 is now used on the distribute points on faces, instance on points, rotate instances, transform geometry, object info, and instance rotation nodes. There's also a new rotate rotation node which is really straightforward and replaces the rotate Euler node. The panels in the geometry nodes modifier have been reorganized and are now grouped under manage so that they take up less space. The ungroup operator can now work on multiple node groups at the same time. Node sockets have slightly larger hitboxes now so you won't accidentally box select or resize the node as often if you miss. The extrude mesh node can be up to six times faster now, the shortest edge paths node can be at least 60% faster, the face group boundaries node can be over three times faster, and the edges to face groups node can be over seven times faster. The big texture news is that the Musgrave texture node has been completely deprecated, you can't find it in blender 4.1 because all of its functionality has been added to the noise texture since they were the same underlying algorithm all along but with slightly different options. Open image denoise which is higher quality but traditionally slower than optics denoising is now GPU accelerated on supported GPUs. Bump map smoothing can now be turned off in cycles so that stylized materials with bump can have sharp shadow terminators. And rendering on the CPU using linux has been sped up across the board by about 5%. A pretty huge milestone for compositing in blender has been reached in blender 4.1 because all nodes are now supported by the viewport compositor. The viewport compositor now also supports full float precision though it's set to half by default like the backdrop and full is only used when rendering so it stays nice and fast when you're editing. You can change this in the compositor options though if you need to. The keying screen node in the compositor which I recently learned can be used to vary the key color across a green screen for more accurate keying has been improved to smoothly transition between the sampled colors. You can now pick crypto matte colors across different windows. The kuahara node now allows for variable sizes and the pixelate node now has an explicit pixel size property. The map uv node can now use nearest neighbor filtering. The flip and crop nodes now behave as expected if transformed before the operation and transforms in the viewport compositors are now immediately realized so that filters after them also work as expected. The z combine and dilate nodes now have better anti aliasing. The sunbeams node produces much smoother results as does the in paint node when filling holes. The double edge mask node which creates a gradient between two masks is now anywhere from 50 to 650 times faster when using complex masks. The split viewer node is now just a generic split node that has an output that you can use. Lastly the compositor no longer updates in the background when you're not viewing the result so there's less wasted calculations. Navigating the video sequence editor timeline is now three to four times faster when using lots of strips. The glow, wipe, gamma cross, Gaussian blur, and solid color effects are 1.5 to 20 times faster. Audio waveform calculation is now 8 to 15 times faster and is on by default. And image transformation, color management, audio resampling, and reading and writing ffmpeg were all significantly sped up as well. Pixel filtering when scaling or rotating has been much improved and the default filter is now auto which smartly chooses the best filter based on the scaling factor. Oh my word, do we have something to celebrate today? Common 3D file types can now be dragged and dropped right into Blender. It's not every file type yet, but more are coming soon. The PLY importer and exporter for Blender now supports custom vertex attributes. The STL exporter has been rewritten in C++ and is now three to ten times faster than the previous one. Alembic better supports point velocities and camera resolutions and OBJ now exports objects without custom normals 20 to 40 percent faster. USD exports now have a scene root by default, lights are now exported with proper limits, subdivision surfaces that are the last in the modifier stack can have their sub div settings saved in the file rather than applying the modifier and saving all that geometry which significantly reduces the file size, armatures and shape keys are now properly exported as skeletons and blend shapes, and USD can now import instances as collection instances. So that's what's new in Blender 4.1. Go download it today from blender.org and don't forget to support the development fund while you're at it. Again, I'm Jonathan Lampell from CGCookie and I can't wait to see all the cool things that are made with this version of Blender. Thanks again for watching and I'll see you later.