Blender 4.2 LTS Released

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But Blender before didn’t have a System Preference setting that said “Allow Online Access”.
Additionally, Blender before also didn’t have such a setting option that as stated by it’s very own tool tip, that having it checked or unchecked may or may not in fact allow or disallow any range of online access to Blender and/or any addons running within the Blender environment.

Now you and I know what it means and what it does or doesn’t do and how basic security and addons from every version of Blender up to and included 4.2 basically hasn’t changed. But if a new user checked or unchecked it without really reading and understanding the Tool Tip (which pretty much contradicts what the label text says), what do you think their understanding of such a preference setting would be?

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83

I think this option is great because some AddOns require access to Internet like BlenderKit or similar that require to load in time updates or also discount in real time and can cause a little delay compare by disable it.

In some cases could be a good solution because if more addons require internet in same time can cause issues in particular I notice the AI or premade components.

And as second fact as security could be a good reason for have something that can prevent access to Internet from unknown source or dangerous one

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That checkbox does not effect that, addons can still access internet. The only thing that it blocks is Blender’s own code from going on line downloading addons and updates. I do not know if the Blenderkit addon follows the “recommendations” but other addons may not.

It is not really a change addons have always been able to access internet, but I agree that it gives a false sense of security to users that are not aware of it.

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85

This is the point I’m making - the checkbox does not do that. An add-on can connect to the Internet or update itself whether you have that turned on or off.

(It would be nice if it did do that, but it doesn’t.)

And this is yet another example of why I suggested that the labeling of this checkbox be changed (or option even removed) before 4.2 was shipped.

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86

Except it doesn’t do that and likely never will. Any addon is meant to check the setting and do what it says, but that is nothing more then a ‘suggestion’ which can be totally ignored.

Now sure, any addon built into Blender and likely any addon on the official extensions platform will check and abide by that setting. But anything that is an ‘unknown source or dangerous’ can and will just totally ignore it and you will never know.

However, thanks for the reply, it totally proved the point that some of us are trying to make, in that you misunderstood what it does and in turn provided a false sense of security.

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87

I thought that was the goal, perhaps it would also be interesting to implement something in this regard for addons that are not up to date or even cause inconsistencies with other addons

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Take my word with a pinch of salt, but after a quick check, I doubt it is technically feasible (or worth it) to implement it. Sandboxing python is not so easy. In fact, I think the best solution is to rely on the OS’ own native sandboxing features for this kind of permissions. Win/Mac/Linux all have their spin on this feature.

Hence, I’d just rename that checkbox to something clearer (“Allow Blender to check for extensions info and updates”), keep it simple and leave the network cutoff functionality in the hands of the user and the sysadmin for organizations. It seems more intuitive to me. Not worth it to work on it as an application developer.

But hey, I’m no Blender dev, of course.

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89

My complaint with Eevee Next- Mix Shaders:
Legacy:

Mix Cube
Mix Cube600×600 17.4 KB

Next:

Mix Cube B
Mix Cube B600×600 95.8 KB

Apparently the general user base does not use nearly as many Mix shaders as I do? On my side, basically none of my shader trees work with Next. Or is there some elegant solution that I’m supposed to be using that solves the problem?

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Probably worth a bug report

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91

Hum, maybe you should make that it’s own topic and post an example of your shader. Indeed you generally don’t need a lot of mix shader node.
A good rule of thumb is that most of the time you need only one shader type per nodetree. Like you might mix a diffuse BSDF and a glossy BSDF, which is fine. But mixing say two diffuse is generally not the way to go. You should instead mix their colors and keep only one bsdf.

It’s the same with the principled BSDF , you can mix them, like one is for a brick material, one is for a plaster it’s easy but that’s going to slow things down by a lot. However you can manage to the same result by mixing each channels and keep only one principled.

Anyway, as Joseph said, maybe it’s worth filling a report as it’s a regression that might not be noticed by the developpers.

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Probably it’s due to Eevee Next sampling ONE random mixed BSDF per pixel every sample. They used to be blended together, with the caveat only one BSDF had the full rendering effect stack applied and other mixed ones were simplified. Now every BSDF receives full effects. it’s supposed to blend together with more render samples (similar to how hashed alpha worked), which it does (128ish looks pretty clean with 4 Principled BSDFs).

1 sample:

image
image3623×802 374 KB

128 samples:

image
image3646×853 189 KB

Doesn’t work that well with temporal reprojection though:

image
image2435×645 124 KB

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93

At the moment, my not so great solution is to add a Kuwahara filter to the compositor. It does seem 4.3 has some changes to temporal reprojection planned that should help some?

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wait, people actually make nodes like that with multiple bsdf to achieve material blending?
that feels wrong

There should be something like Materrial Attribute groups

LB Height Blending (Cheap Contrast)_2
LB Height Blending (Cheap Contrast)_2852×588 220 KB

I guess that layered “texturing” is suppose to be like that

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95

Not super familiar with how it works in UE. But it doesn’t seem to fully address the issue here.

For example: Real world plausible materials sometimes have multiple glossy/specular layers, each with different roughness value. A mix of those would be incorrect if those separate glossy roughnesses were interpolated together. A half and half mix of of 0.0 roughness and 0.5 roughness glossy layers isn’t a single layer with 0.25 roughness. It’s 50% at 0.0 and 50% at 0.5.

On the other hand a dielectric material on it’s own is something like 92% diffuse, 8% glossy and with clearcoat, whatever the small percentage of it defined by user is. Considering how heavy all tracing stuff still is, it doesn’t also really make sense to run it 3 times per pixel during one sample to just occlude it all properly, for how small the contribution to the overall image is. Eevee legacy didn’t, except for one glossy layer, besides the basic lighting pass. Skimming over UE docs it doesn’t seem to imply they run multiple passes of effects to do it either.

I’m pretty sure Cycles does “random” sampling per bsdf. And since the design goal generally seems to be to match Cycles when possible, similar sampling pattern solves that. Without a huge performance cost per sample. It also scales without limits with what the node editor allows users to do. Like alternate PBR ubershaders and so on, without having Blender randomly decide which glossy component should take most priority.

Using a BSDF as an final output in node editor is still what you should be doing most of the time though in practice. Having a better way to mix inputs to that would be very welcome. Personally I’d like to see the ability to batch multiple outputs/inputs between node groups with one connection.

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96

I hope they will completely run it back and put the addons back into the blender file. I immediately downgraded back to 4.1 and won’t upgrade to a new version until to stop that nonsense.

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Sounds like you’ll happily be using 4.1 for many more years to come!

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https://developer.blender.org/docs/release_notes/4.2/#compatibility

you can download the legacy addons here

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99

You are aware that addons in 4.1 (and all the older versions) already had to capability to connect to the internet via python code? That has not changed, it has always been like that.

The checkbox was added because Blender it’s self (without addons) did not connect to internet. They added the checkbox for people who want to control this ability.

If that is the reason you will never update, then it is totally useless because any addon (in all Blender versions) could have code that connects to the internet. Older versions are not more “secure” in that aspect.

Yes, but be aware that there is nothing stopping them from connecting to the internet and there never has been

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100

It´s always good to reiterate that. :+1:

For anyone who wants to Airgap their PC, there are inbuild Firewalls of the OS or tools like Netlimiter available.

https://alternativeto.net/software/netlimiter/

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101

I think most of the concerns of “the community” (whatever that means in practice) were addressed after a little back and forth.

To me, the extensions thingy is not a bad idea. The implementation and exposure in the interface was more concerning, but I think they came to a pretty decent compromise. So it’s good. Again, from my point of view.

As more add-on’s embrace this “extensions” format, some of the remaining, let’s say… hmmm… hurdles? Points of friction?.. will eventually dissipate. And we’ll probably talk about kinds of extensions, rather than add-on’s, themes, packs of geo-nodes, whatever. And when that day comes, keeping track of all we have installed will be easier and more convenient to manage.

What I see as a problem is the unnecessary confusion brought about by that pesky little button and its reading. We’re already starting to see fundamentally confused reactions in diverse ways and directions. I truly hope we won’t get to a point when the issue becomes serious.

Hopefully, after a little “back and forth”, a couple of complaints, three uncalled for attacks at the developers, a dozen defenses on their behalf, and some sensible interaction by some cool headed reputable users will put this to rest, as it usually happens. :slight_smile:

It’s strange to me the resistance on this one. But again, I’m not there, and it’s not my software.

I’m using 4.2, it has some nice new things, some fixes I can use and I model complex things in 4.0.3 and then export. All good. I encourage you to evaluate if 4.2 is fine for you besides the “internet” thing. It’s not a thing, it’s just confusing.

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