Blender 4.3 Released

Blender 4.3 released by Blender Foundation introduces several significant features and improvements that enhance the user experience and expand the software’s capabilities.

Grease Pencil Updates: The third generation of Grease Pencil has been completely rewritten, introducing Layer Groups and support for Geometry Nodes.

This allows for more complex animations and better organization of drawings. Additionally, brushes have been restructured as assets, enabling easier reuse and sharing across projects.

Enhanced Shader Editor: A new dropdown in the principal shader node allows users to adjust roughness and explore various effects with improved controls for anisotropy and frequency. This enhances material creation with more intuitive options.

Sculpting Improvements: The sculpting panel has received a significant overhaul, making it more user-friendly. A new brush shelf feature has been added to streamline access to tools, improving workflow for sculptors.

Texture Management: Users can now preview textures directly in the texture list by hovering over them, which simplifies the process of managing multiple textures in a project. This feature is available in both the UV editing space and Shader editor.

EEVEE Enhancements: Two major features have been added to the EEVEE rendering engine: Light Linking and Multi-pass Compositing. These improvements allow for more advanced lighting setups and compositing workflows, making EEVEE a stronger alternative to Cycles for real-time rendering.

UV Unwrapping Algorithm: A new algorithm for UV unwrapping has been introduced, offering three different options to improve the quality of UV maps. The new method includes an iteration slider that allows users to refine their unwrapping results significantly.

7 Likes

My compliments for this new release.
The most difficult part of the Blender development is to keep the learning pace to the development pace…at least for me.
It’s very hard to keep updated…but it’s also stimulant.

Anyway, personal things apart, great release and a big thank you to all the developers and artists that, using the alphas and betas helped to have this.
Thanks a lot!

3 Likes

I’m worried. Just tested it and found EEVEE NEXT performance in 4.3 is still very poor compared to EEVEE Legacy in 4.1

EEVEE dropped in performance with the change from EEVEE Legacy to EEVEE NEXT in 4.2. Was a big thread about it: https://devtalk.blender.org/t/blender-4-2-eevee-next-feedback

I’ve been stuck in 4.1 because of that, unable to use the new features since.

Had been hoping 4.3 would see EEVEE NEXT able to deliver EEVEE Legacy performance levels, but I took it for tests and the results aren’t good:

Small scenes are ok, but in bigger scenes performance is still unreasonably slower:
(4.2 was similarly bad.)

Sustained Frames (Averaged)
Field: Scene 1: BL41: 11 seconds, BL43: 14 seconds.
Interior: Scene 2: BL43 crashes, no message, nothing.
Interior: Scene 3: BL41 19 seconds, BL43 5 minutes 3 seconds
Urban: Scene 4: BL41 15 seconds, BL43 1 minutes 27 seconds.

Startup Frame (Initial Frame)
BL43 is also much slower at startup:
Urban Scene 3: BL41 1 minute 24 seconds, BL43 5 minute 58 seconds.
Other scenes were similarly slow.

If you’re doing a single render, not a big deal. But if you’re generating a video, that adds up. It’s the difference between rendering a 1000 frame scene in 4 hours with 4.1, versus over 24 hours with 4.3. It’s just not viable.

I know I can’t stay on 4.1 forever, but what really concerns me is there’s no apparent urgency from BF to fix this:
https://devtalk.blender.org/t/blender-4-2-eevee-next-feedback (See last posts)

I’m really worried they’re never going to improve it. With Unreal 5.5 nipping at their heels, Blender should be delivering better performance, not worse.

3 Likes

Why not use Cycles with denoising and settings optimized for speed?

2 Likes

Thanks for your suggestion. I switched the render engine to Cycles and cranked the Samples down to 16 from 4096, relying on denoising.

Surprisingly Cycles was amazingly fast: For Scene3 Time:00:55.47 for the first frame. Not as fast as EEVEE Legacy 4.1 = 19 seconds, but much faster than EEVEE NEXT 4.3 = 5 minutes 10 seconds. And also surprisingly, despite the low sample rate, the output from Cycles was quite good. Hard to say quantitatively, but there were no obvious problems and it seemed just as good as and maybe better than EEVEE.

That was the first frame. Subsequent frames might have been faster, but unfortunately the Cycles run crashed after the first frame (this seems to be a new bug with command line processing reported here https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/130643 ):

Exception ignored in: <function Pool.__del__ at 0x0000022A33307920>
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender 4.3\4.3\python\Lib\multiprocessing\pool.py", line 271, in __del__
  File "C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender 4.3\4.3\python\Lib\multiprocessing\queues.py", line 371, in put
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'dumps'

Blender quit

queues.py:
    def put(self, obj):
        # serialize the data before acquiring the lock
        obj = _ForkingPickler.dumps(obj)	<-----

Meanwhile thanks for the suggestion. Pleasantly surprising! (Update: Ran some more tests: Confirmed! I didn’t realize Cycles could be that fast!)

2 Likes

:+1::+1:

I’ve always been a Cycles fan, while EEVEE… How shall I put it subtly… Does not make my heart beat as fast as Cycles does. :wink:

4 Likes

But in a production environment where you need a lot of frames rendered, cycles just doesn’t cut it. Especially considering the lack of details in the optimized renders.

So, still a close to realtime solution is needed.

We use Cycles. But for projects we can afford to wait for renders.

There is just no comparison between the two however as far as speed/performance, if that is what you need.

And we recently had a project just like that.

Needs to be 8k, 72 fps. 360 and in stereo!

For the budget and timeline required it brought cycles to its knees.

We are redoing it all in Eevee and also a parallel track to test out Unteal 5.5.

Eevee in my opinion should be the blender realtime solution not a production render option. We don’t need that in my opinion.

So speed should be the primary concern here.

Absolutely. I’m not anti-EEVEE. :wink: It’s just that for someone like me, who usually renders a single image, Cycles is the preferred renderer.

Having said that, sometimes a real-time renderer can have a look that is more appealing than a full-fledged ray-traced rendering. I often see Marmoset Toolbag or Unreal Engine renderings that look gorgeous, and I hope the new EEVEE will get to that point in the near future.

1 Like

In plenty of agreement here!

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hey guys, do you know when square brushes is going to be supported? it would very useful for rake strokes.