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.