New Features Not to Miss Out in Blender 3.4 

Just like many other amazing 3D creation suites, Blender constantly gets enriched with new features, which help you create more effective projects within the shortest time possible. Recently, Blender 3.4 got another update, and now it boasts more cool options you can start using to your advantage right now. So, let’s check out all of them right now! 

Story Pencil Addon 

There’s so much sophistication and hidden meaning to hand-drawn animations. And if you’re also into pencil drawings, you can now try to create your own artworks with Blender. Blender’s developers have introduced the new Story Pencil addon, which is just great for creating new scenes, rearranging and editing them in your timeline, as well as making other changes to your projects. This tool can also be effectively used for creating eye-catching product animations for marketing campaigns along with other visual marketing tools offered by VistaCreate. Arguably, with this new feature, Blender becomes one of the best storyboarding options available on the market these days. So, lots of current users nurture hopes that the Story Pencil addon will see future support and won’t go anywhere. 

Grease Pencil 

It would be criminal not to mention the new Grease Pencil Tool update on today’s list of Blender’s recent updates. Undoubtedly, developers did a great job and now, users can enjoy the improved version of this useful feature. There are more options for gap closures accessible in the side panel. There’s also a new outline modifier for generating perimeter strokes based on the camera view. The line art modifier, in its turn, now has a forced intersection option to override the no-intersection command when needed, while the time offset modifier boasts a chain mode. 

Sculpting Auto-Mask

Sculpting has a cool auto-masking popover feature, which helps you manage all your automasking options, making them more accessible and easy to use. In particular, there’s a great ‘Mask From Cavity’ operator. You can utilize this tool to visualize your current auto-mask and manually make any edits to it. These micro features really help take sculpting in Blender to the whole new level.

Geometry Nodes

Most people will be excited to hear that Geometry Nodes has acquired a new evaluation system. This can provide better performance for complex nodes setups. 

Viewer Node 

The new Viewer node may be your win-win option for quickly viewing what you’re working on. This tool is easily activated by clicking on it. Since Geometry nodes can still be a trial-and-error process, the new Viewer node comes in particularly handy. 

 Other Nodes

There’s also a new Distribution of Points and Volume nodes to create points inside volume grids. Users also have a new Self-Object Node at their disposal now. It helps retrieve modifiers for current objects. There’s also a Sample Index, Sample Nearest, and Sample Nearest Surface node for retrieving additional data for use. For mesh we have the Face Set Boundaries node, which finds the edges between groups of faces and provides additional access to mesh topology information. Likewise, users receive an additional Topology Nodes and Curves Department, as well. 

Cycles Path Tracing Updates

Intel Open Path Guiding Library has been added to Cycles. This improves the sampling quality of packs being traced, which helps reduce the noise in your render. Specifically, you’ll notice the improvement in complex lighting scenes, such as indirect bounces, caustics, and more. The less noise in your scenes, the fewer samples you need. Thus, you should see a considerable decrease in render times. 

AMD/Metal/Intel Updates

AMD HIP, Apple Metal, and Intel open API have all seen minor improvements and support updates. 

NLA Track Editor 

NLA Tracks have also undergone minor improvements including automatically naming tracks after their actions have been pushed down, drawing tracks based on their extrapolation type, and adding a Redo panel. 

UV Tools 

The UV Sculpt tools have also seen large improvements. The new geometry-based relax brush improves the quality of UV mapping by making the UVs follow the geometry more closely. It can be accessed under the Brush settings. UV packing has also been spruced up. The recent changes include the ability to work with non-manifold geometry, aligning the UVs to rotation, randomizing islands, and using non-uniform grids. 

Driver Update 

You can now mute drivers in the Drive Properties panel. 

Core Updates

Lots of improvement has been made to Blender’s core options. While it would take too much time to list all of them now, some highlights need to be mentioned, though. 

WebP images are now quicker to review thumbnails, and Metaballs are now evaluated as meshes. Font loading has been improved, as have font thumbnails. U-layer sync operations have also been considerably enhanced for scripts that create a lot of objects in a single operation and lead to performance boosts.