Blender 4.2: Render more beautifully with Eevee and Cycles
The 3D software Blender 4.2 comes with a revised Eevee render engine. It simplifies operation and standardizes it with Cycles.
The splash screen of Blender 4.2 shows a scene from Project Gold, the new open movie from Blender Animation Studios.
(Image: Blender.org)
The free 3D software Blender comes with a completely revised render engine Eevee. The update 4.2, which has been postponed several times, also simplifies and standardizes the operation with Cycles in many areas.
Eevee Next: rendering in real time
Blender's fast real-time render engine Eevee Next is set to usher in a new generation. It does away with numerous limitations. For example, global lighting now works with any number of shaders. The number of lights in the scene is theoretically no longer limited. A maximum of 4096 can be visible at the same time. Light sources are now also visible behind refractive surfaces such as glass.
Eevee can now also display surfaces offset (displacement). Objects can now also be displayed as volumes, for example as fog or smoke. Previously, this only worked with cuboid objects in Eevee.
Eevee can now render shadows with more realism and fewer parameters. The contact shadows previously required are no longer necessary. Whether objects cast a shadow or not has been standardized between Eevee and Cycles.
When a panoramic image with a high dynamic range is used to light a scene, Eevee Next can search the panorama for the sun and place a virtual sun as a light source. This creates more realistic shadows.
Eevee can now display motion blur as a preview in the viewport. The depth of field is then also visible, and now also requires fewer settings with higher quality.
Production-ready rendering with Cycles
The other render engine in Blender is called Cycles and is based purely on computationally intensive path tracing, for example for film production. Rays are sent from the camera into the scene, which are reflected several times like real light. In Blender 4.2, Cycles can send the rays through portals to other areas of the scene, for example to simulate a surveillance camera.
(Image:Â Blender.org)
The Cycles render engine can now simulate the so-called thin-film interference for non-metallic surfaces. This effect is responsible for the rainbow colors on the underside of DVDs and on soap bubbles.
When rendering with Cycles, noise remains in the image, which is removed afterwards. Denoising can now also be performed by AMD GPUs under Windows and Linux on the graphics card, even if the CPU is rendering the actual image. The result should also look better.
Blue noise dithering is intended to reduce noise behavior with only a few rays sent and lead to better results when denoising. The developers have therefore made this method the standard.
(Image:Â Blender.org)
Convenient video editing
The developers have completely revised the timeline of Blender's built-in video editing editor. The strips, which can contain keyframes, transitions or sound, among other things, now have rounded corners. This makes the beginning and end more visible. Selected strips stand out better in color than before. If Blender cannot find a media file for a strip, it is now colored reddish.
The text tool in the video editing editor can now add a border to the letters. The shadow can be moved and rendered blurred.
Installing extensions from the application
Blender used to come with a large selection of add-ons out of the box. Most of them are now available for download on the online platform extensions.blender.org instead. By default, Blender does not access the Internet. If you allow this, you can access the extensions directory directly from the application and install add-ons.
Neutral colors with Khronos PBR Neutral
Colors are a complex matter in computer graphics. A film camera registers colors differently than a digital sensor, which in turn registers colors differently than the human eye. What they all have in common is that colors lose saturation the brighter they are. If this is prevented, bright areas tend to become oversaturated. The tone mapper Khronos PBR Neutral provides a color transformation in Blender 4.2 that promises color fidelity without oversaturation.
Post-processing in the compositor
Blender can also post-process the generated images. This step is called compositing and can now always be carried out on the graphics card in Blender 4.2. Those who continue to use the CPU can look forward to performance improvements.
The Glare Node has been given a new mode called Bloom. It creates an effect as if the camera lens had been lit. It was previously reserved for Eevee and is now available for all render engines via the Compositor.
New hardware requirements
Blender 4.2 requires a CPU with SSE4.2 under Windows and Linux. This instruction set has been supported by Intel since 2008 with Nehalem and by AMD since 2011 with Bulldozer. Blender 4.2 is now available for Windows, macOS and Linux and as source code for download. (akr)
