What's New in Blender 3.0

 Here are some of Blender's new features that will dramatically improve user workflow.

New Features, Updates and Improvements in Blender 3.0

Blender 3.0 is finally here. While a lot has changed since Blender 2.0 first came out in August 2000, it's this latest release that really got the Blender community excited. A lot has changed, but everything users love is still as great as before.

Blender's official YouTube channel covers the start of everything you'd expect (especially if just getting started with Blender).

Some notable highlights include:

1. Improved shading, Ray-tracing and Subsurface Scattering effects (the effect of light passing through an object and scattering inwards).
2. Render faster than ever. Blender claims to be 2 to 8 times faster
3. The Knife tool is greatly improved, as well as adding a lot of small tweaks to other tools.
4. Augmented reality (VR) tools.
5. Expands Grease Pencil and its abilities.
6. More than 100 new nodes, as well as many new modifiers.
7. Better editing and posing features.
8. Optimized user interface.
9. New ways to store, manage, and reuse poses, textures, lighting, and more.

These more exciting developments come with the usual bug fixes and small usability tweaks (you can read the full details of any changes in the Blender 3.0 release notes).

Now, let's take a closer look at some of the new features worth trying in Blender.

New tools in Blender 3.0 (same updated favorites)

As mentioned in the video, the Blender 3.0 Knife tool now supports multi-object editing, among many other additional tweaks worth noting.

What's New in Blender 3.0 Picture 1

One tool that has received a significant improvement is the Blender Grease Pencil tool. It has been refined and now works more realistically than ever; such as applying modifiers to Grease Pencil benchmarks, it's now much easier to apply modifiers to Grease Pencil standards.

Changing poses in Blender 3.0

What's New in Blender 3.0 Picture 2

Pose Sliding allows you to switch easily between two main poses or between multiple poses. Blender's entire new line of editing tools dedicated to pose analysis offers a much greater degree of control over how you characterize each pause, breath, and development.

Asset Browser in Blender 3.0 and new libraries

What's New in Blender 3.0 Picture 3

Blender has been hinting at its Asset Browser for a while now. Blender 3.0 brings users the first official version of the system and it proves to be useful as expected.

With the Asset Browser, you can manage objects, documents, poses, and worlds with one of the libraries. Pose Library is one of the standout features for animators. All of your character's most iconic expressions can be collected and stored, ready to be retrieved whenever you need them.

Jessica Tanner

Update 13 December 2021