The Blender Foundation has launched Blender 4.1, an update to their free, open-source, 3D graphics software that’s compatible with GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows.
This version comes more than four months after
, bringing both quality-of-life upgrades and performance boosts for everyone, but particularly for modelers and animators.
Blender 4.1 has several notable features, such as a new file handler API. This allows developers to enhance file “import” operations with drag-and-drop functionality throughout the Blender interface. The 3D Viewport and Outliner areas now support other file types like Alembic, Collada, Grease Pencil SVG, OBJ, OpenUSD, PLY, and STL.
The update also introduces GPU-accelerated support for OpenImageDenoise during GPU rendering in the 3D viewport. This is compatible with NVIDIA GTX 16xx, NVIDIA TITAN V, all NVIDIA RTX GPUs, Intel GPUs with Xe-HPG architecture or later, as well as Apple Silicon. At this time, AMD GPUs are not compatible due to stability issues.
Blender 4.1 introduces a fresh Soft Falloff option for Point and Spot lights, ensuring the lights render similarly to Blender 3.6 LTS and its predecessors. When the Soft Falloff option is engaged, the light texture radius serves as a blur factor for the projected texture, and it will become directly visible on the spherical light source when the Soft Falloff option is not applied.
New in this release, Bone Collections are displayed hierarchically shown inside a tree rather than a flat list, enabling reordering via drag and drop. Furthermore, a double click on an object or collection icon in the outliner will now select all its children – a highly sought-after feature among users.
Additionally, Blender 4.1 introduces a new “Bake Channels” operator to the Graph Editor that facilitates a range specification for baking, defines the distance between baked keys, removes keys outside the baked range, determines an interpolation type for fresh keyframes, and bakes modifiers to keyframes.
It also adds an option to create motion paths relative to the active camera, improves the speed of Dope Sheet by only calculating keyframes that are visible in the current view, and adds a new option in the Graph Editor to automatically lock key movement to either the X or Y axis.
Support for the Cryptomatte, Defocus, Keying Screen, and Vector Blur nodes was added to the Viewport Compositor, and the Keying Screen node has been updated to use a Gaussian Radial Basis Function Interpolation to produce smoother temporally stable keying screens.
Blender 4.1 improves the Viewport Compositor to cache multi-pass images, improves the Sun Beams node to produce smoother results, updates the Inpaint node to use Euclidean distance instead of Manhattan distance, and improves Linux CPU rendering performance by about 5% across benchmarks.
Among other noteworthy changes, this release replaces the Split Viewer node with the Split node, a new option lets users disable bump map correction, AMD GPU rendering support was added for RDNA3 generation APUs, and the mesh “Auto Smooth” option has been replaced by a modifier node group asset.
Furthermore, the new curve type supports new operators, a new render “simplify” setting adds the ability to turn off the calculation of face corner and custom normals in the viewport, the Musgrave Texture node was replaced by the Noise Texture node, and Python has been upgraded to Python 3.11, matching the VFX platform 2024.
For sculpting, Blender 4.1 adds brush settings for view and normal automasking values, adds a brush setting for input samples, and adds a scene setting for the automasking propagation step value. Also, the video Sequencer received many performance optimizations across the board, audio waveforms are now displayed by default, and the Sequencer Scopes got visual look improvements.
For more details about the new features, fixes, improvements, and other changes included in this release, check out the release notes. Meanwhile, you can download Blender 4.1 right now from the official website.
Last updated 4 hours ago