Sponsored content in collaboration with NVIDIA Studio.
New Blender releases are always cause for celebration, and it's time to celebrate, folks! The highly anticipated Blender 3.5 has finally arrived, revolutionizing the world of 3D creation with countless enhancements and new features, all while paving the way for the upcoming massive 4.0 release.
Many Light Sampling
One of the key features in Blender 3.5 is Cycles' introduction of Light Trees, also known as Many Lights Sampling. This new addition to the path-tracer efficiently samples scenes with numerous lights, significantly reducing noise while slightly increasing render times per sample. Moreover, materials with emission now feature a new Emission Sampling setting, further improving the rendering process. Combined with RTX Hardware, path-tracing in cycles has never been more efficient.
Without and with Light Tree enabled at equal render times
Viewport Compositor
Another groundbreaking feature in Blender 3.5 is the debut of the viewport compositor, part of the real-time compositor project. The viewport compositor applies the compositing node tree directly to the viewport, offering an entirely new level of interactivity and novel workflows for creators. This speed and performance is unlocked by virtue of the viewport compositor being a fully GPU based re-write, leveraging graphics hardware to do what it does best, at blazing speed. With the first iteration of this feature now available, users can expect even more advancements in the future.
New Hair System
Blender 3.5 also boasts an upgraded hair system and built-in hair assets, powered by Geometry Nodes. This enhancement enables users to quickly and easily create hair, fur, or grass, and access a library of hair assets from the Asset Browser. Furthermore, Blender 3.5 adds support for Vector Displacement Maps in sculpt mode, allowing the creation of complex shapes with overhangs in one brush dab, which can significantly streamline the sculpting process.
Nvidia Studio Platform
While the tools don’t make the (blender) artist, they sure can help unlock creativity and new workflows by removing any friction with the content creation process, as well as giving access to next gen tools to push the barrier of what is possible as an individual or a small team. And when talking about the right tools for a 3D job, NVIDIA is the first name that comes to mind, not the least thanks to their NVIDIA Studio Platform and NVIDIA Omniverse.
The NVIDIA Studio platform, which is a hardware and software ecosystem combining the latest advancements in graphics cards, laptops, drivers, creative software, and more to craft a game-changing experience for content creators. This platform supercharges over 110+ creative apps by accelerating their most computationally intensive aspects with the power of RTX GPUs, all while providing lasting stability with NVIDIA Studio Drivers. All this awesome computing power is accompanied by NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform where creators can connect their 3D apps and collaborate in real time. It is then no wonder that NVIDIA is a go-to for many content creators.
This week’s "In the NVIDIA Studio" artist: AuraProds
AuraProds, a Spain-based 3D artist and filmmaker, is the star of the 50th edition of "In the NVIDIA Studio". Inspired by the blockbuster movie Jurassic Park, AuraProds has created a short film featuring adorable dinosaur models that they sculpted by hand using Blender 3.5.
The artist took advantage of Blender Cycles' RTX-accelerated OptiX ray tracing in the viewport for interactive, photorealistic modeling, made possible by their GeForce RTX 4080 GPU. NVIDIA NanoVBD allowed for easier volume rendering, achieving realistic atmosphere in his renders. Optix also allowed for quickly exported fully rendered files to Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve software, which greatly benefited from GPU-Accelerated workflows, color grading, video editing, and color scopes, while GPU-accelerated decoding with NVDEC enabled smooth playback and scrubbing of high-resolution footage.
AuraProds also harnessed the power of AI video editing tools, achieving up to 2x increase in AI performance over the previous generation. They applied several AI features to achieve their desired visual effects, wrapping up the project by deploying the RTX 4080 GPU’s dual AV1 video encoders, effectively cutting export time in half.
Check out AuraProds' previous endeavour, a desert sci-fi short shot entirely on green screen, and also made using Blender and Davinci Resolve:
To see more of AuraProds' work and learn more about how he used NVIDIA Studio technology to create his adorable "dinomites" check out the NVIDIA Studio blog post. The possibilities are endless with the right tools and support, and NVIDIA Studio is leading the way in empowering content creators to achieve their aspirations. Check out the NVIDIA Studio YouTube channel for more educational content hosted by Blender Artists.
