Blender 4.3 is here with massive upgrades to its visuals and performance

Blender 4.3 brings some highly anticipated changes that supercharge the program's ability to create visually striking 3D models, animations, and the many other functions Blender has become known for. While the list of updates is massive, a few key changes are those made to the Eevee, Blenders rendering engine, the grease pencil, the video editor/compositor, and the user interface.

Blender devs have significantly upgraded the lighting capabilities of Eevee, Blender's rendering engine, by introducing light and shadowing linking, which provides more control over a 3D scene. For users creating metal objects with the Metallic BSDF node, Eevee has access to a new mode called "Physical Conductor," which uses lab-grade information to determine how light interacts with real metals to provide a more realistic rendering of the user's object. However, this function has yet to be fully supported by Eevee, but the mode creates an equivalent F82 Tint. Additionally, a new slider uses an algorithm known as "Orn" to roughen or smooth a surface to add more realistic qualities to objects like brick or wood. To maximize the photo-realistic potential of a 3D project, Blender has introduced multipass compositing to let users layer on effects.

Blender's grease pencil received a host of new improvements. Firstly, brushes are now independent assets that users can transfer between projects. Users can also set the size of a brush in pixels or real-world units. Other changes include a new fill gradient tool to help make smoother gradients, and all grease pencil operations are multi-threaded whenever possible. The multi-threaded change is sure to offer some significant performance gains.

Users will find many quality-of-life improvements for the video sequencer and compositor. Connecting and disconnecting strips has been made easier, snapping has been improved, and the editor's overall performance is faster and smoother. The compositor sees the same improvement found with Eevee's multipass compositing capabilities and receives more color correction options.

Finally, Blender's user interface has been upgraded to be clean and user-friendly. Icons are now full SVGs and can be infinitely scaled. The maximum resolution has been increased to whatever your system's memory can handle. Thanks to the new glowing edge, it is easier to find your active window. Last, color picking receives a performance boost.

This giant update contains so much more. For those interested, Blender's official 4.3 update video breaks down all the new features in depth.