It’s the start of the pre-Black Friday, pre Christmas big releases. A biggie, the Blender 4.0 Release Candidate is expected on the 14th November 2023. New is…
– An updated UI (again, will it never end?). There’s even a whole new UI font. Huge UIs menus can now be searched, which is something.
– The vital Principled BSDF node “had a full rewrite”, seemingly enabling slightly better shading and shadows. Hair shading is also a little more realistic, at least considering it’s 3D hair.
– The Anisotropic shader is gone, and Specular BSDF is on the way out.
– The Asset Library is now an ‘Asset Shelf’, under your workspace and viewport.
– Developers can now hook external render engines into Blender.
– User-colored wireframes for 3D meshes.
– Lights now can be textured, and also made to only affect specific parts of a model or figure.
– Nodes can now have collapsible sections.
– “Transparent images in the File Browser now have a checkered background” like in Photoshop. Thumbnail previews for .SVG vector images.
– “Mesh to Volume” node now creates proper volume fog, via OpenVDB.
– Various modelling and rigging changes, which are breaking people’s rigs.
– The minimum OpenGL requirement is now 4.3.
Some of these will likely feed through into Poser 14 in due course, since Poser’s SuperFly is Blender’s Cycles re-branded.