Sacred Deer made for the Blender 3.1 splash screen by Lorenzo Aiello (orencloud). Too many improvements to count in Blender

This has come primarily through an update to the Open Image Denoiser which improves normal passes but also through changes to the Shadow Catcher. We’ve been treated to some major improvements in noise-handling too. Rendering improvements are not just limited to speed and performance though. That’s quite the improvement in such a short space of time! Now called Cycles X, artists will be glad that the team decided to not just tinker with the existing code, then ten years old, but to give it a complete re-work from the ground up.Īlongside the better algorithms that have been adopted, much of the improvement has come through the changes to the underlying architecture and utilising the capabilities of modern CPUs and GPUs. In the time between the announcement and the release of Blender 3.0 (only eight months) Blender developers have managed to make rendering times up to eight times faster. In April 2021, Blender announced that it was going to carry out a major overhaul of Cycles, its primary render engine. Artists can now more easily set up outlines using a negative value in the fill tool. One example includes the ‘Dot Dash’ modifier which allows animators to use 'Dot Dash' lines on strokes automatically.

Not only has its performance been sped up but it also comes with a new set of modifiers. The 2D animation tool, Grease Pencil, has been vastly improved.

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