Blender, the popular free open-source 3D creation software, announced new major 4.3 release this Tuesday with many exciting new features and performance improvements.

In the new release, the real-time renderer EEVEE now supports Light Linking and Shadow Linking, which was previously available only in Cycles. It now has a new Metallic BSDF node in shader editor, and, new texture node that can create procedural Gabor noise for random interleaved bands with controllable direction and width.

Blender 4.3 artwork

Grease Pencil in Blender 4.3 was rewritten with overall performance improvements. It now features Layer Groups with ability to toggle visibility, locking, and onion skinning for all the layers in a group. And, there can be color-coded using color tags.

It also features a new Fill Gradient tool, brush asset system, multiple threads whenever possible for faster performance. The eraser has been rewritten to allow strokes to be “cut”. And, Grease Pencil is now supported within Geometry Nodes.

Grease Pencil files are 2.5x ~ 3.4x smaller than before. However, these files created or saved in 4.3 or higher will not load correctly in 4.2 or lower.

The release also includes numerous performance improvements and new features to the Video Sequencer. Video strips are now automatically connected to their sound strip. Sequencer Preview now supports snapping, and, Color Balance is several times faster.

For the UI, it now features area docking. Just move mouse cursor to corner of one area. When the cursor becomes a cross mark, dragging and moving allows to split, join, mov, and dock that window. Tooltips now provide much more information than before, and they now have dedicated style settings for font size, weight, and shadows.

For Linux and Windows, Blender 4.3 adds experimental support for rendering user interface via Vulkan graphics API. And, Linux computers with AMD GPUs now support hardware accelerated ray-tracing using HIP-RT with performance boost (See this page for comparison).

Other changes in Blender 4.3 include:

• New White Point conversion mode in Color Balance node.
• New global Save As Render option
• Removed Compositor Auto Render
• New UV Unrwap menu
• New For Each Element zone, make it easy to iterate over elements of a geometry in parallel.
• Ability to add gizmos to node groups.
• New Set Geometry Name node to give geometries names based on object and collection names.
• New Utility node, and new waring node.
• And more, see official release note for details.

How to Get Blender 4.3

Blender website provides the source code, as well as, official packages for Linux, Windows, and macOS.

For Ubuntu and other Linux, it can be installed via one of the packages below:

• Linux tarball (see the last link) – just extract and run executable file to launch the software.
• Snap package – available in Ubuntu Software or App Center, but runs in sandbox.
• Flatpak package – community maintained (meaning unofficial) and runs in sandbox. See it in flathub.org.

And, for those who are new to Linux, there’s a step by step guide shows how to install the packages above.