5 Key Features of Blender 4.3

Blender Foundation has released Blender 4.3, which includes significant updates across various features, from Grease Pencil 3 – a major overhaul of the 2D animation toolset – to enhancements in sculpting, materials, and Eevee and Cycles rendering.

1. Grease Pencil 3: Major Overhaul of 2D Animation Tools
One of the standout features in Blender 4.3 is Grease Pencil 3, a long-awaited update to the Blender toolset used for storyboarding and 2D animation. First introduced in Blender 4.0, Grease Pencil 3 represents a "complete overhaul" of the toolset, designed to lay a "solid foundation for the next decade." This update improves performance for large projects and introduces several new features, building on the initial release's focus on aligning the updated toolset with Blender 4.2.

This is just the beginning of the many changes and updates in Blender 4.3. You can expect more enhancements aimed at improving workflow efficiency and creative capabilities, especially in the realms of animation and rendering.

The most important update in Grease Pencil 3 in Blender 4.3 is its compatibility with Geometry Nodes, Blender's procedural modeling system. This integration allows users to modify Grease Pencil objects through geometry nodes. Many of the existing nodes that work with curves have been updated to support Grease Pencil data.
Other new features include layer groups with color coding, making it easier to manage large projects, a new gradient fill tool, and updates to existing drawing tools. However, these changes are not backward-compatible, and some features, including drawing guides, have been deprecated.

2. Eevee: Light Linking for Artistic Control over Lighting Effects
Although Eevee, Blender's real-time rendering engine, was significantly overhauled in the previous version with the introduction of "Eevee Next," Blender 4.3 brings additional improvements. The most important of these is the introduction of light linking, which allows users to configure light sources so that they affect only specific objects in the scene. This feature provides enhanced artistic control over lighting effects. It supports both regular light sources and emissive materials, as well as shadow linking, enabling users to select which objects in the scene cast shadows from a light source. This change aligns Eevee with Cycles, Blender's primary production renderer, which also gained light linking support in Blender 4.0.

3. Cycles: New Volumetric Visualization Features for Sea, Sky, and Stars
Cycles now includes support for new phase functions in the Volume Scatter node in Blender. Traditionally used for adding effects like fog or smoke to a scene, these new functions simulate specific types of scattering found in the real world. The Fourier-Form function simulates underwater haze, while Rayleigh scattering is used for rendering the sky and ocean surface. Two additional functions extend the capabilities to otherworldly effects: the Double Henyey-Greenstein function is designed for planet atmospheres, and Draine scattering is primarily used for simulating interstellar dust. These updates expand Cycles' ability to accurately render complex volumetric effects in various environments.

4. Materials: New Metal BSDF Node for Realistic Metals

Blender's shader editor has been updated with a new Metal BSDF node designed to simplify the creation of realistic metallic materials. This node gives access to previously hard-to-reach shading controls within a single dedicated node. There are two available configurations: F82 Tint Conductor Fresnel, which is used in the principal BSDF node, and Conductor Fresnel configuration. The latter, which was previously used only for custom OSL scripts, delivers "more accurate" results but is more complex to use. Currently, it is supported only in Cycles and not in Eevee.

5. Digital Sculpting: New Brush Selection and Saving Features

Blender 4.3 introduces changes to the brush management workflow for sculpting and painting models. Brushes are no longer stored directly within the main scene file. Instead, they are now kept in separate resource libraries, which makes it easier to reuse brush sets across different projects or share them with teams. Brushes are selected from a dedicated brush tool shelf, which appears at the bottom of the 3D view and image editor when in sculpt mode.
Additionally, brushes are no longer grouped by tool but organized into "resource catalogs." Users can customize the shelf to display only the subsets of catalogs relevant to a particular project.
There are also significant performance improvements in sculpting. Brush evaluation is now "approximately 8 times faster" when creating a mesh with 6 million faces.

Blender 4.3 introduces several UI improvements that enhance workflow. Among these is the ability to preview images, videos, and fonts within tooltips that appear when hovering over resources. This feature helps users quickly identify assets without needing to open them separately.

Additionally, the UI now supports an experimental Vulkan interface for the viewport. Available on Windows and Linux with AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA GPUs, this new Vulkan interface offers potential improvements but still has limitations. Currently, it may perform slower than the existing OpenGL server.

The new features for 3D modeling and UV unwrapping in Blender 4.3 include a new minimal stretching mode for UV unwrapping, based on the SLIM algorithm. This feature is designed to reduce texture distortion by optimizing the unwrapping process. You can find more details about this in an article.
For procedural modeling and scene composition, the Geometry Nodes Toolset has been enhanced with several new features, including a zone for each element to simplify complex workflows. Additionally, users can now add controls to node groups, allowing direct editing of their input data within the 3D viewport, rather than needing to switch between the node editor or the modifier stack.
Character rigging and animation tools have received small improvements in the workflow, including updates to motion paths, keyframes, and the introduction of a new bone picker system for easier bone selection during rigging.
In rendering, Cycles now supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing on AMD GPUs using HIP RT on Linux—this functionality has been available to Windows users since Blender 3.6. Eevee receives multi-pass compositing support, which enhances compositing workflows.
The Video Sequencer has also been improved with better performance and workflow updates, such as the ability to toggle strips on and off and snapping support in the preview area.
Finally, pipeline integration changes include the ability to export point clouds in USD format, making Blender more compatible with other production tools.

Blender 4.3 is compatible with Windows 8.1, macOS 11.2, and Linux distributions with glibc 2.28 or newer. Additionally, there is an experimental new build for Windows ARM processors, expanding Blender's accessibility to a wider range of devices.