🦄 I've been using Blender 4.2 since beta and it's been great! I don't mind the extension update as it makes downloading and updating free community add-ons easier.
I've been having a great time with 4.2 and didn't come across any issues when it comes to migrating old projects. The extensions platform change also went smoothly and I think they're going into the right direction even if the change might seem scary. So far, I did not have any issues with old addons and when importing old preferences it even tells you which essential addons you need to get as extensions. Settings seem to be remembered as well for the most part. I only had to change one thing so far. I'm glad they also still kept some very important stuff built into blender. This might also finally be an incentive to integrate more addons into core blender as well. They even created a bundled zip you can download and install if you don't want to touch extensions at all. I think if they'd put that download in a more obvious place when downloading blender, at lot less people would panic. And as soon as other platforms like Blendermarket adopt the idea, things will run a lot smoother. I've got so many addons now that I have to manually update that this will end up being a big time saver.🦄
It feels like Blender is becoming a bit of a victim of its own success. Updates and feature improvements are great, but there is always such a big re-learning curve with every big update: 1) find out where all your favorite tools went 2) find out what plugins you use are now broken with no updates 3) figure out how the developers now expect you to do your workflow so you can actually benefit from the new features 4) go through every menu/modifier/material/tool to find they've inserted a ton more menus/features that you have no idea if you need it or not. 5) Try to do your usual workflow or methods in features like geometry nodes, only to discover all your favorite nodes disappeared or were rewritten/renamed/completely changed functionality. It feels like I spend more time relearning how to use blender than I am actually modelling/animating anything in it. And just when I figure it all out, there's another massive update and the process starts over again. There has to be a better way for a more seamless transition.
I know some people find matrices scary but let's not downplay how amazing it is that you can now perform matrix operations in geometry nodes! This opens the path to a slew of custom deformers and generaly will increase possibilities for transforming geometries in highly specific ways.
Only thing that was annouying was reinstalling all my addons and setting up my q menu shortcuts. I had heaps! On the positive note, it like spring cleaning!!! 🦄
🦄 Much better overview than another one I saw earlier. Looking forward to finally getting a computer I can run new versions of Blender on. I'm in the process of setting up a company which has meant lots of expensive legal and visa costs, but it did provide a nice excuse to visit Ho Chi Minh City for a few days while applying for my new visa at The Thai Consulate and seeing several friends there that I haven't seen since before Covid. It's really an amazing city and the food is phenomenal. This may seem irrelevant, but so would my talking about how much these changes will be for me updating from version 3.3.2!
🦄 I love watching videos like this that dive into all the changes and new toys we're all given to play with in Blender. I've already made my rounds with CG Cookie and Southern Shotty, and yet I always seem to pick up on details a bit easier or learn something I didn't already know with your videos. It'll be cool to see what projects you may get into with the node tools updates and advanced geometry nodes (when they stop being a constant whirlwind of change, that is).
The portable settings feature is fantastic if you work on more than one machine, as I sometimes do. As usual tons of work has gone into this and I am happy to reap the benefits.
Now all blender needs is a Nanite type system that can be found in Unreal! That way you could have vast seens without having to worry about graphics card memory!
Geometry streaming is unfortunately something that’s possible due to game engines working fundamentally differently to DCC apps. It’s not something to anticipate from Blender or any equivalent 3D DCC app. There are drawbacks to the approach as well - for example in Unreal, you have to very annoyingly open up a mesh or material in a separate window to edit it, it can’t be directly edited within the scene. Also working with geometry in Blender is much more predictable and stable, with fewer glitches and annoying shading artefacts that you have to deal with as a result of nanite or lumen in UE. There are many tradeoffs and sacrifices that need to be made to achieve what Unreal does.
Regarding add-ons, I just chose to 'use existing settings' from my previous version. It couldn't take all the legacy add-ons but it was easy to grab the new ones from the website.
Thanks Curtis for your philosophy on donating to Blender. More users definitely need to step up. I've been a contributor for 5 years and recently upgraded to a gold membership.
If the Blender VSE finally supported LUTs it would be actually a kinda viable Video Editor for me. I alsways shoot Log so i have to be able to use LUTs but other than that i dont need many fancy features and the Blender VSE would totally do it for me.
🦄 Been watching 4.2 closely since Beta but getting to use it when it released, I fell in love instantly, my newest project which previously only worked in cycles actually look viable in EEVEE Next, as well as just Extensions have just proved to be a quick and easy way to find useful tools, very much enjoyed how it is built into blender as it showed me many things I didnt know I needed and could test with a click of a button
I made till the end of video! But BLENDER changes so fast, that I cannot keep up with getting used to previous version.... somebody stop this blender spin! ...but meanwhile I`ll stick to 4.1.
🦄Nice way to catch up on what changed in Blender this time around. Currently still running 4.1 as one of the modding tools I'm using has been caught in the breaking changes.
I've noticed that some extensions seem to cause Blender 4.2 to crash. I admit I was attempting to try some of the extensions I have never used or even seen and probably there were some issues with conflicts between the various add-ons.
Blender is great but I think the team needs to make the UI and general navigation more like C4D, it needs to be simpler to get started, the current UI and Navigating the viewport and objects is not intuitive.
Is it just me or is "place a folder named portable next to where you run Blender" a really weird way to phrase that? Do they mean place a folder named portable INSIDE the same folder as the Blender executable? Genuinely do not understand this wording at all. Anyway, great overview of the new features as always, Curtis. Your channel has been a huge help for me in terms of using blender and discovering other tools. Cheers! Edit: ok so it is clarified in the documentation. Though even there they say "next to the executable." I still think this is a very strange way to word it as opposed to in the same folder as the executable.
The one question I have is why would you choose Eevee over Cycles? Like, what's the point of having two render engines in Blender now? If they are aligning them closely, I just don't understand what creative decision I'd have to make to choose Eevee...is it just speed over Cycles?
Yes, for one EEVEE is extremely fast by comparison, but it also falls short for accuracy and shader complexity. NPR projects are very viable with EEVEE, Cycles may be unnecessary for these. But for more realistic or lighting / shader-complex scenes, Cycles is ideal.
Animation. If you want a photorealistic aesthetic for your animation, Eevee being able to match Cycles without as many hack workarounds is a huge plus. The render times in Eevee aren’t just faster, they’re orders of magnitude faster. For example, I’d commonly achieve in the region of under 1s per frame for some very high quality animated renders using eevee. This might typically be around 15x faster than a comparable best case scenario with Cycles. That’s a total render time for your animation of 1 day vs over 2 weeks. In client projects with tight deadlines, this is the difference between a project being viable, or not.
Not only being faster, but also EEVEE is great for making stylized NPR style renders, so giving EEVEE new capabilities opens up new possibilities for other stylized effects.
@@felixmakesart Cheers for all your replies.... like Felix states... EEVEE allows you to be more stylised with your renders, which was my hunch, but I was getting confused with how close it was starting to feel like Cycles.. I guess it needed some alignment to make some things better without it becoming photoreal.
Besides the annoying downgrades like how the auto smooth modifier replaced the better working old auto smooth, I noticed more crashes than even in Blender 4.2. I cannot use it, I have to use 4.0 instead, and even that has some weird downgraded stuff compared to Blender 3.0 that I've been using for ages without any problems. It's shocking what path Blender has taken recently.
Version 4.2 is still buggy for me. Blender stops working when switching to eevee. No program closure report. Updating the drivers didn't help. Wrote to technical support. In general, I noticed that there are many similar reports in tasks. There are also many other bugs associated with the new engine. Hope they fix it soon.
🦄 I haven't jumped into 4.2 yet, because I'm at the end of a months-long project that I've pinned to 4.1 to avoid any fun surprises a new version might have in store. Looks like some great stuff in there, though, and I look forward to finishing this up so I can dig into the shiny new goodness! As always, thanks for the lowdown, Curtis!
They improved some things but in basic things in which they were good they went back so much that it seems that I am using 2.0, I am better off with 4.1
It’s amazing how none of the videos out there on 4.2 talk about what to do about the crashes many are experiencing. Once I click on Eevee and go to material view or rendered view, blender crashes.
@@cekuhnen 😀 I would if I could. 😫. No concrete response on the forum. It seems we are many with the problem. I’m pretty sure it would work if I could just find the bl..dy driver update
For crashes please do a bug report. Some bugs only happen on certain hardware, so there's no way for the developers to fix it if you don't report the bug.
@@il4n-vse I have reported it and noticed that many have the same issue. No suggestions have been given except to update display adapters. Now I am not able to find any of the updates for my drivers on the DELL or AMD websites. ☹️
Amazing video explains the new features, I experimented with it but some addons are not working as expected, Actually, the extensions are cool and easy to use but as we have gotten used to old stuff, change is always difficult I made a video on how to install them if you are curious about it •ᴗ•
All I can guess it's due to the update: if I wanna position in an exact place the loop cut, by snapping to the end of the face and then moving it, it will move the whole thing, not just the new vertices, help? I can't find anything online and I'm so close to throwing my computer out of the window
I beg to differ. It is much slower, the viewport corresponds with delays, some addons make the software to crash and quit. This is not an update, this is just a hype over nothing...
4.2 rendering is it broken or is it me? I updated from 4.1 to 4.2 and nothing renders - not even a cube in a new scene with a new camera - anyone have any ideas on this? I've uninstalled and reinstalled - googled too but can't see anything online?
The new 4.2 is all broken for me, even switching render and crash, add a new material and crash... Try to get the latest driver for your GPU, if not help, stay on 4.1 like me...
User Default: [WinError 3] The system cannot find the path specified: 'C:\\Users\\vinit\\AppData\\Roaming\\Blender Foundation\\Blender\\4.2\\extensions\\user_default' any fix
I have a good PC and GPU and even so I feel that the program lost performance and quality. I can play Doom Eternal at 180 or more fps but in Blender I don't notice consumption of anything and even so I feel it is very slow and I feel that they went backwards with this update instead If I improve it I will continue with 4.1
The new Version of blender is the worst version I've ever seen this new evee render is atrocious and this dither effect that makes everything spotty is atrocious who's ever idea that was should be fired I'm so sick of saying the dots everywhere I uninstalled the it completely 🤦🏿♂️ and this pointless new extension features put your add-on in a bunch of different folders for no benefit it just extra nonsense Pointless steps all my years using this software this is the worst version ever the viewport is a complete shit show cause of this dither feature
🦄 I've been using Blender 4.2 since beta and it's been great! I don't mind the extension update as it makes downloading and updating free community add-ons easier.
I've been having a great time with 4.2 and didn't come across any issues when it comes to migrating old projects. The extensions platform change also went smoothly and I think they're going into the right direction even if the change might seem scary. So far, I did not have any issues with old addons and when importing old preferences it even tells you which essential addons you need to get as extensions. Settings seem to be remembered as well for the most part. I only had to change one thing so far. I'm glad they also still kept some very important stuff built into blender. This might also finally be an incentive to integrate more addons into core blender as well. They even created a bundled zip you can download and install if you don't want to touch extensions at all. I think if they'd put that download in a more obvious place when downloading blender, at lot less people would panic. And as soon as other platforms like Blendermarket adopt the idea, things will run a lot smoother. I've got so many addons now that I have to manually update that this will end up being a big time saver.🦄
Love blender, thanks for reminding me to donate some!
It feels like Blender is becoming a bit of a victim of its own success. Updates and feature improvements are great, but there is always such a big re-learning curve with every big update: 1) find out where all your favorite tools went 2) find out what plugins you use are now broken with no updates 3) figure out how the developers now expect you to do your workflow so you can actually benefit from the new features 4) go through every menu/modifier/material/tool to find they've inserted a ton more menus/features that you have no idea if you need it or not. 5) Try to do your usual workflow or methods in features like geometry nodes, only to discover all your favorite nodes disappeared or were rewritten/renamed/completely changed functionality. It feels like I spend more time relearning how to use blender than I am actually modelling/animating anything in it. And just when I figure it all out, there's another massive update and the process starts over again. There has to be a better way for a more seamless transition.
I know some people find matrices scary but let's not downplay how amazing it is that you can now perform matrix operations in geometry nodes! This opens the path to a slew of custom deformers and generaly will increase possibilities for transforming geometries in highly specific ways.
Only thing that was annouying was reinstalling all my addons and setting up my q menu shortcuts. I had heaps! On the positive note, it like spring cleaning!!! 🦄
🦄🦄 The portable settings functionality sounds potentially very useful
Thanks for the overview m8 will go check out the fine print now!
Great walk-through of Blender 4.2's new features 🦄
🦄 Much better overview than another one I saw earlier. Looking forward to finally getting a computer I can run new versions of Blender on. I'm in the process of setting up a company which has meant lots of expensive legal and visa costs, but it did provide a nice excuse to visit Ho Chi Minh City for a few days while applying for my new visa at The Thai Consulate and seeing several friends there that I haven't seen since before Covid. It's really an amazing city and the food is phenomenal. This may seem irrelevant, but so would my talking about how much these changes will be for me updating from version 3.3.2!
🦄 I love watching videos like this that dive into all the changes and new toys we're all given to play with in Blender. I've already made my rounds with CG Cookie and Southern Shotty, and yet I always seem to pick up on details a bit easier or learn something I didn't already know with your videos. It'll be cool to see what projects you may get into with the node tools updates and advanced geometry nodes (when they stop being a constant whirlwind of change, that is).
The portable settings feature is fantastic if you work on more than one machine, as I sometimes do. As usual tons of work has gone into this and I am happy to reap the benefits.
🦄 Thanks for the overview. I always like to wait a month before installing a new version, so any bugs or add ons get a chance to be fixed.
🦄 Always good to to see see your walkthroughs of what's new in Blender
🎠 Thanks for a run through on these new features. And thanks for your logical, calm nature with a touch of humor now and then.
Now all blender needs is a Nanite type system that can be found in Unreal! That way you could have vast seens without having to worry about graphics card memory!
Geometry streaming is unfortunately something that’s possible due to game engines working fundamentally differently to DCC apps. It’s not something to anticipate from Blender or any equivalent 3D DCC app.
There are drawbacks to the approach as well - for example in Unreal, you have to very annoyingly open up a mesh or material in a separate window to edit it, it can’t be directly edited within the scene. Also working with geometry in Blender is much more predictable and stable, with fewer glitches and annoying shading artefacts that you have to deal with as a result of nanite or lumen in UE.
There are many tradeoffs and sacrifices that need to be made to achieve what Unreal does.
🦄thanks Curtis!
Regarding add-ons, I just chose to 'use existing settings' from my previous version. It couldn't take all the legacy add-ons but it was easy to grab the new ones from the website.
🦄Thanks for the overview
its crazy i've never really seen anyone cover poly line..it such a monumental addon
Thanks Curtis for your philosophy on donating to Blender. More users definitely need to step up. I've been a contributor for 5 years and recently upgraded to a gold membership.
Nicely done Curtis.
Cheers
MR H
i think this guy is in the seattle office of blender branch
I use blender only for 3d printing and it would be nice to see more add-ons and function for people like myself
I still remember 2.79b. That's where I started. At XYZUVW. How far we have progressed.
🦄thank you, your reviews are always very helpful!
If the Blender VSE finally supported LUTs it would be actually a kinda viable Video Editor for me. I alsways shoot Log so i have to be able to use LUTs but other than that i dont need many fancy features and the Blender VSE would totally do it for me.
🦄 Thanks for the walkthrough. Hope you're getting what's needed for your eyes.
Woot!
Thanks for the break down. I really trust your take on blender related trends.
Really valuable overview. Well put across as always. Thanks Curtis 🦄
Hope you are doing well! Take care!
🦄 Great video. I did read through most of the new features, but somehow missed the portable settings thing. This will be so usefull!
Thanks for sharing, Curtis! 🦄
🦄Super helpful! Thank you for this!
Thank you, great stuff!
🦄I am loving the new Blender 4.2 I have been working on it since late alpha. I love the fast volumetric in Eevee!
I don't even use Blender as much as I would like but your videos are just that enjoyable. 🦄
🦄 I'm still using 4.1 atm but loaded up 4.2 to check out some of the features mentioned here
🦄 Been watching 4.2 closely since Beta but getting to use it when it released, I fell in love instantly, my newest project which previously only worked in cycles actually look viable in EEVEE Next, as well as just Extensions have just proved to be a quick and easy way to find useful tools, very much enjoyed how it is built into blender as it showed me many things I didnt know I needed and could test with a click of a button
I might make 4.2 my main version with the difference improvement it has. I do use the video editor as my main editor. 🦄
Where did ambient occlusion go?!
i cant wait to see what people do with ray portals
I made till the end of video! But BLENDER changes so fast, that I cannot keep up with getting used to previous version.... somebody stop this blender spin! ...but meanwhile I`ll stick to 4.1.
Skill issue. You’re missing out on some fantastic features
@@felixmakesart not only skill issue... there's a lot more to it!
Thanks for the overview 🦄🦄
Wow Blender 4.2 is massive for sure! Thanks for going through all the updates, you are AWESOME!! 🦄
Thank you. I need to get back into Blender. 🦄
🦄Nice way to catch up on what changed in Blender this time around. Currently still running 4.1 as one of the modding tools I'm using has been caught in the breaking changes.
🦄Thanks for the info and love your succinct delivery.
I've noticed that some extensions seem to cause Blender 4.2 to crash. I admit I was attempting to try some of the extensions I have never used or even seen and probably there were some issues with conflicts between the various add-ons.
Blender is great but I think the team needs to make the UI and general navigation more like C4D, it needs to be simpler to get started, the current UI and Navigating the viewport and objects is not intuitive.
Thank you for the review! 🦄
🦄 Reluctanct to move from 3.6, just in case some addon I use breaks. But those are good updates to play with.
¡Thanks for your recap!
Is it just me or is "place a folder named portable next to where you run Blender" a really weird way to phrase that? Do they mean place a folder named portable INSIDE the same folder as the Blender executable? Genuinely do not understand this wording at all.
Anyway, great overview of the new features as always, Curtis. Your channel has been a huge help for me in terms of using blender and discovering other tools. Cheers!
Edit: ok so it is clarified in the documentation. Though even there they say "next to the executable." I still think this is a very strange way to word it as opposed to in the same folder as the executable.
🦄 Thanks for the walkthrough!!🦄
🦄 I just switched from 4.0 to 4.2 today. No problems so far...
A Nanite type end system would round this software out!
Amazing update
🦄 Nice breakdown, thanks 🙏 🦄
The one question I have is why would you choose Eevee over Cycles? Like, what's the point of having two render engines in Blender now? If they are aligning them closely, I just don't understand what creative decision I'd have to make to choose Eevee...is it just speed over Cycles?
Yes, for one EEVEE is extremely fast by comparison, but it also falls short for accuracy and shader complexity. NPR projects are very viable with EEVEE, Cycles may be unnecessary for these. But for more realistic or lighting / shader-complex scenes, Cycles is ideal.
Animation. If you want a photorealistic aesthetic for your animation, Eevee being able to match Cycles without as many hack workarounds is a huge plus.
The render times in Eevee aren’t just faster, they’re orders of magnitude faster.
For example, I’d commonly achieve in the region of under 1s per frame for some very high quality animated renders using eevee. This might typically be around 15x faster than a comparable best case scenario with Cycles.
That’s a total render time for your animation of 1 day vs over 2 weeks.
In client projects with tight deadlines, this is the difference between a project being viable, or not.
Not only being faster, but also EEVEE is great for making stylized NPR style renders, so giving EEVEE new capabilities opens up new possibilities for other stylized effects.
@@felixmakesart Cheers for all your replies.... like Felix states... EEVEE allows you to be more stylised with your renders, which was my hunch, but I was getting confused with how close it was starting to feel like Cycles.. I guess it needed some alignment to make some things better without it becoming photoreal.
what are your PC specs? Also, any good PC builds recommendations pls!!!
Thanks for sharing. 🦄
Why everyone is 🦄
Besides the annoying downgrades like how the auto smooth modifier replaced the better working old auto smooth, I noticed more crashes than even in Blender 4.2. I cannot use it, I have to use 4.0 instead, and even that has some weird downgraded stuff compared to Blender 3.0 that I've been using for ages without any problems. It's shocking what path Blender has taken recently.
🦄 Thanks. "Enlightning."
Version 4.2 is still buggy for me. Blender stops working when switching to eevee. No program closure report. Updating the drivers didn't help. Wrote to technical support. In general, I noticed that there are many similar reports in tasks. There are also many other bugs associated with the new engine. Hope they fix it soon.
why is it in the last few updates abnormal breaks?
no way you wrote the B mesh branch
Anyone tried re-scaling images in different resolution in Blender 4.2 compositor, it feels weird 🤔
🦄 I haven't jumped into 4.2 yet, because I'm at the end of a months-long project that I've pinned to 4.1 to avoid any fun surprises a new version might have in store. Looks like some great stuff in there, though, and I look forward to finishing this up so I can dig into the shiny new goodness! As always, thanks for the lowdown, Curtis!
They improved some things but in basic things in which they were good they went back so much that it seems that I am using 2.0, I am better off with 4.1
It’s amazing how none of the videos out there on 4.2 talk about what to do about the crashes many are experiencing. Once I click on Eevee and go to material view or rendered view, blender crashes.
Get a new pc ;)
Joke aside ask in the forum
@@cekuhnen 😀 I would if I could. 😫. No concrete response on the forum. It seems we are many with the problem. I’m pretty sure it would work if I could just find the bl..dy driver update
For crashes please do a bug report. Some bugs only happen on certain hardware, so there's no way for the developers to fix it if you don't report the bug.
@@il4n-vse I have reported it and noticed that many have the same issue. No suggestions have been given except to update display adapters. Now I am not able to find any of the updates for my drivers on the DELL or AMD websites. ☹️
Gr8t vid 🦄
Amazing video explains the new features, I experimented with it but some addons are not working as expected,
Actually, the extensions are cool and easy to use but as we have gotten used to old stuff, change is always difficult
I made a video on how to install them if you are curious about it •ᴗ•
🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄 well done
All I can guess it's due to the update: if I wanna position in an exact place the loop cut, by snapping to the end of the face and then moving it, it will move the whole thing, not just the new vertices, help? I can't find anything online and I'm so close to throwing my computer out of the window
Sounds like you have 'Auto Merge' or 'Proportional Edit' enabled.
@@LEHtJong I had to watch a tutorial, but I found it! Didn't know it was a feature the auo merge, thank you so much!
@@melbeh9718 glad to be able to help :)
I beg to differ. It is much slower, the viewport corresponds with delays, some addons make the software to crash and quit. This is not an update, this is just a hype over nothing...
🦄!
🦄
4.2 rendering is it broken or is it me? I updated from 4.1 to 4.2 and nothing renders - not even a cube in a new scene with a new camera - anyone have any ideas on this? I've uninstalled and reinstalled - googled too but can't see anything online?
The new 4.2 is all broken for me, even switching render and crash, add a new material and crash...
Try to get the latest driver for your GPU, if not help, stay on 4.1 like me...
User Default: [WinError 3] The system cannot find the path specified: 'C:\\Users\\vinit\\AppData\\Roaming\\Blender Foundation\\Blender\\4.2\\extensions\\user_default'
any fix
Anyone else find 4.2 is really slow to save a file?
I have a good PC and GPU and even so I feel that the program lost performance and quality. I can play Doom Eternal at 180 or more fps but in Blender I don't notice consumption of anything and even so I feel it is very slow and I feel that they went backwards with this update instead If I improve it I will continue with 4.1
Nothing on GP 3 ? And geometry nodes integration?
GP 3 is for 4.3
This is a bad day for CPU Blender users.
🦄
🦄
4.2 crashes all the time on my Mac!
Harry Potter talks about Blender 😮
🦄 Cool video
Every blender update recently makes me regret ever giving them money.
Really?
👍🏽
🦄🦄
🤘🧚♀
🦄🦄🦄🦄
🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄
oof 🦄
Intel iris xe 😞
🦄 :)
We were big fan of Blender
But Blender 4.0 and above are Worse in may ways specially performance wise
The new Version of blender is the worst version I've ever seen this new evee render is atrocious and this dither effect that makes everything spotty is atrocious who's ever idea that was should be fired I'm so sick of saying the dots everywhere I uninstalled the it completely 🤦🏿♂️ and this pointless new extension features put your add-on in a bunch of different folders for no benefit it just extra nonsense Pointless steps all my years using this software this is the worst version ever the viewport is a complete shit show cause of this dither feature
I hate blender 4.2