In nuce: The 3D graphics software Blender will support the Metal programming interface with the release of version 3.5. This was announced on 13 January this year by Francesco Siddi, Blender’s Chief Operating Officer, on code.blender.org . Blender 3.5 is currently in the alpha phase. The release of the finished version 3.5 is planned for March this year.

In toto: The following new features for Blender 3.5 result from the aforementioned announcement.

• Metal GPU backend support for Mac operating systems: This is to be introduced. Currently, the OpenGL programming interface is still used in Blenders default settings. After a test phase, however, the plan is to switch to the Metal programming interface.
• The Eevee renderer is also to be supported – which means that Mac users will now also benefit from viewport rendering. The user interface is also to be improved. In a corresponding report on 80.lv, editor Gloria Levine writes that the Metal backend was previously only available for the Cycles renderer.

Blender as a member of the Blender Development Fund: The corresponding blog post sets the framework for how the development of the Metal interface took place. The post states: “About a year ago, after Apple joined the Blender Development Fund, Apple empowered some of its developers to contribute directly to the Blender source code.” This invitation to developers to get involved led, the post continues, to the Metal interface for the Cycles renderer – and now culminates in Metal as a GPU backend. With its membership of the Blender Development Fund, Apple – together with many other well-known companies from the media sector – ensures that Blender will continue to be expanded with new features, receive its bug fixes and remain visible within the digital content creation community. The other companies supporting the Blender Development Fund include Adobe, AMD, Facebook, Microsoft, Unity and Reallusion (Digital Production reported on 11 January 2022).

Outlook: Support for the real-time compositor is planned for one of the next Blender releases; again for Mac operating systems. Bug fixes are also in the pipeline – and support for AMD and Intel graphics cards is also in preparation. Digital Production reported on the release of Blender 3.4 on 20 December last year – at that time the Open Path Guiding Library (Open PGL) from Intel was installed.

Click further: To the announcement on code.blender.org.

Sources: code.blender.org (announcement by Francesco Siddi), 80.lv (announcement by Gloria Levine)

The post Blender 3.5 should support Metal programming interface? first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In nuce: Every week we present you with the best tutorials that will help you polish your workflows with the hottest digital content creation tools in the world! For this week’s tutorial you will need Blender 3.0.

What tutorial awaits you this week? Today we are treating ourselves to the first part of a tutorial series that all fans of the series adaptation “Arcane” will be delighted with. incidentally, “Arcane” is based on the globally popular multiplayer game “League of Legends”.

What will you learn in this tutorial? In this almost half-hour tutorial by “Lightning Boy Studio”, you will be shown how to use Blender 3.0 and the Eevee renderer to create the kind of hair styling that viewers will recognise from the animated series “Arcane”. More specifically, you will learn how to style the hair using Blender’s particle system so that it looks like the styling of the protagonist Jinx.

Second part of the tutorial: According to the announcement, a second tutorial part will follow in which you will learn how to not only make Jinx’s hair look nice, but also how to create the rest of the character – using camera mapping, among other things.

What else does “Lightning Boy Studio” have to offer? If you want to find out how the three-person studio from Canada managed to win numerous film awards with their animated short film “Le Gouffre” (engl.: “The Abyss”), then click over to legouffre.com .

Adieu! Check back next week when it’s Tutorial Tuesday again!

Arcane Style Tutorial Part 1: Hair (Blender 3.0 / EEVEE)

The post League of Legends: Arcane | Tutorial Tuesday first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In nuce: In a blog post by developer Joseph “Joe” Eagar, the Blender Foundation announces which sculpting features will be included in the next Blender version. If the releases of the next versions follow Blender’s roadmap, Blender 3.2 and 3.4 will be released this year (we reported on 30 December 2021).

Blender’s beautiful new sculpting features: One of the main functions is to be able to paint vertex colours even when you are currently in Sculpt mode. However, the function is experimental for the time being, but according to the blog post it already offers improved performance compared to the previous vertex painting mode – and supports masks, face sets and filters. In the blog post, Eagar also explains that users can paint other vertex attributes as well as surface colours. In addition, the painting tools are now also supported with cavity masking. This should enable you to align brush strokes (paint strokes) according to the surface curvature – always depending on the geometry concerned. This would also automatically emphasise edges or depressions.

Preview sculpting with Eevee – is that possible? Blender’s real-time renderer Eevee should now make it possible to interactively display changes that have been made. Eevee previews are initially supported in Sculpt mode – provided you use Dynamic Topology (Dyntopo). One of the new features of Dyntopo itself is that edge boundaries are better preserved, including UV seams and face sets. In addition, Dyntopo is now said to be significantly faster and also supports “just-in-time” triangulation. With just-in-time, an entire mesh is no longer triangulated.

Outlook: What can we expect with Blender 3.2 and 3.4? Among the features that these upcoming releases are expected to bring is an improvement for texture painting, or an extension of vertex painting to a general “attribute paint” mode. In addition, Multires Sculpting and Brush Management are among the key components of upcoming Blender versions.

Click further: The corresponding blog post by developer Joseph Eagar can be found at code.blender.org.

The post Blog entry announces new Blender Sculpting features first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

In this almost two-hour video tutorial, Simon Fuchs shows you how to create a three-layer blendshader in Blender (for Cycles and Eevee).

Simon says about his video: “Using vertex colours and heightmaps, you’ll learn how to blend different materials together – right in Blender’s viewport.” Simon also says that his tutorial is worthwhile for anyone who wants to show off their projects directly in Blender without having to calculate the material in a game engine first. Simon continues: “The tutorial is also great for anyone who wants to learn more about Blender’s shader editor in general.”

You can find Simon’s tutorial on Gumroad – or in the video below.

Blender 3 Layer Material Blending Tutorial

The post Material Blending | Tutorial first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.