In total, in a two-month span, they fixed over 500 issues, including some pretty big, important, long-standing ones.

But even though a lot of the focus recently has been on fixing bugs, we still have some cool new features to explore in Blender 4.4, which just dropped today.

I'm Jonathan Lampell from CGCookie.com, and in this video, we're going to explore everything that's new in Blender 4.4.

In the Modeling section, the Tries to Quads operator has a new topology influence setting that prioritizes even grids.

Combined with the existing settings, it allows you to get significantly better results.

There's also a new operator to select vertices by edge count, so you can easily find and select poles.

The hotkey L to select linked under the mouse now works in the new curve edit mode.

Fun fact, you can also deselect linked in any edit mode with Shift-L.

I didn't know that one.

The UV editor now uses the hotkeys Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V for copy and pasting UVs, which makes sense.

The status bar now displays a helpful warning when the active object has a non-uniform or negative scale.

There's also now a warning when the scale or rotation transform is set to only affect location and has no effect.

The default front color for the face overlay has been changed to transparent, so you'll now only see red for the back face.

If you liked seeing the blue, then you can always change that back in Preferences.

The Mesh Indices overlay setting is now always visible to everybody, not just developers, and the numbers are also now more readable.

The Knife Tool overlay now uses the same theme color as the other gizmos.

In Sculpt mode, a new brush type called Plane replaces the flatten, fill, and scrape brushes.

You get all of the same functionality, now with much more customizability.

You'll still have all of the same brush presets, they're just using this new brush type under the hood.

The Cloth Brushes now have the Persistent option off by default, which should make them feel a little more stable.

And the Grab Cloth Brushes now use the Local Simulation Area type by default, because it works a bit better with symmetry.

Now, there's some big animation news, but I want you to hear it straight from the rigging and animation expert himself, Wayne Dixon.

Thanks, Jonathan.

So here are the things I want to talk about today.

There are four things to do with animation, and then two to do with rigging.

The first one with animation is going to make a lot of people happy, so let's go.

In older versions of Blender, if you had a crane animation interacting with another box, the crane would have its own animation action, and the box would also have a separate animation action.

But in Blender 4.4, the actions are now slotted, which means you can have an action that contains the animation for both the crane and the box at the same time.

I've already set this one up, and you can see that the box animation is stored in a slot over here called Box Animation, and the crane animation is stored in the Crane Animation slot.

The amazing thing is, the animation for multiple objects can live inside a single action.

Awesome.

So how do we set this up?

Let's say I wanted to add some animation to this Box B here, and I want to include it in the existing action.

Well, you don't just hit the button here, because that's going to create a new action for just that object.

So let's undo that.

Before you start animating, you want to assign that existing action to the object.

That's the trick.

Then we can create a new slot for that animation to live.

So we'll click the New Slot button, and now when we animate the box, all of that data is inside the same action.

I'm pretty good at animation.

So what if you wanted to include all of your animation inside the same action, except you accidentally went ahead and animated this box in its own separate action all by itself?

Well, the developers have thought of that.

Let's select our Lonely box first, and then shift select any of the other objects that already have the action that we want to merge into.

And then in the action menu here, we can choose the Merge Operator.

Now you'll see our box animation isn't so lonely anymore.

If you wanted to separate your actions, you have two options.

You can separate just the selected slots.

So if you click this one, it's going to move whatever slots you have selected into a new action.

Or if you wanted to separate all of your slots at once, you can choose this Separate Slots.

That's going to create a new single slotted action for each object.

So now everyone can be equally lonely.

The pose library has had a little bit of love.

Firstly, you can create a new pose right from the menu up here.

You can also specify which library you want to put it in.

That's awesome.

And when you right-click on any of your poses, you've got three new options.

You've got Adjust, Modify, and Delete.

Use Adjust if you want to tweak any of the existing channels for that pose.

Under Modify, you can replace all of the existing channels or add or remove selected bones to that existing pose.

And there is now also a way to delete the pose from the right-click menu.

If you're using the Noise Modifier in Blender 4.4, you'll notice that it's looking a little bit different.

And that is because the algorithm has been updated to fix a bug.

This change has given us two new settings.

Lacrinarity, or however you say it, is related to the gap between the noise bumps.

The higher the number, the bigger the gaps.

And the roughness is how smooth those noise bumps are.

Of course, you'll only really see the effect this has if you increase the depth of your curve.

It's just worth noting that your Noise Modifier is going to act a little bit differently moving forward.

However, if you want the old legacy noise, you can just click this toggle button here.

Animation playback is up to 15% faster for meshes that have custom normals.

I'll take that.

When rigging, now when you symmetrize bones, it can also symmetrize the bone collections.

That is flippin' awesome.

Incomplete or broken constraints now no longer draw the relationship line to the world origin.

That's going to keep your broken constraints looking nice and tidy.

So that's all the animation and the rigging stuff that I wanted to talk about.

Now I'm going to pass over to Well, after 4.3's whirlwind of geometry node newness, 4.4's updates are tighter and neater, focusing mostly on the little big things we use every day.

But there are some new nodes, the first of which is Find in String.

With this node, we can now search a string for another string, finding the index of the first occurrence.

It also outputs a count of the number of times that that string occurs.

This means we can now split strings in much more advanced ways.

Useful for when we are creating text geometry, but also for using strings as an input method for geometry nodes.

Next, it's the normal input node, which now outputs proper face corner normals instead of just face normals like it did before.

So yes, this is the new normal.

But you can turn the old functionality back on in the sidebar, and old files will automatically have this switched on.

Oh, and node widths now snap if you're snapping, which is not only great for keeping things tidy, but surprisingly good for stress too.

This is one of 4.4's minor but mighty quality of life improvements.

Some nodes are now showing us more information than they did before, by greying out all the inputs that don't affect the output.

And conversely, we can now see a lot less if we want to, because group panels can be nested, helping us focus on only the things we want to change.

The constant input node family is already relatively large, but up until now a couple of members have been missing, so the arrival of the object and collection input nodes has been welcomed with open arms.

These, like their longer standing siblings, are unassuming but incredibly convenient, allowing the same object or collection to be used by multiple nodes at once.

Next we have the warning node, which now has a dynamic label depending on the warning, warning you which warning it's warning you of.

And the limit surface option from the subdivision surface modifier is now available on the subdivision surface node, allowing us to place our vertices at their theoretical position on an infinitely subdivided mesh.

Both the join and realize instances nodes no longer remove the vertex groups of attributes, instead they have both agreed that they will preserve and respect an attribute's vertex group status.

And finally we come to performance improvements, the contenders this time being sort elements and the triangulate node.

Sort elements is an impressive 50% faster in common scenarios, but the cup goes to triangulate, which having been ported from bmesh to mesh, now gives a 30 to 100 times performance improvement.

You beauty!

And that is what's new with geometry nodes in Blender 4.4.

Hey everyone, Paul here to tell you about some of the grease pencil features that you're going to find in Blender 4.4.

Let's check them out.

Grease Pencil 3.0 made its debut in the previous version of Blender, but was not yet fully featured.

In Blender 4.4, we will see the reintegration of some legacy tools that will improve your workflow.

The menu for stroke placement was merely a placeholder in 4.3.

As you can see, it wasn't exactly functional.

But now, these stroke placements have been reactivated, so you can control how your strokes are placed when working in 3D space.

Auto-locking inactive layers means that you'll only affect the layer you're working on.

If a group is locked, but the layers inside are unlocked, it will still prevent you from working on those layers.

This function will only work on layers and not groups.

Selecting specific parts of a drawing to sculpt is very useful.

Sculpt mode auto-masking allows you to isolate areas of focus according to stroke, layers, materials, or a combination of these filters.

This makes workflows so much faster as you don't have to consider things like auto-locking or what layers assets might be on.

In draw mode, holding down CTRL and ALT while right-clicking enables the Lasso Box Erase tool.

You can simply draw a lasso around the area you wish to erase, then simply release.

Often when you're working on a storyboard or animation, you'll be copying and pasting a lot of layers onto new keyframes and just tweaking one or two details.

The Paste by Layer function allows you to copy all of the layer information and paste it to a new keyframe all at once and retain each shape and stroke on the correct layer.

The Simplify function under the points menu now includes Fixed, Adaptive, Sample, and Merge as functions to simplify a stroke.

Set Start Point is functional again in edit mode.

This is very useful for tools such as the Build effect.

Where an enclosed shape starts isn't always ideal, and so having the option to select exactly where you want that curve to start drawing on from is very useful.

Invisible layers on a grease pencil object that needed a geometry node setup were problematic previously, but now making any layer invisible will be taken into account by your geometry node tree.

Thanks, Paul.

When it comes to rendering, the NVIDIA Optics Denoiser was upgraded and the results are pretty significantly improved when it comes to color accuracy, smooth surfaces, subsurface scattering, and depth of field.

It does have a slightly harder time with some features, but overall, it's a big step up.

The blue noise sampling pattern can now be properly distributed when rendering frames across multiple machines.

The OSL shader scripting in Blender got some improvements to better align with the MaterialX standard.

Texture baking using Selected to Active is now significantly faster in some cases thanks to multi-threading the geometry matching.

When it comes to rendering the viewport, the overlays have been completely rewritten.

You shouldn't be able to tell much difference beyond improved performance, but you might be able to notice that the origins are being drawn on top of edit mode now.

There's better X-ray shading for objects set to display in front.

Wires in wireframe view and in edit mode are now displayed even when the overlays are off, and curves now use the wire color option in the shading popover.

The Vulkan experimental backend for rendering the viewport and EV, which is off by default because it doesn't yet support all of Blender's features, received a big boost in both stability and performance.

Here you can see that the initial startup time for large scenes has been dramatically improved compared to the current OpenGL backend.

It's also now used for displaying the result of cycles, though the performance there is the same.

Over in the compositor, the glare node has been changed to give artists more control over the result.

New outputs help visualize the glare.

The smoothness value helps blend the glare so that the hotspots have a nicer roll-off.

You can set a maximum input value now so that one really bright light source doesn't dominate the entire scene.

A new strength option combined with the new outputs replaces the previous and weird-to-use mix value.

Also, now you can choose how much of the original input color gets used and define a custom color to tint the output with.

Lastly, the fog glow and bloom sizes were corrected and are now relative to the image size, so your renders should look more consistent when you bump up or down the resolution.

The wrapping option in the translate node has been changed to repeat and now works like you would expect when overlaying on a larger image.

This same option will come to all transform nodes soon but is just on the translate node for now.

You can now specify the quality of denoise nodes.

By default, it uses the setting in the render performance panel for faster results when previewing and higher quality when rendered.

Just be aware that the compositing node still uses the CPU for now, so it's going to be much faster to instead use the render denoising when you can.

In the video sequence editor, text strips can now be edited directly in the preview area.

Just hit tab to edit.

A bunch of other text strip improvements were added like better alignment, rounded background corners, faster rendering, and reorganized properties.

Retiming keys can now be snapped and be snapped too.

You can now use shift D to duplicate elements right in the preview area.

Building proxies for image sequences is now up to 30% faster and has been fixed for HDR content and playback of HDR content is two and a half times faster now.

Curves, hue correct, and white balance modifiers are up to two times faster now and many other effects have been sped up as well.

The YUV to RGB conversion for imported clips is more accurate now.