On December 3, 2021, Blender Foundation announces the release of Blender 3.0. So our technical team immediately integrates this version, and 3S Cloud Render Farm is one of the first render farms for Blender 3.0.

New updates of Blender 3.0:

*Cycles faster: Cycles GPU kernels have been rewritten for better performance, rendering between 2x and 8x faster in real-world scenes.

*A more responsive viewport: Enjoy a more responsive viewport due to new scheduling and display algorithms.

*Nice noise: OpenImageDenoise was upgraded to version 1.4, with improved detail preservation. A new pre-filter option was added to control the denoising of auxiliary albedo and normal passes.

*Shadow Terminator: New option to reduce shadow artifacts that often happen with low poly game models. Offset rays from the flat surface to match where they would be for a smooth surface as specified by the normals.

*New shadow catcher:

• Indirect and environment light support, for more accurate compositing.
• Option for lights to be considered included or excluded, that is if they are real or synthetic objects.
• New Shadow Catcher pass to fully handle coloured indirect light and emission.
• Coloured shadows and precise reflections make blending 3D with real footage much easier.

*Skincare: Subsurface scattering now supports anisotropy and index of refraction for Random Walk. Realistic skin has an anisotropy around 0.8.

*Geometry Nodes: The procedural system introduced in 2.92 has been extended with a re-imagined method for designing node groups, a new attribute system, around 100 new nodes for interaction with curves, text data, instances, and more.

• Go on a field trip: Operations can be built from basic nodes and simply connected together, removing the need for named attributes as a way to store intermediate data, and removing the need for special “Attribute” nodes for simple operations.
• Ahead of the curve: Native curve data joins the Geometry Nodes party. Resample, fill, trim, manipulate the handles, set spline type, convert to mesh or get started with the included curve primitives.
• A wall of nodes: The Geometry Nodes modifier is now supported on Curve and Text objects with full support for the attribute system.
  • Splines have resolution and cyclic builtin attributes.
  • Control points have position, radius, tilt, handle_left and handle_right built-in attributes.
  • Attributes with any name or data type can be created or removed on splines or control points.
  • Attributes can be interpolated between the two curve domains.
• Text nodes: Manipulate strings with new nodes such as:
  • String to Curves
  • String Length
  • Slice String
  • Value to String
  • Join Strings
  • Replace String
  • Special Characters
• Materials inside Geometry Nodes: New nodes include:
  • Set Material
  • Replace Material
  • Material Selection
  • Material Input
  • Material Index
• Instancing: The way geometry nodes work with instances has been improved, to make it more intuitive and much faster.
  • Geometry can now be instanced directly.
  • Mesh modifiers after geometry nodes no longer implicitly realize instances.
  • Instances are now exposed properly to nodes, and aren’t converted to real geometry implicitly.
  • The Realize Instances node can explicitly convert instances into real geometry.
• Eevee Attributes: Mesh attributes are no longer a Cycles exclusive, Eevee now fully supports attributes including those generated by Geometry Nodes.

*User Interface: To celebrate the beginning of a new series, Blender 3.0 sports an updated theme, improvements, and a bunch of new options to further customize the already flexible layout system.

• Visual Refresh
  • Theme update focused on improving contrast.
  • Panels now have customizable rounded corners and margin between panels to tell them apart more clearly.
  • Several widgets have been tweaked for consistency, including menu items customizable roundness.
• Area Management
  • New “Close Area” option in the context menu.
  • Hit size for area resizing has been increased.
  • Better snapping of areas while holding Ctrl.
  • Improved mouse cursor feedback when joining is not possible.

*Strip

• Strip thumbnails: The Video Sequencer now supports thumbnail previews:
  • Enable it via the Overlay popover.
  • Works with Image and Video strips.
  • Preview while transforming.
  • Threaded loading for performance.
• Strip Transform Tools: It is now possible to transform strips directly in the preview region, just like in the 3D Viewport.
  • New transform tools and gizmos.
  • Press G, R, S for quick transforms.
  • Supports axes snapping.
  • All pivot points supported.
  • Use the new 2D Cursor as pivot.

*Take Control: Blender 3.0 offers a brand new set of VR controller-based functionality, including the ability to visualize controllers and the ability to navigate one’s way through a scene in VR using controller inputs.

*Strike a pose:

• New pose library
  • Making use of the new Asset Browser, the pose library system in Blender gets a massive revamp.
  • Create or set poses directly from the 3D Viewport.
  • Click-drag to blend into the pose.
  • Right-click on a pose to select or deselect its corresponding bones.
  • Quickly flip a pose with just a click.

*Grease Pencil: The 2D animation workflow keeps getting better with new modifiers, a polished drawing experience, and Line Art performance has been greatly improved since the last release.

*Dot Dash: This new modifier allows you to generate dot-dash lines on strokes automatically, assign different materials, offset, and more.

*Quick Save: Loading and saving compressed .blend files are now magnitudes faster thanks to using the Zstandard algorithm instead of gzip.

*Team Player: Interoperability takes a leap forward in 3.0 with the support for importing Pixar’s Universal Scene Description and improvements to Alembic.

• USD Importer: The first milestone for importing USD files is here:
  • Meshes with UV coordinates, Vertex Colors and Subdivision.
  • Cameras, perspective and orthographic.
  • Curves including USD Basis and NURBS.
  • Volumes as OpenVDB field assets.
  • Materials, including an experimental feature to convert shaders to Principled BSDF.
  • Lights, does not include USD Dome, Cylinder, Geometry.
• Alembic
  • Support for exporting animated UV maps.
  • Import per vertex UV maps.
  • Import and export support for generated mesh vertex coordinates (ORCOs).
  • New Render and Viewport evaluation modes.

Render Farm for Blender 3.0

3S Cloud Render Farm is a cloud render farm for Blender 3.0 as well as other Blender versions with Cycles, Eevee, LuxCoreRender together with other 3D creation suites with renderers/ render engines such as Autodesk Maya, Houdini, Autodesk 3ds Max, Cinema 4D (C4D), and to be updated continuously.