Please note that Blender 3.4 is not backwards compatible. This is technically true of any Blender version that introduces new features, but in this case it is particularly noteworthy since two very common shader and geometry nodes have changed. If you save any file with a MixRGB or a Transfer Attribute node in Blender 3.4, it will get converted to a new node type (described below) which will break if you try to open it in Blender 3.3 or earlier. So, be careful! Don’t save anything with Blender 3.4 unless you know you don’t need to go backwards.

Due its previous large impact on performance, you can no longer search overrides by name in the Hierarchies view of the Outliner’s Library Overrides display mode. The count on objects in a collection has also been improved to be more readable and it can display up to three digits now instead of two.

Did you know that, in Object Mode, Alt + LMB brings up a selection menu for all of the objects under the mouse? In 3.4, that menu is now ordered by depth, from front to back.

3D text editing is looking a bit nicer now that the cursor is thin, and the selection highlight uses the theme’s text input highlight color.

The Page Up and Page Down keys now work in the Console editor.

Fonts in the File Browser are now previewed more accurately according to their shapes, intent, and intended language.

Lastly, the links in the node editors are now looking even sharper with a subtle but classy facelift to the colors, dashed lines, and shadows.

The Subdivision Surface modifier and geometry node got a performance improvement when working on loose edges. The enhancement only kicks in when loose edges are detected and it does take some extra memory, so it may result in a slight loss of performance if there are very few loose edges, but it makes up for it by being significantly faster if there are many.

The new Viewer Node by Jacques Lucke is incredibly helpful for previewing each step of a procedural creation in the viewport. Combined with Node Wrangler, Ctrl Shift can be used to not only switch between geometry outputs but also to preview colors, vectors, textures, and other data extremely quickly.

If you noticed the Geometry Nodes Add menu slowing to a crawl when you first opened up Blender 3.4, you’re not alone! That’s because it’s loading in node group assets from the asset browser. Only node group assets that have been saved with Blender 3.4 will be visible. I was not a huge fan of this change at first as it really did slow me down every time I opened Blender and wanted to node around, but after backing up my asset library and re-saving my node groups with Blender 3.4, everything got slightly smoother. I also tested a patch for an upcoming Blender 3.4.1 corrective release that is blazing fast and solves the problem entirely. 

RIP the Transfer Attribute node. Long live Sample Index, Sample Nearest, and Sample Nearest Surface! Those three nodes, which exactly mirror Transfer Attribute’s three modes, have replaced Transfer Attribute in order to make room for more types of sampling in the future. The first two can be found in the Geometry category and the latter can be found under Mesh.

A new Self Object node returns information about the object the Geometry Nodes modifier is operating on, such as its current location and rotation.

Several new nodes have been added which give more access to a mesh’s topology and attribute information, such as Face Set Boundaries, Corners of Face, Corners of Vertex, Edges of Corner, Edges of Vertex, Face of Corner, Offset Corner in Face, Vertex of Corner, and Sample UV Surface.

For curves, Curve of Point, Points of Curve, Offset Point in Curve, and Set Curve Normal were added. Trim Curves now supports cyclic curves and Sample Curve can now sample any attribute rather than just the position, tangent, and normal.

At long last, the Distribute Points in Volume node has arrived!

The Attribute node in Eevee and Cycles now supports using attributes from geometry node instances as well as Boolean and integer arrays. It also has a new View Layer mode, which grabs attributes from the active View Layer, Scene, and World.

Another welcome change, which applies to all node editors, is that creating new node groups no longer creates duplicate sockets when nodes inside the group are all getting inputs from the same source.

Overall performance was improved as well since the whole Geometry Nodes evaluation system was refactored. The speedup is appreciated, but what’s even more exciting is what features it opens the door for in the future such as using geometry node setups as custom operators throughout the Blender UI.

Lastly, you can now choose whether or not to duplicate the node tree or keep it linked when duplicating an object with a Geometry Nodes modifier.

Performance has been boosted for both Sculpt and Texture Paint mode when extra features like face sets, hiding, and masking are not used. The Voxel Remesh operator is much faster now too, over twice as fast, specifically when reprojecting attributes like face sets and vertex colors.

Auto Masking can now be accessed via a new popover menu in the header or via the Brush popover - the settings are the same in each. The Cavity masking options have a bit of a weird UI layout, but you can use its new Create Mask button to convert the auto-mask into a regular color attribute mask. That and the new Mask From Cavity operator have replaced the old Dirty Vertex Colors command.

The UV editor, which doesn’t always get much development love, received some welcome improvements in Blender 3.4!

The Relax brush has a new Geometry method that attempts to keep the UV’s in line with the 3D topology. For some reason this can only be found in the sidebar’s tool settings and not the header’s tool settings. UV sculpting was also improved in general. It now supports pinned vertices, constraining to the bounds of the grid, and live unwrap as well as new fixes for boundary edges and orphaned islands.

There are new options to choose from when packing: Add, Scaled, and Fraction. Add was Blender’s behavior from Blender 2.8 and earlier, Scaled has been its default since, and Fraction is the new one which is slower but can precisely specify a fraction of the UV space. If you want a good “set it and forget it” rule of thumb for how much margin to use, just flip the method to Fraction and use a value of 0.015.

What’s even more exciting is that the release notes specify that these margin updates are making way for more packing methods coming in the future, which is something Blender needs very badly (and why I still use UV Packmaster).

The UV grid can now be non-square if you set the shape to Fixed and it can be matched to the pixels of the image if the shape is set to Pixel. The grid can also be shown over the image. Combined with Increment Snapping and Absolute Grid Snap, that means you can now snap UVs to pixels! There’s also a set of options called Round to Pixels that does exactly that automatically. It may seem like a minor improvement but it should help a lot of game artists in particular.

As if that wasn’t enough, there’s a new operator called Align Rotation that can align islands based on edge selection or their 3D orientation and one called Randomize Islands which, well, randomizes the location, rotation, or scale of the islands.

The NLA (non-linear animation), Dopesheet, and Timeline editors now have their own Redo panel! It’s minimized and out of the way by default, but it should be useful every now and then for more complex keyframe operations.

In the NLA editor, the track background now communicates the strip’s extrapolation type so you can clearly see if a strip is set to hold or hold forward. The sidebar got cleaned up a bit with the Edited Action tab removed when it’s not usable. Also, pushing down an action to an NLA track now names the track after the action. Thanks to Brad Clark for bringing that up in his Blender conference talk, and to Sybren for committing the improvement before the talk was even over!

The Edit Driver popover has a new checkbox for muting the driver, so you don’t have to head all the way to the Drivers editor to turn it off temporarily.

The Grease Pencil Fill tool now has a new and improved method for closing gaps called Radius, which checks to see if the end of one stroke is within a certain distance of another. Enabling Visual Aids will make this process interactive if no bridgeable gaps were detected.

The Time Offset modifier received a new mode called Chain, which can be used to run different time offsets together in a sequence.

A new modifier, Outline, generates strokes around the perimeter of a Grease Pencil object. There is also a new Edit mode operator called Outline and a new Draw mode Stroke setting called Outline which will do the same.

Set Start Point is a new Edit Mode operator that sets what point is considered the first one along a cyclic stroke.

The big exciting new feature in Blender 3.4 is path guiding for Cycles. Path guiding works by taking a few initial samples and then directing more samples into important areas. It’s somewhat like the idea behind Portals, but it’s calculated automatically and even more effective at clearing up noise in otherwise notoriously difficult to render scenes such as interiors and volumes. At the moment it is only available for CPU rendering, but GPU support is slated to be added in the future. The gif below shows 3 impressive renders of before and after using path guiding, where each one shows a reduction in noise for the exact same render time. 

The Cycles sampling patterns were also improved, which slightly reduces the perceived level of noise in some scenes for the same number of samples.

More GPUs are now better supported by Cycles, including AMD RX 7000, Vega, RDNA1, Apple Metal, and Intel cards.

Multiple SVG files can now be imported at the same time.

OBJ material files now include basic values in the roughness, metallic, sheen, clearcoat, anisotropy, and transmission channels if you enable PBR Extensions when exporting. There’s also a new Scale parameter when importing OBJ files.

The glTF 2.0 importer and exporter, which I did not know can handle geometry, basic PBR materials, textures, cameras, lights, and even animations, received a huge number of fixes which you can read about on the add-ons update page.

Blender is now also a standalone Python 3.1.0 module that can be easily installed with pip.

Eevee can now render from the terminal on Linux without needing the Blender UI, which should help speed things up for those using renderfarms.

The internal mesh data structure has changed a bit in order to better support the attribute workflow that Blender is working towards, and new methods have been added for working with attributes via Python. The full list of changes can be found on the Blender 3.4 Python API update page.