Blender 4.0 Overhauls the Principled BSDF and Adds AgX

Blender 4.0 arrives

The Blender Foundation released Blender 4.0 on November 14, 2023, describing it as a major leap for rendering and creation tools. The release combined a shading overhaul, new color management, Cycles rendering features, and a broad set of usability changes.

A new Principled BSDF and AgX

Blender 4.0 shipped a rewritten Principled BSDF that is more energy conserving and flexible, reordering its layers and adding a Coat layer with tint and IOR, a new microfiber Sheen model, a Glossy BSDF with anisotropy control, and new Subsurface Scale, Specular Tint and IOR Level inputs. Color management gained AgX, a new view transform that handles over-exposed and saturated areas better than Filmic by rolling bright colors toward white like a real camera.

Cycles: Light Linking and Path Guiding

Cycles added the long-awaited Light Linking, letting lights and emissive objects affect only specific elements in a scene, with Shadow Linking controlling which objects block a light, both set up by drag and drop from the Outliner. Path Guiding was extended to glossy surfaces in addition to diffuse, reducing noise, and the release added more efficient Multiple Scattering GGX, Metal hardware ray tracing, and faster large-mesh uploads.

Geometry Nodes and UI

Geometry Nodes gained Node Tools, letting node groups run as regular operators to build custom tools without Python, plus Repeat Zones for looping and a new rotation socket. The Voronoi Texture node added fractal noise. Elsewhere, Blender introduced type-to-search in the Add menus, converted armature bone groups and layers into Bone Collections, and adopted the Inter typeface with subpixel anti-aliasing for a sharper UI.

Related on Skillo

See also: Blender 4.1 and its quality-of-life release.

Sources

• Blender 4.0 release notes (blender.org)

Published date reflects the original event date (2023-11-14). This article is original Skillo editorial written from the sources above; facts were verified in September 2026.