17 ms·

Blender 2.8

481 points by based2 8y ago

unmole 8y ago
It's in beta, not yet released.
electricslpnsld 8y ago
> By default, Blender now uses the left mouse button for selection. This is probably the biggest feature in 2.8! The super non-standard select behavior was a (probably unfairly, but still real) turn off to people trying Blender for the first time. The more Blender can bring its UI in line with industry standards the better for Blender adoption.
- ryz 8y ago
  oh god, absolutely! It's baffling to me how they did stick to a default like this for so long. It goes against any standard which has been established in similar software, not only 3ds max/maya/etc. but also engines like unity/unreal. Like if some clever game developer suddenly decided to map forward movement to the right trigger and shooting to analog stick up on a gamepad control scheme in a FPS. It's one of these things which you won't be able to measure, but they will certainly have lost thousands* of people trying to switch to blender by this very simple default setting. This right here is a UX lesson - take note folks! *probably, maybe
  - bayesian_horse 8y ago
    Every change breaks somebody's workflow... This change also has received some backlash from the existing userbase, albeit you can configure the behavior.
    - snazz 8y ago
      There's even a convenient toggle in the settings for going back to all the 2.79b keybinds. Muscle memory shouldn't be a reason to not upgrade.
    - astrodust 8y ago
      It's going to bring in more users than it alienates, and those that are upset about the change can always easily switch controls to "Blender Classic" in the preferences. New users don't know how to fix the behaviour. They just leave.
  - knolan 8y ago
    A lot of Blender is completely customisable. It takes a few seconds to find user preferences, make the required change and even switch to a colour scheme to match Maya/Max etc. The thing is, however, Blender is more than just a Maya/Max replacement. It can do a hell of a lot more. It has After Effects capabilities like compositing and video camera tracking, 2D animation tools, render outlines to SVG, video editing and python scripting. It’s a bit of a jack of all trades, master of some.
    - TomVDB 8y ago
      I wonder if I'm the only one who's extremely reluctant to change default key bindings? I find it very off putting that suddenly all existing tutorials and manuals might become bogus. Pretty much the only tool where I have custom bindings is Vim.
      - bch 8y ago
        Same. Am always envisioning having to sit down at a default configuration or _somebody else’s_ custom config. Emacs was the one I (ironically) resisted the most.
      - knolan 8y ago
        I also try to keep to default key mappings where possible. When you’re the one called on to help others in a variety of situations then keeping everything as default as much as possible is useful.
    - hbosch 8y ago
      If the first thing you have to do to a software is customize it, you’ve already lost on usability. How many thousands of potential users simply created a cube and tried to click it, realize that on top of the already overwhelming UI you don’t even know how to click something in this software, then just exit and take to the internet to echo that Blender is unusable.
      - knolan 8y ago
        You don’t have to do anything, I’ve taught several people how to use Blender and the right click to select thing wasn’t an issue. I won’t deny that it’s complex software but so are all professional 3D applications. Try and use Solidworks or (shudder) Creo/ProE or Maya or Max and selecting a cube will be the least of your issues. All of these tools require some degree of training that’s part of the landscape.
  - orbital-decay 8y ago
    > Like if some clever game developer suddenly decided to map forward movement to the right trigger and shooting to analog stick up on a gamepad control scheme in a FPS. It's like with Emacs and its defaults. It wasn't breaking any convention originally, because there were no conventions back then, and it made sense for this particular case. Right-click selection was born before Blender, in Traces for Amiga. It was 1988 and the "standards" of today weren't established yet. Traces didn't become Blender directly, but this particular behavior has been carried over to it. Years have passed, and another convention won. Maya, another software with quite a legacy, also has a lot of things considered archaic today. None of that is right-click selection tier, though.
    - msla 8y ago
      In Emacs, you can start the GUI version and use the menus, and it isn't modal so you can just start typing and it'll work like it does in Notepad. You won't get the advanced features Emacs has, but there's no standardization for "text editor advanced features" anyway, especially if you don't distinguish between text editors and word processors and think a ribbon bar is a UI standard.
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    I use emacs, so I shouldn't disregard non ~standard defaults.. but blender was just too odd. 2.8 aligns it not with standards but with human ergonomics.
  - iamcreasy 8y ago
    > oh god, absolutely! It's baffling to me how they did stick to a default like this for so long. Because they wanted to develop Blender for Blender users.
  - thatoneuser 8y ago
    I’d be surprised if thousands properly encapsulates it. I’ve used blender various times for like... 15 years? I think it’s a phenomenal tool. Absolutely amazing for what it can all do and the fact that it’s free. Truly is an amazing project. But god damn I’ve never even gotten close to being comfortable using their interface. Every tutorial online seems to be flawed in some way, so that you have to look up another tutorial to find some feature. I really can’t follow the logic they use to organize things. Is there a feature where you can type the name of a function into a search and it just pops up? If so I’d probably save 80+% of my time spent in the program.
knolan 8y ago
This is a massive release and represents a huge overhaul of how Blender works from the UI to new technologies. It’s also a bit of a jarring change for everyone to get used to but it seems like it’ll be worth it. The new real time eevee renderer is an incredible achievement for the open source community and, I believe, its direct compatibility with the Cycles path tracing renderer is an industry first. (Your materials and textures just work between the two). The grease pencil tool and new 2D features are also some of the best. I once used 2.7* on a video conference call to annotate parts of a CAD model to finalise changes and it helped considerably. Really looking forward to the full release this year.
fimdomeio 8y ago
While I'm not that much into 3d nowadays, tried the beta a few weeks ago and it has some amazing improvements in usability. Would love to read more about how things get organized behind the scenes to accomplish such a complex and polished piece of open source software
- Joeboy 8y ago
  They have money to pay developers, which differentiates them from the vast majority of OSS projects. Obviously that's not all there is to it, but I'm sure it makes a huge difference.
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    And I can't imagine that the kind of devs who can work on rendering engines come cheap either.
    - UncleEntity 8y ago
      Brecht wrote the initial Cycles implementation during the time he was away from the Blender Foundation working for some other (who's name I forget) renderer company -- so, basically, for free. Back when I used to hack on the low-hanging Blender fruit my impression of the core devs was they did it for the love of doing it, any one of them could've gotten a job paying a lot more but they always stuck around because they liked it. And that was when they could only afford a couple fulltime devs who I imagine weren't making a whole lot. Also, they couldn't pay anyone enough to mess with the spaghetti code of the old builtin renderer...
      - SpliffnCola 8y ago
        SolidAngle is the company he was working for, creators of the commercial Arnold renderer.
    - Joeboy 8y ago
      https://fund.blender.org/ https://fund.blender.org/ says 50k EUR / month pays for 10 developers, so about 60k EUR a year each I guess. Edit: I can't remember the details but I vaguely recall Blender 2.8's headline new realtime renderer EEVEE was a by-product of a GSoC project, or something along those lines.
nicoburns 8y ago
Awesome to see an established OSS project put such a focus on usability (and do it well from the looks of things).
- mrspeaker 8y ago
  I agree! I'm so impressed they could defeat the spectre of OSS UX (at least for me). Blender is now an app I am excited to open up and play with (even before 2.8, I thought they had made some great improvements). Gimp and Inkscape still give me a little bit of dread whenever they start. They're functional and work well - but they aren't a joy to use. I hope the Blender-vibes start rubbing off. Seriously, I know it's (really really) hard and I don't know how Blender managed to pull it off, but hats-off to them!
golergka 8y ago
Am I the only one who's irritated by how they treat 2.8 and 2.80 as if it was the same version number? In any sane use of semver, they are 72 minor versions apart
- danellis 8y ago
  They're not the same, but 2.80 is the first release in the 2.8 series, so this is the release of both the specific 2.80 version and the 2.8 series. Next will be 2.81, etc. (Except it's not, because it hasn't been released yet. Still in beta.)
- Tempest1981 8y ago
  Yes, the rare case where you can sort version number strings alphabetically, not numerically (split on .) And a max of 10 minor versions per major version (2.70-2.79)
- enzanki_ars 8y ago
  Because they are not the same version number. See https://www.blender.org/download/releases/ https://www.blender.org/download/releases/. There does not look to be a 2.8 based on your description because it would have been called 2.08.
- blensor 8y ago
  In Blender versioning if they are talking about single digit minor release numbers you always have to add an imaginary x at the end 2.4x branch, 2.5x branch, 2.6xbranch, ... Every time they move the first digit after the comma something major changes.
- alliecat 8y ago
  Not everything uses Semver (which is primarily aimed at software libraries). Blender's versioning scheme is consistent and reasonably well documented.
heinrichf 8y ago
The demo video https://youtu.be/EAhRiv-FKbI https://youtu.be/EAhRiv-FKbI of the real time renderer is really impressive (see https://www.blender.org/2-8/#eevee https://www.blender.org/2-8/#eevee)
nv-vn 8y ago
Congrats to everyone who worked on this -- this is a great step forward for the Blender community as a whole! Andrew Price did a great set of videos on some of the changes in this release [1] for anyone who's interested in trying it out. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPVpg4_POww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPVpg4_POww.
- equalunique 8y ago
  I did see his series of videos recommended on YouTube and yes those are quite explanatory. Good choice.
Animats 8y ago
This is still the beta version. The add-on API was only frozen a few weeks ago, so many add-ons aren't ported yet. Now all the Blender tutorials and answers on line are out of date. Add on developers and document authors need to move now, but end users can wait a bit longer.
- slavik81 8y ago
  Yeah. The add-on API docs for the beta are a little inaccurate at the moment. For now, developing new extensions is experts only. I'm not familiar enough with the API, so I switched back to 2.79. I didn't want to go back, because the human interface is vastly improved... So, I'm really looking forward to the 2.80 release.
  - Animats 8y ago
    Yes, open source stuck state. Version N is no longer being worked on, and Version N+1 isn't fully ready yet. Commercial products tend to avoid this, because, in that state, sales of the product drop as customers wait for the new model. The Blender API has changed incompatibly, too. I'm holding off on porting my personal add-ons for now. 2.8 looks great, but not fully here yet.
antoineMoPa 8y ago
The video is really impressive. It looks like there are a lot of new real time features that I have to try. I wonder if there is the possibility to code our own real time shaders in glsl/osl for the viewport.
jordache 8y ago
I have not done 3d stuff extensively for years now... The current iteration of Blender looks amazing. How does it compare to commercial 3D tools from Autodesk?
- pasta 8y ago
  Well it starts in a second and then you just have everything available you ever dreamt of. But seriously: don't let the price fool you. This is production ready software. There is also a lot of professional support available like training by certified trainers.
- astrodust 8y ago
  It's in many ways 80% as good as commercial offerings like Maya...from three to five years ago. It trails behind the leading edge in many regards, but if you're not pushing the limits it's actually really great. If you don't need that 20% you won't even notice. Blender can do almost anything Maya can do, but it can often take longer or a ton more fussing because of a lack of tools. It's like using a really great IDE for coding versus being stuck with vi. Both get the job done, but your workflow might be easier in one. For example, Maya can do a lot of things for animation with driven keys but Blender's equivalent is really weak. It "works" but it's quite clunky.
  - thedaemon 8y ago
    Not sure of your experience level with Blender, but it's rigging tools are about on par these days. Drivers are easy to setup and with a few add-ons it can be one click. That's part of the issue with Blender, finding the right addons or programming your own. I've even made my own character animation addon. :P Blender, Maya, 3ds Max, they all can do the same things in the end.
    - astrodust 8y ago
      It can do it, but what's easy in Maya is kind of clunky in Blender. Maya does a few things that are great that Blender should totally steal, and one of them is having really easy driven keys.
stevebmark 8y ago
I love Blender, coming from other "industry" tools like 3ds max, Blender has all the features I want for amature 3d work. I think my favorite thing about Blender (I still love it) is the objectively god awful user interface. It's a good learning opportunity to show what happens when a community designs a GUI (hint: never ever let it happen). Almost every single possible GUI design decision is wrong or backwards. I'm excited to try this new interface to see what terrible UI gems lie in wait for discovery. It's weird and exciting that Blender is so useful and feature filled and yet so poorly visually designed.
- tambourine_man 8y ago
  You could say the same of Gimp, to a lesser degree. It’s interesting that features can probably be coded by committee and volunteers (as both programs are featured packed) but UI seems to require a unified vision.
  - Sharlin 8y ago
    To code features, you only need to understand technology. To create UIs, you need to understand people, which is much harder. To make matters worse, I suspect many Gimp or Blender devs don't eat their own dogfood, and insofar as they do, they're accustomed to the weird taste of said dogfood.
  - Joeboy 8y ago
    I don't think either Gimp or Blender have bad UIs at this point. Historically though, I think they've had opposite problems. Gimp has tended to just do the minimum to make the UI just about work with no regard for efficient/pleasant workflow, whereas Blender has abandoned convention in pursuit of an efficient workflow for experienced users.
    - CharlesW 8y ago
      > I don't think either Gimp or Blender have bad UIs at this point. I'm reasonably fluent with modern tools (Photoshop, Sketch, Figma, etc.) and consider GIMP to be an incredible accomplishment. But as much as I'd like to use GIMP, I find it too painful to use even for simple tasks. I wish someone would start a "sister" app leveraging the GIMP codebase as much as possible, but with an entirely different user experience and name, starting with Apple Preview-level MVP functionality and building from there.
bhouston 8y ago
Meanwhile Autodesk Maya missed it's planned release date by 7 months and counting.
- opencl 8y ago
  This is just the beta, which came out last month but gets new builds daily. And at the time of the beta release they said the final version will be March of next year at the earliest[1]. [1] https://code.blender.org/2018/11/blender-2-8-beta/ https://code.blender.org/2018/11/blender-2-8-beta/
- electricslpnsld 8y ago
  Well, given that Autodesk shifted Maya ownership to their life support division and fired most of the Maya R&D team, this isn’t too surprising. Good news for SideFX I suppose!
  - Silhouette 8y ago
    It's funny how such things can happen a relatively short time after a big, expensive product moves to a subscription model.
nickmain 8y ago
Is anyone else worried about about the future of Blender on macOS with the deprecation of OpenGL in favor of Metal ? This thread offers some hope, but there is still no definitive roadmap: https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2018-December/049683.html https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2018-Decem...
- tiles 8y ago
  There has been a lot of progress with MoltenVK and polyfill backends like gfx-rs in other emulator backends. I wonder if either would be suitable for Blender in the future?
- opencl 8y ago
  Blender has a lot of OpenGL code, including shaders that are dynamically generated at runtime. There are definitely not enough resources to maintain multiple rendering backends. If Blender is going to continue working on MacOS at all it is probably going to be through a wrapper like MoltenVK (if Blender eventually moves to Vulkan). Apple is being actively hostile to cross platform software development with their graphics APIs so I will not be surprised if a lot of projects drop Mac support entirely when they finally remove OpenGL.
  - dana321 8y ago
    Thats one part of moving away from apple i'm happy about, not having to deal with constant feature removal on both hardware and software.
- astrodust 8y ago
  If it ever becomes a problem it'll be ported to Metal. Annoying but not fatal.
- Asking4AFriend 8y ago
  Meh. Blender is free software. Mac is almost (or is) the polar opposite of free software.
  - 8y ago
stesch 8y ago
Someone should add " [BETA]" to the title. People are getting very excited.
person_of_color 8y ago
Any good Blender MOOCs or courses with a relatively recent version?
- bookseller 8y ago
  You can try https://www.udemy.com/blendertutorial/ https://www.udemy.com/blendertutorial/ by Ben Tristem on Udemy. I haven’t taken it but it looks legit from rating and content freshness point of view. It’s got 4.5 stars from 23.9k ratings. It’s also been updated this month (12/2018), covering Blender 2.77 and up.
vinniejames 8y ago
Has anyone tried using Golem for rendering tasks? https://golem.network/rendering/ https://golem.network/rendering/
emmanueloga_ 8y ago
I was curious which UI framework blender uses. It implements its own using OpenGL. A lot of the UI code seems to reside in /source/blender/editors/interface. [1] 1: https://git.blender.org/gitweb/gitweb.cgi/blender.git/tree/HEAD:/source/blender/editors/interface https://git.blender.org/gitweb/gitweb.cgi/blender.git/tree/H...

481 points by based2 8y ago

It's in beta, not yet released.

> By default, Blender now uses the left mouse button for selection. This is probably the biggest feature in 2.8! The super non-standard select behavior was a (probably unfairly, but still real) turn off to people trying Blender for the first time. The more Blender can bring its UI in line with industry standards the better for Blender adoption.

ryz 8y ago
oh god, absolutely! It's baffling to me how they did stick to a default like this for so long. It goes against any standard which has been established in similar software, not only 3ds max/maya/etc. but also engines like unity/unreal. Like if some clever game developer suddenly decided to map forward movement to the right trigger and shooting to analog stick up on a gamepad control scheme in a FPS. It's one of these things which you won't be able to measure, but they will certainly have lost thousands* of people trying to switch to blender by this very simple default setting. This right here is a UX lesson - take note folks! *probably, maybe
- bayesian_horse 8y ago
  Every change breaks somebody's workflow... This change also has received some backlash from the existing userbase, albeit you can configure the behavior.
  - snazz 8y ago
    There's even a convenient toggle in the settings for going back to all the 2.79b keybinds. Muscle memory shouldn't be a reason to not upgrade.
  - astrodust 8y ago
    It's going to bring in more users than it alienates, and those that are upset about the change can always easily switch controls to "Blender Classic" in the preferences. New users don't know how to fix the behaviour. They just leave.
- knolan 8y ago
  A lot of Blender is completely customisable. It takes a few seconds to find user preferences, make the required change and even switch to a colour scheme to match Maya/Max etc. The thing is, however, Blender is more than just a Maya/Max replacement. It can do a hell of a lot more. It has After Effects capabilities like compositing and video camera tracking, 2D animation tools, render outlines to SVG, video editing and python scripting. It’s a bit of a jack of all trades, master of some.
  - TomVDB 8y ago
    I wonder if I'm the only one who's extremely reluctant to change default key bindings? I find it very off putting that suddenly all existing tutorials and manuals might become bogus. Pretty much the only tool where I have custom bindings is Vim.
    - bch 8y ago
      Same. Am always envisioning having to sit down at a default configuration or _somebody else’s_ custom config. Emacs was the one I (ironically) resisted the most.
    - knolan 8y ago
      I also try to keep to default key mappings where possible. When you’re the one called on to help others in a variety of situations then keeping everything as default as much as possible is useful.
  - hbosch 8y ago
    If the first thing you have to do to a software is customize it, you’ve already lost on usability. How many thousands of potential users simply created a cube and tried to click it, realize that on top of the already overwhelming UI you don’t even know how to click something in this software, then just exit and take to the internet to echo that Blender is unusable.
    - knolan 8y ago
      You don’t have to do anything, I’ve taught several people how to use Blender and the right click to select thing wasn’t an issue. I won’t deny that it’s complex software but so are all professional 3D applications. Try and use Solidworks or (shudder) Creo/ProE or Maya or Max and selecting a cube will be the least of your issues. All of these tools require some degree of training that’s part of the landscape.
- orbital-decay 8y ago
  > Like if some clever game developer suddenly decided to map forward movement to the right trigger and shooting to analog stick up on a gamepad control scheme in a FPS. It's like with Emacs and its defaults. It wasn't breaking any convention originally, because there were no conventions back then, and it made sense for this particular case. Right-click selection was born before Blender, in Traces for Amiga. It was 1988 and the "standards" of today weren't established yet. Traces didn't become Blender directly, but this particular behavior has been carried over to it. Years have passed, and another convention won. Maya, another software with quite a legacy, also has a lot of things considered archaic today. None of that is right-click selection tier, though.
  - msla 8y ago
    In Emacs, you can start the GUI version and use the menus, and it isn't modal so you can just start typing and it'll work like it does in Notepad. You won't get the advanced features Emacs has, but there's no standardization for "text editor advanced features" anyway, especially if you don't distinguish between text editors and word processors and think a ribbon bar is a UI standard.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  I use emacs, so I shouldn't disregard non ~standard defaults.. but blender was just too odd. 2.8 aligns it not with standards but with human ergonomics.
- iamcreasy 8y ago
  > oh god, absolutely! It's baffling to me how they did stick to a default like this for so long. Because they wanted to develop Blender for Blender users.
- thatoneuser 8y ago
  I’d be surprised if thousands properly encapsulates it. I’ve used blender various times for like... 15 years? I think it’s a phenomenal tool. Absolutely amazing for what it can all do and the fact that it’s free. Truly is an amazing project. But god damn I’ve never even gotten close to being comfortable using their interface. Every tutorial online seems to be flawed in some way, so that you have to look up another tutorial to find some feature. I really can’t follow the logic they use to organize things. Is there a feature where you can type the name of a function into a search and it just pops up? If so I’d probably save 80+% of my time spent in the program.

knolan 8y ago

This is a massive release and represents a huge overhaul of how Blender works from the UI to new technologies. It’s also a bit of a jarring change for everyone to get used to but it seems like it’ll be worth it. The new real time eevee renderer is an incredible achievement for the open source community and, I believe, its direct compatibility with the Cycles path tracing renderer is an industry first. (Your materials and textures just work between the two). The grease pencil tool and new 2D features are also some of the best. I once used 2.7* on a video conference call to annotate parts of a CAD model to finalise changes and it helped considerably. Really looking forward to the full release this year.

fimdomeio 8y ago

While I'm not that much into 3d nowadays, tried the beta a few weeks ago and it has some amazing improvements in usability. Would love to read more about how things get organized behind the scenes to accomplish such a complex and polished piece of open source software

Joeboy 8y ago
They have money to pay developers, which differentiates them from the vast majority of OSS projects. Obviously that's not all there is to it, but I'm sure it makes a huge difference.
- village-idiot 8y ago
  And I can't imagine that the kind of devs who can work on rendering engines come cheap either.
  - UncleEntity 8y ago
    Brecht wrote the initial Cycles implementation during the time he was away from the Blender Foundation working for some other (who's name I forget) renderer company -- so, basically, for free. Back when I used to hack on the low-hanging Blender fruit my impression of the core devs was they did it for the love of doing it, any one of them could've gotten a job paying a lot more but they always stuck around because they liked it. And that was when they could only afford a couple fulltime devs who I imagine weren't making a whole lot. Also, they couldn't pay anyone enough to mess with the spaghetti code of the old builtin renderer...
    - SpliffnCola 8y ago
      SolidAngle is the company he was working for, creators of the commercial Arnold renderer.
  - Joeboy 8y ago
    https://fund.blender.org/ https://fund.blender.org/ says 50k EUR / month pays for 10 developers, so about 60k EUR a year each I guess. Edit: I can't remember the details but I vaguely recall Blender 2.8's headline new realtime renderer EEVEE was a by-product of a GSoC project, or something along those lines.

nicoburns 8y ago

Awesome to see an established OSS project put such a focus on usability (and do it well from the looks of things).

mrspeaker 8y ago
I agree! I'm so impressed they could defeat the spectre of OSS UX (at least for me). Blender is now an app I am excited to open up and play with (even before 2.8, I thought they had made some great improvements). Gimp and Inkscape still give me a little bit of dread whenever they start. They're functional and work well - but they aren't a joy to use. I hope the Blender-vibes start rubbing off. Seriously, I know it's (really really) hard and I don't know how Blender managed to pull it off, but hats-off to them!

golergka 8y ago

Am I the only one who's irritated by how they treat 2.8 and 2.80 as if it was the same version number? In any sane use of semver, they are 72 minor versions apart

danellis 8y ago
They're not the same, but 2.80 is the first release in the 2.8 series, so this is the release of both the specific 2.80 version and the 2.8 series. Next will be 2.81, etc. (Except it's not, because it hasn't been released yet. Still in beta.)
Tempest1981 8y ago
Yes, the rare case where you can sort version number strings alphabetically, not numerically (split on .) And a max of 10 minor versions per major version (2.70-2.79)
enzanki_ars 8y ago
Because they are not the same version number. See https://www.blender.org/download/releases/ https://www.blender.org/download/releases/. There does not look to be a 2.8 based on your description because it would have been called 2.08.
blensor 8y ago
In Blender versioning if they are talking about single digit minor release numbers you always have to add an imaginary x at the end 2.4x branch, 2.5x branch, 2.6xbranch, ... Every time they move the first digit after the comma something major changes.
alliecat 8y ago
Not everything uses Semver (which is primarily aimed at software libraries). Blender's versioning scheme is consistent and reasonably well documented.

heinrichf 8y ago

The demo video https://youtu.be/EAhRiv-FKbI https://youtu.be/EAhRiv-FKbI of the real time renderer is really impressive (see https://www.blender.org/2-8/#eevee https://www.blender.org/2-8/#eevee)

nv-vn 8y ago

Congrats to everyone who worked on this -- this is a great step forward for the Blender community as a whole! Andrew Price did a great set of videos on some of the changes in this release [1] for anyone who's interested in trying it out. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPVpg4_POww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPVpg4_POww.

equalunique 8y ago
I did see his series of videos recommended on YouTube and yes those are quite explanatory. Good choice.

Animats 8y ago

This is still the beta version. The add-on API was only frozen a few weeks ago, so many add-ons aren't ported yet. Now all the Blender tutorials and answers on line are out of date. Add on developers and document authors need to move now, but end users can wait a bit longer.

slavik81 8y ago
Yeah. The add-on API docs for the beta are a little inaccurate at the moment. For now, developing new extensions is experts only. I'm not familiar enough with the API, so I switched back to 2.79. I didn't want to go back, because the human interface is vastly improved... So, I'm really looking forward to the 2.80 release.
- Animats 8y ago
  Yes, open source stuck state. Version N is no longer being worked on, and Version N+1 isn't fully ready yet. Commercial products tend to avoid this, because, in that state, sales of the product drop as customers wait for the new model. The Blender API has changed incompatibly, too. I'm holding off on porting my personal add-ons for now. 2.8 looks great, but not fully here yet.

antoineMoPa 8y ago

The video is really impressive. It looks like there are a lot of new real time features that I have to try. I wonder if there is the possibility to code our own real time shaders in glsl/osl for the viewport.

jordache 8y ago

I have not done 3d stuff extensively for years now... The current iteration of Blender looks amazing. How does it compare to commercial 3D tools from Autodesk?

pasta 8y ago
Well it starts in a second and then you just have everything available you ever dreamt of. But seriously: don't let the price fool you. This is production ready software. There is also a lot of professional support available like training by certified trainers.
astrodust 8y ago
It's in many ways 80% as good as commercial offerings like Maya...from three to five years ago. It trails behind the leading edge in many regards, but if you're not pushing the limits it's actually really great. If you don't need that 20% you won't even notice. Blender can do almost anything Maya can do, but it can often take longer or a ton more fussing because of a lack of tools. It's like using a really great IDE for coding versus being stuck with vi. Both get the job done, but your workflow might be easier in one. For example, Maya can do a lot of things for animation with driven keys but Blender's equivalent is really weak. It "works" but it's quite clunky.
- thedaemon 8y ago
  Not sure of your experience level with Blender, but it's rigging tools are about on par these days. Drivers are easy to setup and with a few add-ons it can be one click. That's part of the issue with Blender, finding the right addons or programming your own. I've even made my own character animation addon. :P Blender, Maya, 3ds Max, they all can do the same things in the end.
  - astrodust 8y ago
    It can do it, but what's easy in Maya is kind of clunky in Blender. Maya does a few things that are great that Blender should totally steal, and one of them is having really easy driven keys.

stevebmark 8y ago

I love Blender, coming from other "industry" tools like 3ds max, Blender has all the features I want for amature 3d work. I think my favorite thing about Blender (I still love it) is the objectively god awful user interface. It's a good learning opportunity to show what happens when a community designs a GUI (hint: never ever let it happen). Almost every single possible GUI design decision is wrong or backwards. I'm excited to try this new interface to see what terrible UI gems lie in wait for discovery. It's weird and exciting that Blender is so useful and feature filled and yet so poorly visually designed.

tambourine_man 8y ago
You could say the same of Gimp, to a lesser degree. It’s interesting that features can probably be coded by committee and volunteers (as both programs are featured packed) but UI seems to require a unified vision.
- Sharlin 8y ago
  To code features, you only need to understand technology. To create UIs, you need to understand people, which is much harder. To make matters worse, I suspect many Gimp or Blender devs don't eat their own dogfood, and insofar as they do, they're accustomed to the weird taste of said dogfood.
- Joeboy 8y ago
  I don't think either Gimp or Blender have bad UIs at this point. Historically though, I think they've had opposite problems. Gimp has tended to just do the minimum to make the UI just about work with no regard for efficient/pleasant workflow, whereas Blender has abandoned convention in pursuit of an efficient workflow for experienced users.
  - CharlesW 8y ago
    > I don't think either Gimp or Blender have bad UIs at this point. I'm reasonably fluent with modern tools (Photoshop, Sketch, Figma, etc.) and consider GIMP to be an incredible accomplishment. But as much as I'd like to use GIMP, I find it too painful to use even for simple tasks. I wish someone would start a "sister" app leveraging the GIMP codebase as much as possible, but with an entirely different user experience and name, starting with Apple Preview-level MVP functionality and building from there.

bhouston 8y ago

Meanwhile Autodesk Maya missed it's planned release date by 7 months and counting.

opencl 8y ago
This is just the beta, which came out last month but gets new builds daily. And at the time of the beta release they said the final version will be March of next year at the earliest[1]. [1] https://code.blender.org/2018/11/blender-2-8-beta/ https://code.blender.org/2018/11/blender-2-8-beta/
electricslpnsld 8y ago
Well, given that Autodesk shifted Maya ownership to their life support division and fired most of the Maya R&D team, this isn’t too surprising. Good news for SideFX I suppose!
- Silhouette 8y ago
  It's funny how such things can happen a relatively short time after a big, expensive product moves to a subscription model.

nickmain 8y ago

Is anyone else worried about about the future of Blender on macOS with the deprecation of OpenGL in favor of Metal ? This thread offers some hope, but there is still no definitive roadmap: https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2018-December/049683.html https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2018-Decem...

tiles 8y ago
There has been a lot of progress with MoltenVK and polyfill backends like gfx-rs in other emulator backends. I wonder if either would be suitable for Blender in the future?
opencl 8y ago
Blender has a lot of OpenGL code, including shaders that are dynamically generated at runtime. There are definitely not enough resources to maintain multiple rendering backends. If Blender is going to continue working on MacOS at all it is probably going to be through a wrapper like MoltenVK (if Blender eventually moves to Vulkan). Apple is being actively hostile to cross platform software development with their graphics APIs so I will not be surprised if a lot of projects drop Mac support entirely when they finally remove OpenGL.
- dana321 8y ago
  Thats one part of moving away from apple i'm happy about, not having to deal with constant feature removal on both hardware and software.
astrodust 8y ago
If it ever becomes a problem it'll be ported to Metal. Annoying but not fatal.
Asking4AFriend 8y ago
Meh. Blender is free software. Mac is almost (or is) the polar opposite of free software.
- 8y ago

stesch 8y ago

Someone should add " [BETA]" to the title. People are getting very excited.

person_of_color 8y ago

Any good Blender MOOCs or courses with a relatively recent version?

bookseller 8y ago
You can try https://www.udemy.com/blendertutorial/ https://www.udemy.com/blendertutorial/ by Ben Tristem on Udemy. I haven’t taken it but it looks legit from rating and content freshness point of view. It’s got 4.5 stars from 23.9k ratings. It’s also been updated this month (12/2018), covering Blender 2.77 and up.

vinniejames 8y ago

Has anyone tried using Golem for rendering tasks? https://golem.network/rendering/ https://golem.network/rendering/

emmanueloga_ 8y ago

I was curious which UI framework blender uses. It implements its own using OpenGL. A lot of the UI code seems to reside in /source/blender/editors/interface. [1] 1: https://git.blender.org/gitweb/gitweb.cgi/blender.git/tree/HEAD:/source/blender/editors/interface https://git.blender.org/gitweb/gitweb.cgi/blender.git/tree/H...