11 ms·

Blender 2.80 release candidate

390 points by crispinh 7y ago

knolan 7y ago
Blender is an incredible achievement for the open source community. It is an extraordinarily capable bit of software and 2.80 brings so many huge changes and refinements. While it still remains a complex bit of software it is not has difficult as its reputation would suggest and 2.80 makes a lot of concessions to making the UI more familiar to newbies.
- antome 7y ago
  For anyone wanting to jump in now, here's a good guide for making your first model in Blender 2.8, even if you have never made a model before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBqYTgaFDxU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBqYTgaFDxU
  - Diederich 7y ago
    Thank you kindly, this is the kind of thing I was looking for. I've been thinking about getting into 3d modeling for a while now.
- Topgamer7 7y ago
  I credit Ton Roosendaal for his direction of the project. Since I first started following the project, there have been two large refactors. Both which have driven significant improvements.
- blihp 7y ago
  A lot of the 'difficult' reputation lingers from the pre-2.5 days when the UI was quite different from anything most users had ever seen before. The 2.5, and now 2.8, UI reworking has gone a long way to remove this barrier for many users.
pre 7y ago
The new renderer, Eevee, is brilliant and fast and is only one of the many great improvements to what was already one of my favourite bits of software. Some of the best open-source desktop software that there is.
- panpanna 7y ago
  Another renderer? They already have two parallell and partially incompatible pipelines...
  - davissorenson 7y ago
    Blender Internal (1) and the Blender game engine were both removed in 2.80. Eevee uses the same nodes as Cycles. (1) Blender's legacy rendering engine which has been around since the '90s
    - pre 7y ago
      Yep. Hadn't noticed Internal had disappeared, but indeed it has. Suppose there's not really any need for it with Eevee existing now.
      - dtf 7y ago
        Part of the original rationale for Eevee was to replace Blender Internal.
        panpanna 7y ago
        How is performance (ram/cpu) compared to internal? I used to switch to internal when designing on really low-end hardware (Atom tablets)
        penagwin 7y ago
        From my understanding (SOMEBODY CORRECT ME IF IM WRONG) Eevee is designed for realtime rendering in mind - it uses tricks similar to videogames to get high quality renders without raycasting everything. So it performs FAR better than blender internal.
bayesian_horse 7y ago
It has been a long wait. I'm still not quite used to the new UI, but I generally trust the Blender foundation that most changes are to the better (and many of them can be reversed through settings).
davissorenson 7y ago
This is (a release candidate for) a huge milestone in Blender's history. So much has been improved, that some, including myself, have speculated why they didn't choose to make it a 3.0 release. Aside from the fantastic new features geared towards existing users, which are described in detail & with pictures in the OP, this release also makes Blender a lot more user-friendly for those who haven't used it before. 3D software almost necessarily has a steep learning curve for new users, as you have to learn not only how to use a new program, but also how 3D content creation itself works. But in this release the developers and designers have made an effort to get rid of the biggest "gotchas" that many new users complained about when using previous versions of Blender. If you've wanted to get into 3D content creation before, there's never been a better time!
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  > there's never been a better time! Sounds like the best time is "in the coming days." :) But seriously: I'm not sure I want to cut my teeth on a version that hasn't been fully tested for bugs.
  - gfodor 7y ago
    It's not a beta, it's an RC. 2.8 has been being tested for bugs for months now.
    - harperlee 7y ago
      Anyone can read in the developer blog’s last entry (2 clicks away from blender’s homepage) that the final 2.8 version was scheduled in only 5 days, but OP seemingly wanted the karma points. Otherwise there isn’t any real reason for sharing a RC of a project you are not working with without checking what is the release plan.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
      Then why is it RC and not release?
- goblin89 7y ago
verytrivial 7y ago
This is great news tempered by the fact that this is the first version since the NaN buyout that I'll not be able to run without buying new hardware. I saw many similar lamentations in the various fora, usually met with "It's 2019 etc etc." And so it goes.
- davissorenson 7y ago
  The first version since the NaN buyout... So you mean the first version since 2002? One advantage of Blender being open source is that you can use any previous version forever. And the previous versions are quite good!
- opencl 7y ago
  They already bent over backwards working around bugs in drivers the GPU vendors abandoned years ago to support 10 year old NVIDIA hardware, 7 year old AMD hardware, and 5 year old Intel hardware. And it still works on hardware older than that (at least on Linux) in spite of not being "supported". I don't know what else people are expecting them to do.
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    People are being unreasonable. It's free software and it's the best there is. Even a commercial software package that you'd pay 100's of dollars for would be worse in the compatibility dimension that the poster is lamenting.
    - cellular 7y ago
      How much does 3d Studio max cost? I haven't used it since the 90s so even the name might have changed. I thought it was thousands.
      - lkschubert8 7y ago
        Last I checked its 1500 a seat... a year.
    - 7y ago
cannedslime 7y ago
So glad to see 2.8 getting closer to release. I recently used blender for a project, had a problem with the new gltf exporter, luckily it was so easy to fix that even I could create a patch and a pull request, which was reviewed and accepted within a day. Now THATS open source!
- randyrand 7y ago
  I had a GLTF export problem too! Though I can’t remember what specifically. Thanks for your help!
mcjiggerlog 7y ago
Excited to try this, but the download is going at low KB/s ... anyone got a torrent for the linux version?
- mcjiggerlog 7y ago
  In the end I downloaded it through Steam - just select the release candidate beta channel.
  - mpwoz 7y ago
    Thanks for the tip, I had no idea blender was on steam (and had beta channels there too!) Link for the lazy: https://store.steampowered.com/app/365670/Blender/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/365670/Blender/
timonoko 7y ago
No more "just learn them 100 shortcuts you newbie". It was incredibly annoying advice for casual user, who has simply forgotten everything everytime they need to do some 3D-modelling.
- jobigoud 7y ago
  You could usually hit space bar and start typing a command to find it and run it.
  - PrototypeNM1 7y ago
    For the curious, search is now mapped to f3.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
douglasfshearer 7y ago
> left click select as the new default This is a huge improvement for new users. Right click was very un-intuitive when coming from other applications. Congrats to the Blender team on this release.
- panpanna 7y ago
  They make so many good decisions without sacrificing functionality. I feel Blender should loan some of its UI people to GIMP...
  - Ygg2 7y ago
    Why GIMP though? I thought Krita was pretty nice.
    - Crinus 7y ago
      GIMP and Krita focus on different stuff even if some of their functionality overlaps. GIMP focuses on photo editing whereas Krita focuses on digital painting. This sort of focus affects what priorities functionality for each program gets.
    - panpanna 7y ago
      Krita usually does as I want, gimp has a mind of its own. On other words, gimp has much worse UIX and desperately needs an overhaul
edwintorok 7y ago
It has a real-time physically based renderer now: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.80/EEVEE https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.80/E...
tannhaeuser 7y ago
I'm totally looking forward to the work that has gone into UI improvements. My prior attempts at using Blender left me puzzled, and I figured it was kindof the vi of 3D modelling eg. made for full-time as opposed to casual work. Though my son told me it isn't difficult if you know the basics. Anyway, I'm used to SketchUp and have a couple of models (no animations), so is there a way to import .skp files? Years ago, I used SketchUp Pro's Collada export with some success, but since SketchUp has changed to a browser-based free version (ugh), it looks like I'll need to use an old SketchUp install.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- greeneggs 7y ago
  The interface is impressively bad. I think it is the only program for which I had to Google how to close a window. I am glad that they are taking it seriously. Unfortunately, as a casual user (opening it maybe once or twice a month), this release has the side effect of breaking all the interface tutorials out there. It is probably still for the best in the long run, but I've had to keep both 2.79 and 2.80 installed.
  - anchpop 7y ago
    > the vi of 3D modelling > I think it is the only program for which I had to Google how to close a window Jokes aside, the UI really isn't that bad and they removed most of the little gotchas in 2.8 (e.g. left-click is used for selection now). I would say the UI is quite a bit better than a few other popular 3D modelling applications like Maya, but worse than Modo.
  - HelloNurse 7y ago
    > this release has the side effect of breaking all the interface tutorials out there All the obsolete interface tutorials. There are plenty of new ones for 2.80.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  The recommendation is to go through a few online tutorials (YouTube). Just follow along a donut and coffee cup tutorial and that should teach you most of the basic things you need to use the UI for modelling. Even though 3d software is and looks really complex, the main things used in 3d modelling are pretty simple to learn. Blender 2.79 does support the importing of some .skp files. I'm unsure if 2.80 supports the same.
caspervonb 7y ago
Oh wow, the UI has changed significantly which is a huge milestone. Back in the days any mention of the UI being awkward would typically just result in people telling you "you just aren't smart enough to use it" which basically just let people to roll with Maya instead.
- Doxin 7y ago
  I mean honestly the old UI wasn't bad, it just was wildly different from anything else which makes the learning curve too steep. I can't recall the blender UI ever feeling like it got in my way after I got to grips with how it does things.
spupy 7y ago
Anyone know what's the feature shown in the banner video where a seemingly hand-drawn griffon is then used to generate a 3D model?
- avian 7y ago
  Looks like the Grease Pencil feature that is mentioned on the page if you scroll down a bit.
- thedaemon 7y ago
  It's Grease Pencil. Looks like they convert the Grease Pencil to mesh at the end of the clip as well. Grease Pencil is 2d painting in 3d.
- opencl 7y ago
  It's grease pencil as others have mentioned, Jama Jurabaev talked a bit about this kind of workflow in a Blendconf talk last year[1]. I believe that griffon is this[2] piece of concept art he did for the Fantastic Beasts movie. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpcKPJTmqSI&t=935 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpcKPJTmqSI&t=935 [2] https://www.artstation.com/artwork/oO2r0q https://www.artstation.com/artwork/oO2r0q
optymizer 7y ago
This new release of Blender sounds awesome! How can I learn Blender effectively? I've tried in the past but got frustrated quickly with the low quality or with how out of date the videos were. I don't mind paying for quality.
- elil17 7y ago
  You’ll probably have to wait before resources are available for the new UI
  - JTxt 7y ago
    People have been making 2.8 tutorials for months. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blender+2.8+tutorials https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blender+2.8+tut...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- JTxt 7y ago
  I'd recommend video tutorials on YouTube. There's many great ones already: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blender+2.8+tutorials https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blender+2.8+tut... And use forums if you get stuck. https://blenderartists.org/ https://blenderartists.org/ Help others to learn faster.
cellular 7y ago
The first thing I'm going to check is how to close a "window" if they haven't put a simple X in the top right, I'll be disappointed.
- cellular 7y ago
  Unfortunately, the existing YouTube tutorials will be outdated. Hopefully, the ui will be so perfect that it won't matter! (Am I dreaming?)
  - JTxt 7y ago
    It bends over backwards to be discoverable for new users, but it's still a powerful 3d program with many features... an understanding of those concepts are needed to make any 3d tool to work. There's already a ton of 2.8 video tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blender+2.8+tutorial https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blender+2.8+tut...
- andybak 7y ago
  My first forays into Blender involved accidentally creating some new UI windows, closing others and being unable to fix either without resetting the whole of my preferences.
  - Doxin 7y ago
    That same system of panels is still in use, but they shrunk the hot corner for it significantly so it's much harder to accidentally activate. That said: learning how it works is definitely worth the effort if you have a large screen. You can have as much or as little on the screen as you like.
- JTxt 7y ago
  It still has the powerful tiling window system. There's no overlapping windows so you don't close windows, you combine and subdivide windows to make the tool layout you want. But now there's Tabs for different default window setups: Layout, modeling, Sculpting, UV Editing... So you shouldn't have to change the setups much, they're already designed for the task. You can can still customize/ create your own. That feature was already there as a drop down but now it's more accessible and you can add more default layouts.
yodon 7y ago
I've been using Blender 2.80 as a daily tool since it hit alpha, having started in the industry with the pre-release of Maya beta 4 in 1996. I'm tempted to start with a snarky comment like "only 19 years to get left-mouse select?" or "Microsoft shipped a Linux kernel before Blender got left-mouse select" but the fact is 2.80 is a huge UI improvement. At this point, the UI is merely a bit odd, as opposed to inconceivably terrible. If you are a hobbyist or have only occasional need for 3D editing, Blender should absolutely be your go-to tool today. At this point it's no harder to learn and not significantly quirkier than Maya or 3ds Max, it's just different. When the last major Blender UI update came out (something like 2.64? I can't remember) I recall saying "one more round of UI improvement like this and I'd consider starting my next studio pipeline around Blender rather than Maya." That was about 6 years ago. Today I'd consider building a studio pipeline around it but probably decide against, though one more round of improvement like 2.80 and I'd definitely start a studio on Blender over Maya which hasn't advanced significantly in more than ten years. 2025 FTW! I haven't pulled down the RC yet (I'm still on the most recent beta) so this might have changed in RC but if you are considering shifting from your 3D editor of choice to Blender, you'll want to know that parenting relationships are still needlessly buried but accessible[0]. [0] https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/127105/the-outliner-doesnt-show-parent-child-relations-in-blender-2-8?rq=1 https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/127105/the-outli...
- snek 7y ago
  Even in the new UI, I still use right click to select. Old habits die hard.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  Have all 'modes' been updated, how is it for non-linear [video] editing (NLE) now. I usually use KDEnlive but have used Blender in the past for this and it was pretty good but entirely unlike anything else in it's controls IIRC.
beeskneecaps 7y ago
Talk about amazing, free software! Thanks to everyone that worked so hard on this! Such helpful Blender communities on YouTube sharing tutorials that can help you achieve any effect, build any model, rig any character, motion track and composite any video!
DiseasedBadger 7y ago
The hardest thing for me in blender so far has been uv coords. Sometimes I seem to be editing them, but they don't change, sometimes the ui for it seems to be gone. Sometimes they don't seem to apply. Sometimes the material seems to get lost. It's been an incredible festival of mis-design, so far. So, I hope that has improved.
- JTxt 7y ago
  UV editing has a tab at the top now. There's a few things to keep track of to be successful with this tool and hook up with materials, but I don't think the difficulty is much different then similarly powerful tools. There's youtube tutorials that will walk you though it.

390 points by crispinh 7y ago

Blender is an incredible achievement for the open source community. It is an extraordinarily capable bit of software and 2.80 brings so many huge changes and refinements. While it still remains a complex bit of software it is not has difficult as its reputation would suggest and 2.80 makes a lot of concessions to making the UI more familiar to newbies.

antome 7y ago
For anyone wanting to jump in now, here's a good guide for making your first model in Blender 2.8, even if you have never made a model before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBqYTgaFDxU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBqYTgaFDxU
- Diederich 7y ago
  Thank you kindly, this is the kind of thing I was looking for. I've been thinking about getting into 3d modeling for a while now.
Topgamer7 7y ago
I credit Ton Roosendaal for his direction of the project. Since I first started following the project, there have been two large refactors. Both which have driven significant improvements.
blihp 7y ago
A lot of the 'difficult' reputation lingers from the pre-2.5 days when the UI was quite different from anything most users had ever seen before. The 2.5, and now 2.8, UI reworking has gone a long way to remove this barrier for many users.

pre 7y ago

The new renderer, Eevee, is brilliant and fast and is only one of the many great improvements to what was already one of my favourite bits of software. Some of the best open-source desktop software that there is.

panpanna 7y ago
Another renderer? They already have two parallell and partially incompatible pipelines...
- davissorenson 7y ago
  Blender Internal (1) and the Blender game engine were both removed in 2.80. Eevee uses the same nodes as Cycles. (1) Blender's legacy rendering engine which has been around since the '90s
  - pre 7y ago
    Yep. Hadn't noticed Internal had disappeared, but indeed it has. Suppose there's not really any need for it with Eevee existing now.
    - dtf 7y ago
      Part of the original rationale for Eevee was to replace Blender Internal.
      - panpanna 7y ago
        How is performance (ram/cpu) compared to internal? I used to switch to internal when designing on really low-end hardware (Atom tablets)
        penagwin 7y ago
        From my understanding (SOMEBODY CORRECT ME IF IM WRONG) Eevee is designed for realtime rendering in mind - it uses tricks similar to videogames to get high quality renders without raycasting everything. So it performs FAR better than blender internal.

bayesian_horse 7y ago

It has been a long wait. I'm still not quite used to the new UI, but I generally trust the Blender foundation that most changes are to the better (and many of them can be reversed through settings).

davissorenson 7y ago

This is (a release candidate for) a huge milestone in Blender's history. So much has been improved, that some, including myself, have speculated why they didn't choose to make it a 3.0 release. Aside from the fantastic new features geared towards existing users, which are described in detail & with pictures in the OP, this release also makes Blender a lot more user-friendly for those who haven't used it before. 3D software almost necessarily has a steep learning curve for new users, as you have to learn not only how to use a new program, but also how 3D content creation itself works. But in this release the developers and designers have made an effort to get rid of the biggest "gotchas" that many new users complained about when using previous versions of Blender. If you've wanted to get into 3D content creation before, there's never been a better time!

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
> there's never been a better time! Sounds like the best time is "in the coming days." :) But seriously: I'm not sure I want to cut my teeth on a version that hasn't been fully tested for bugs.
- gfodor 7y ago
  It's not a beta, it's an RC. 2.8 has been being tested for bugs for months now.
  - harperlee 7y ago
    Anyone can read in the developer blog’s last entry (2 clicks away from blender’s homepage) that the final 2.8 version was scheduled in only 5 days, but OP seemingly wanted the karma points. Otherwise there isn’t any real reason for sharing a RC of a project you are not working with without checking what is the release plan.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    Then why is it RC and not release?
goblin89 7y ago

verytrivial 7y ago

This is great news tempered by the fact that this is the first version since the NaN buyout that I'll not be able to run without buying new hardware. I saw many similar lamentations in the various fora, usually met with "It's 2019 etc etc." And so it goes.

davissorenson 7y ago
The first version since the NaN buyout... So you mean the first version since 2002? One advantage of Blender being open source is that you can use any previous version forever. And the previous versions are quite good!
opencl 7y ago
They already bent over backwards working around bugs in drivers the GPU vendors abandoned years ago to support 10 year old NVIDIA hardware, 7 year old AMD hardware, and 5 year old Intel hardware. And it still works on hardware older than that (at least on Linux) in spite of not being "supported". I don't know what else people are expecting them to do.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  People are being unreasonable. It's free software and it's the best there is. Even a commercial software package that you'd pay 100's of dollars for would be worse in the compatibility dimension that the poster is lamenting.
  - cellular 7y ago
    How much does 3d Studio max cost? I haven't used it since the 90s so even the name might have changed. I thought it was thousands.
    - lkschubert8 7y ago
      Last I checked its 1500 a seat... a year.
  - 7y ago

cannedslime 7y ago

So glad to see 2.8 getting closer to release. I recently used blender for a project, had a problem with the new gltf exporter, luckily it was so easy to fix that even I could create a patch and a pull request, which was reviewed and accepted within a day. Now THATS open source!

randyrand 7y ago
I had a GLTF export problem too! Though I can’t remember what specifically. Thanks for your help!

mcjiggerlog 7y ago

Excited to try this, but the download is going at low KB/s ... anyone got a torrent for the linux version?

mcjiggerlog 7y ago
In the end I downloaded it through Steam - just select the release candidate beta channel.
- mpwoz 7y ago
  Thanks for the tip, I had no idea blender was on steam (and had beta channels there too!) Link for the lazy: https://store.steampowered.com/app/365670/Blender/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/365670/Blender/

timonoko 7y ago

No more "just learn them 100 shortcuts you newbie". It was incredibly annoying advice for casual user, who has simply forgotten everything everytime they need to do some 3D-modelling.

jobigoud 7y ago
You could usually hit space bar and start typing a command to find it and run it.
- PrototypeNM1 7y ago
  For the curious, search is now mapped to f3.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

douglasfshearer 7y ago

> left click select as the new default This is a huge improvement for new users. Right click was very un-intuitive when coming from other applications. Congrats to the Blender team on this release.

panpanna 7y ago
They make so many good decisions without sacrificing functionality. I feel Blender should loan some of its UI people to GIMP...
- Ygg2 7y ago
  Why GIMP though? I thought Krita was pretty nice.
  - Crinus 7y ago
    GIMP and Krita focus on different stuff even if some of their functionality overlaps. GIMP focuses on photo editing whereas Krita focuses on digital painting. This sort of focus affects what priorities functionality for each program gets.
  - panpanna 7y ago
    Krita usually does as I want, gimp has a mind of its own. On other words, gimp has much worse UIX and desperately needs an overhaul

edwintorok 7y ago

It has a real-time physically based renderer now: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.80/EEVEE https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.80/E...

tannhaeuser 7y ago

I'm totally looking forward to the work that has gone into UI improvements. My prior attempts at using Blender left me puzzled, and I figured it was kindof the vi of 3D modelling eg. made for full-time as opposed to casual work. Though my son told me it isn't difficult if you know the basics. Anyway, I'm used to SketchUp and have a couple of models (no animations), so is there a way to import .skp files? Years ago, I used SketchUp Pro's Collada export with some success, but since SketchUp has changed to a browser-based free version (ugh), it looks like I'll need to use an old SketchUp install.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
greeneggs 7y ago
The interface is impressively bad. I think it is the only program for which I had to Google how to close a window. I am glad that they are taking it seriously. Unfortunately, as a casual user (opening it maybe once or twice a month), this release has the side effect of breaking all the interface tutorials out there. It is probably still for the best in the long run, but I've had to keep both 2.79 and 2.80 installed.
- anchpop 7y ago
  > the vi of 3D modelling > I think it is the only program for which I had to Google how to close a window Jokes aside, the UI really isn't that bad and they removed most of the little gotchas in 2.8 (e.g. left-click is used for selection now). I would say the UI is quite a bit better than a few other popular 3D modelling applications like Maya, but worse than Modo.
- HelloNurse 7y ago
  > this release has the side effect of breaking all the interface tutorials out there All the obsolete interface tutorials. There are plenty of new ones for 2.80.
Mirioron 7y ago
The recommendation is to go through a few online tutorials (YouTube). Just follow along a donut and coffee cup tutorial and that should teach you most of the basic things you need to use the UI for modelling. Even though 3d software is and looks really complex, the main things used in 3d modelling are pretty simple to learn. Blender 2.79 does support the importing of some .skp files. I'm unsure if 2.80 supports the same.

caspervonb 7y ago

Oh wow, the UI has changed significantly which is a huge milestone. Back in the days any mention of the UI being awkward would typically just result in people telling you "you just aren't smart enough to use it" which basically just let people to roll with Maya instead.

Doxin 7y ago
I mean honestly the old UI wasn't bad, it just was wildly different from anything else which makes the learning curve too steep. I can't recall the blender UI ever feeling like it got in my way after I got to grips with how it does things.

spupy 7y ago

Anyone know what's the feature shown in the banner video where a seemingly hand-drawn griffon is then used to generate a 3D model?

avian 7y ago
Looks like the Grease Pencil feature that is mentioned on the page if you scroll down a bit.
thedaemon 7y ago
It's Grease Pencil. Looks like they convert the Grease Pencil to mesh at the end of the clip as well. Grease Pencil is 2d painting in 3d.
opencl 7y ago
It's grease pencil as others have mentioned, Jama Jurabaev talked a bit about this kind of workflow in a Blendconf talk last year[1]. I believe that griffon is this[2] piece of concept art he did for the Fantastic Beasts movie. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpcKPJTmqSI&t=935 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpcKPJTmqSI&t=935 [2] https://www.artstation.com/artwork/oO2r0q https://www.artstation.com/artwork/oO2r0q

optymizer 7y ago

This new release of Blender sounds awesome! How can I learn Blender effectively? I've tried in the past but got frustrated quickly with the low quality or with how out of date the videos were. I don't mind paying for quality.

elil17 7y ago
You’ll probably have to wait before resources are available for the new UI
- JTxt 7y ago
  People have been making 2.8 tutorials for months. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blender+2.8+tutorials https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blender+2.8+tut...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
JTxt 7y ago
I'd recommend video tutorials on YouTube. There's many great ones already: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blender+2.8+tutorials https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blender+2.8+tut... And use forums if you get stuck. https://blenderartists.org/ https://blenderartists.org/ Help others to learn faster.

cellular 7y ago

The first thing I'm going to check is how to close a "window" if they haven't put a simple X in the top right, I'll be disappointed.

cellular 7y ago
Unfortunately, the existing YouTube tutorials will be outdated. Hopefully, the ui will be so perfect that it won't matter! (Am I dreaming?)
- JTxt 7y ago
  It bends over backwards to be discoverable for new users, but it's still a powerful 3d program with many features... an understanding of those concepts are needed to make any 3d tool to work. There's already a ton of 2.8 video tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blender+2.8+tutorial https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blender+2.8+tut...
andybak 7y ago
My first forays into Blender involved accidentally creating some new UI windows, closing others and being unable to fix either without resetting the whole of my preferences.
- Doxin 7y ago
  That same system of panels is still in use, but they shrunk the hot corner for it significantly so it's much harder to accidentally activate. That said: learning how it works is definitely worth the effort if you have a large screen. You can have as much or as little on the screen as you like.
JTxt 7y ago
It still has the powerful tiling window system. There's no overlapping windows so you don't close windows, you combine and subdivide windows to make the tool layout you want. But now there's Tabs for different default window setups: Layout, modeling, Sculpting, UV Editing... So you shouldn't have to change the setups much, they're already designed for the task. You can can still customize/ create your own. That feature was already there as a drop down but now it's more accessible and you can add more default layouts.

yodon 7y ago

I've been using Blender 2.80 as a daily tool since it hit alpha, having started in the industry with the pre-release of Maya beta 4 in 1996. I'm tempted to start with a snarky comment like "only 19 years to get left-mouse select?" or "Microsoft shipped a Linux kernel before Blender got left-mouse select" but the fact is 2.80 is a huge UI improvement. At this point, the UI is merely a bit odd, as opposed to inconceivably terrible. If you are a hobbyist or have only occasional need for 3D editing, Blender should absolutely be your go-to tool today. At this point it's no harder to learn and not significantly quirkier than Maya or 3ds Max, it's just different. When the last major Blender UI update came out (something like 2.64? I can't remember) I recall saying "one more round of UI improvement like this and I'd consider starting my next studio pipeline around Blender rather than Maya." That was about 6 years ago. Today I'd consider building a studio pipeline around it but probably decide against, though one more round of improvement like 2.80 and I'd definitely start a studio on Blender over Maya which hasn't advanced significantly in more than ten years. 2025 FTW! I haven't pulled down the RC yet (I'm still on the most recent beta) so this might have changed in RC but if you are considering shifting from your 3D editor of choice to Blender, you'll want to know that parenting relationships are still needlessly buried but accessible[0]. [0] https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/127105/the-outliner-doesnt-show-parent-child-relations-in-blender-2-8?rq=1 https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/127105/the-outli...

snek 7y ago
Even in the new UI, I still use right click to select. Old habits die hard.
pbhjpbhj 7y ago
Have all 'modes' been updated, how is it for non-linear [video] editing (NLE) now. I usually use KDEnlive but have used Blender in the past for this and it was pretty good but entirely unlike anything else in it's controls IIRC.

beeskneecaps 7y ago

Talk about amazing, free software! Thanks to everyone that worked so hard on this! Such helpful Blender communities on YouTube sharing tutorials that can help you achieve any effect, build any model, rig any character, motion track and composite any video!

DiseasedBadger 7y ago

The hardest thing for me in blender so far has been uv coords. Sometimes I seem to be editing them, but they don't change, sometimes the ui for it seems to be gone. Sometimes they don't seem to apply. Sometimes the material seems to get lost. It's been an incredible festival of mis-design, so far. So, I hope that has improved.

JTxt 7y ago
UV editing has a tab at the top now. There's a few things to keep track of to be successful with this tool and hook up with materials, but I don't think the difficulty is much different then similarly powerful tools. There's youtube tutorials that will walk you though it.