Blender 2.80
blender.org
blender.org
I suspect adoption will grow considerably. The previous interface conventions were unusual and clumsy, and were the primary barrier for those curious about switching packages.
I switched to Blender after using the beta for several months. I have put thousands of dollars into licenses for Modo and Maya over the years. I would much rather put that into Blender donations, now that I can actually use it. The things a good user interface team can do.
Unusual, sure. Clumsy? not at all. It was extremely efficient and hyper-organized. The real problem was that it was different, and people just don't like change.
This new interface is great because it's easy to use for Maya/Max people, and it's still similar-enough to the 2.7 era so as not to alienate long-time users.
I'd also go so far as to say that the 2.80 UI overhaul has slowed me down a bit. Things that were a single key stroke away are now an extra one or two. Menu items have been renamed and rearranged (often for the better) but now I have to go hunt for them and relearn them. If these help Blender become more popular, then that pain is worth it.
Bravo to the Blender team!
Every action I take, I can no longer be confident about my "guess" of what it will do. It's like the door handle problem, where you see a strange unlabeled handle and are not sure that you need to push or pull to open the door. Then you tried to push, since that's the convention for all the door in this building space. The door doesn't open. Then you tried to pull, and it works. Maybe pulling to open the door is better than the normal convention, but sometimes it's not worth it to sacrifice consistency.
I think the new changes are for the better :).
A couple years ago, I learned to use Blender through cgcookie tutorials and googling. Nothing was easy, but everything made sense eventually. It really makes me appreciate the free tools and learning resources we have today.
You cannot explore it, and that's the problem. RTFM is required.
> it's easy to use for Maya/Max
When I was 14, with not prior 3D software experience, I first attempted to use Blender (it's free!). After maybe 20 minutes I gave up trying to add a sphere to the scene. I figured out the Max interface in less than a minute.
Change aversion is a factor, but it also alienated complete newbies.
When it comes to user experience, blaming the user is the worst sword to fall on.
It was clunky, kind of like Gimp's UI, and felt like a remnant of the 90's. Usable, sure. Aesthetically pleasant? Absolutely not. Our tools should feel nice.
Major kudos to Blender on this.
Its true that the new ui is an improvement - it looks cleaner and I guess things like left click to select is more intuitive. But the old blender ui wasn't as bad as people make it out to be and lots of things that sucked before like the ui for for hair particles are still pretty bad in the new ui.
The main issues new users have are often related to management of the deliberately non-modal UI which allows you to split the main window up in any way you like, kinda like tmux. With 2.80 tool sidebars now have big clear icons instead of rows of buttons with sometimes impenetrable words written on them.
Ultimately the 2.80 UI is much the same as the 2.79 UI with a more fashionable dark UI and a reworking of some idiosyncratic design choices (changing from right click select to left click select etc).
> Aesthetically pleasant? Absolutely not
That's subjective, but it did support themes and DPI scaling.
UI design in open source software has been greatly under appreciated though... Maybe its having a revival
I'm an occasional Photoshop and Illustrator user (longtime Fireworks diehard, though, RIP) and while some conventions make sense to me, there's plenty of things that I have to look up tutorials for, even if I've learned them before.
Sometimes different software is different.
Yet many artists make amazing stuff with ZBrush.
And so, I started investing time into Blender. I started out with something as simple as modeling a speaker box. It was such a joy. Still, it's not perfect. The camera movement is really terrible in comparison with 3ds Max. You can't create a camera from your current viewport view so easily like on Max and to manoeuvre the camera is such a pain in the ass. Still, it makes up for that in modeling. I'm enjoying 3d now again and even building a new rig to support my renders.
Well done Blender team. Thanks for the 2.80.
It won’t create a new camera but this shortcut moves the camera to show the current view.
This still is in the documentation but I haven’t checked if the key is still the same in 2.80.
I've never realized I needed something so badly that Blender didn't have as I do now.
Other Free Software projects quite often get stuck in a UX rut and resist any efforts to improve or change.
It's a big fail of the Apple management to not support the metal development for apps like Blender, they gonna lose a generation of creatives.
I think they're focusing most of their resources on ARM.
Or, I'm probably just crazy.
#1 is billed services (iCloud, Apple Music, etc)
#2 is iOS devices (mostly iPhone)
a very distant #3 is laptops and desktops
macOS is nowhere on the list because it doesn't make them any money.
They also do not directly sell iOS or its upgrades but we'd hardly say iOS isn't making money.
Threre are two mobs... one of "They changed it, now it sucks" and on the other "They didn't change it, and now it sucks".
Apple abandoning OpenGL sucks a lot, but them not supporting Vulkan is much worse.
They ditched OpenGL? how does that work?
I don't know if one already exist for OpenGL, but for Vulkan there's MoltenVK: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/MoltenVK
I believe the answer for blender is https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/radeon-prorender-downloa...
Which I think is ready now as well.
Someone please correct me if I am wrong.
The issue that we had was that a lot of functionality that works in Cycles didn't work in ProRender, which would have required our artists to rework potentially large parts of their 3D scenes, and to also use different techniques to accomplish certain affects in the future (meaning many tutorials or examples might no longer match up).
I'm not sure what the specifics are, since I didn't really understand how 3D scenes are made, but basically something like some texture effects or something (??) weren't available in ProRender, and so those effects would have to be removed or redone. Unless they've changed something since then (added support for whatever it is), I think this will still be the same issue.
https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/rn-prorender...
Everything I've heard says that Vulkan and Metal both are far more efficient, let you get more out of the hardware with less CPU time, and can more easily support newer features.
OpenGL as a major target platform is dying, it's just a question of how long the tail is.
Even from the perspective of bringing people smoothly to their proprietary API, they have failed miserably.
Haven't they already?
I don't do 3D but anecdotally the 3D guys I know all use Windows.
It is true that we have Mac systems here, that's no secret. But all 'real' film production work is completely Linux based with a completely custom infrastructure.
Source: Currently at Pixar
"Steve wasn’t capable of being friends. That wasn’t his personality. Besides the Apple stuff, I had a lot to do with his Pixar thing. I was contacted by the people who became Pixar–I knew them well, and they wanted to get out of Lucasfilm. They called me up and asked me for advice, and so I said, I can talk to Steve. I explained very carefully to him who these people were, and you shouldn’t fuck around with them, like he did with his normal employees. He did a good job with them. [Pixar] was the most honest billion he ever made, because he put a lot of his own personal money into nurturing those guys. They got fabulous. That was Steve’s best hour."
Alan Kay - https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-ab...
> Pixar began in 1979 as the Graphics Group, part of the Lucasfilm computer division, before its spin-out as a corporation in 1986, with funding by Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs, who became the majority shareholder.
(Also almost every single one of those is from a CEO or VP, not someone who's job it is to actually use these things.)
3D motion design was actually quite Mac centric, because many people came into it from 2D graphic design where Macs are widely used. Folks just kept their old Mac Pros and went with fat GPU's for rendering in the last 5 years or so. But with Nvidia dominating in the GPU rendering space and Apples stance against Nvidia it's kind of a roads end for professional 3D people.
It's not that it would cut into Apples profits directly, but good artists and designers are taste makers, it hurts Apple as a brand going forward, 3D is only getting more popular with AR.
Edit: This quote is from a different link, https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-80/
https://developer.blender.org/rB159806140fd33e6ddab951c0f6f1... Showing 876 changed files with 228 additions and 193,524 deletions.
Another large cleanup was done on the "internal and legacy viewport" (I'm not familiar with the lingo, sorry), also so satisfying:
https://github.com/sobotka/blender/commit/51b796ff1528c52cc8... (only have the git mirror link, sorry) Showing 309 changed files with 1,687 additions and 84,075 deletions.
https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/9n53ij/wha t_do_people_here_make_of_this_detailed_and/
Fortunately, the next expected release of Godot (4.0) might be able to solve a lot of those problems. It's going to be ported to Vulkan, the renderer is going to be multi-threaded and optimized, and a lot of the lighting related functionality from major game engines is going to be implemented.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Godot-4....
https://code.blender.org/2019/07/development-fund-report-jul...
The commercial 3D programs bundle a lot, including: extensive documentation, video training, example files, material/light databases, example textures and assets, 3rd-party software (e.g. additional renderers). Arguably those things do provide value.
Could the GIMP foundation follow Blenders example or is it politically untenable?
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2019 2.80 117 MB | xEDIT: You know, it would probably be too wide. You can look at the dates in inflatableDodo's link (the parent post to mine). If I were to add the dates I would only be able to see the dates on my phone without scrolling horizontally. In the link, the dates are already listed in the same order so there isn't much to gain in adding them here.
I've been looking to get back into video-production in my free time, but on Linux the number decent video-editing solutions is limited. I'm looking into Lightworks, but I'd prefer something FOSS if at all possible.
With that being said, it is still a great tool for making videos.
*edit fixed some sentences
These days I would use HarfBuzz/stb_truetype [1] for a lightweight thing. Use FreeType if you need something even fancier.
[0] https://git.blender.org/gitweb/gitweb.cgi/blender.git/blob/H... [1] like https://gist.github.com/rygorous/6f2779a451d2040371e3acb79e1...
intern/ghost if I were to guess without looking at the actual sourcetree...
That said, I've never been proficient at 3D, other than a couple of level editors, so all 3D tools are hard for me to use. With my mediocre background and armed with tutorials, I didn't find it time-consuming to do some basic things like creating a mesh (lots of techniques to pick up here), creating a UV map, and baking a light map.
Even aside from personal learning preferences, I suspect trying to learn a complex UI from a video is going to be a struggle if you're working on a single screen.
[0]https://unity3d.com/unity/features/worldbuilding/probuilder
That said, I'm often working with an engine other than Unity, so I'm not sure how much Probuilder is an option.
Outdated tutorials aren't totally useless, since they'll still give you an idea of how to approach a modeling problem. But the UI won't match what you're working in, so I certainly wouldn't recommend them for trying to learn the software.
You could change it before, but defaults matter a lot for new users.
EDIT: I just tested it and I might be misinformed on this. Either it's still RMB selection or I have an old config that it loaded.
EDIT2: Load factory settings put me on LBM select. Yay!
I'd say it's a bit easier to grasp for someone new.
I did not do animation, though, only 3D-modelling and architectural scenes.
Is it at this point mostly momentum of Maya etc. or are there still many small things, that a professional designer miss in blender?
Or is it bigger? Some time ago, I heard the renderer of blender did not hold up to the rest, but that has changed?
Some time ago, the blender ren
I used Maya as a 3D freelancer for some while and switched to Blender when Cycles got introduced. I never really regreted that decision. Odly enough the one point that I liked the most about Blender was its user interface – yeah it was weird, but it was consistent. If "g" moves things in the 3D window it moves things also in a timeline and in a compositor.
What does Blender need? I think 2.80 has done a lot of what the industry needs, especially in terms of 2D animation and performance improvements. My major caveat is, that Compositing with video sources is just slow.
I wonder if it is something you can learn by working on it or you just have to be gifted...
Video’s a reason I’ve spent time with multiple previous Blender versions. Be great if this UI refresh + templated defaults create more traction for me and other video editors.
My http download is glacially slow right now...
I hate fragmenting my install routes though.
Fwiw the Steam install comes up as only 491MB for me. Also I see quite a few "bring back 2.79" comments whilst everywhere else I've looked had only been positive.
I grabbed most of the downloads from the website and have them in a resilio share here BBFPBUQ2TM7EKQIH3MVFPQWIRBLWVQEOO too if that helps.
Crazy question. Is anyone working on a VR interface for Blender?
It looks more like Max now. And I know they did some rework in the whole asset organization thing.
And they removed the parts that weren't as core, so great job overall. :)
Sure, the minimum requirements are "GCN 1st gen and up", which came out after the 6750M, but other apps with GPU acceleration work fine with it, and Blender 2.79 also worked fine, so it's kind of shitty to miss out on all the amazing new stuff that got added to 2.80 =(
Is there really no good changeset/blog links to post?
Edit: looks like the previous link was fixed to which someone mentioned hasnt been updated for RC3 yet https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-80/
I still find the 2.80 UI unintuitive. Clicking now selects, which is great, but it's weird to me that clicking on the background and then dragging doesn't move the viewport but does a selection box. Neither ctrl-drag nor any other modifier and drag moved the viewport either. After some more trial and error, apparently swiping on the trackpad rotates the viewport and shift-drag moves it, but I couldn't figure out how to dolly after some more trial and error.
IIRC Blender is the only program where I couldn't figure out basic actions without RTFM. It's a bit better now, but that's still the case.
Don't get me wrong, it's really impressive that they're able to do such a big UI overhaul! But at least for me, it feels there's still a ways to go.
Shift+middle-click to translate the viewport
If you're using a Mac, or a laptop without a three-button trackpad or mouse, there is an option called "emulate three-button mouse" that lets you use alt+left-click as an alternative to middle-click. A little clumsy, but adequate for viewing files on-the-go.
In the new 2.80 UI, there is a set of colored axes in the top-right corner. Clicking and dragging on those rotates the viewport, and clicking on the ends of one of the axes aligns the viewport to that axis.
To the left of those axes is a hand-shaped icon. Clicking and dragging on this icon translates the viewport.
(I'm curious which programs you've used before. This is definitely the same way you navigate in all of Autodesk's products, and in SolidWorks.)