*jumps from the void*
Hey Blender! Pablo here.
Over three years of development make this the greatest release ever,
with hundreds of features. But, it's impossible to go through all of them,
so here are FIVE of the greatest features you'll find in Blender 2.80 Beta.
#1: User Interface & User Experience
Because Blender, not only now has a dark theme with flat icons and anti-aliasing and everything looks
very nice and very polished, but also the settings all over Blender now they're much more consistent.
The shortcuts that work in one area work the same in another area of Blender, the names of the tools are also
as consistent as possible, the menus have been reorganized to have the more used features first,
and then-
It's also about the way you interact with Blender.
Now the selection occurs by default with left click select is a big change for Blender.
It's always been right click select by default.
You can still do it (everything is accessible), but by default it's left click select.
Box selection, click anywhere on the viewport to deselect your objects...
We believe this change will help not only new users that come from other softwares, but also a lot of devices that
are depending on the left click, like a tablet, or a trackpad, or a touchscreen.
And your two system nodes sits on the sidebar when you can pick a brush for example, change the settings
on the new topbar, and just calt [?] right away on your model, or paint for example, treat your U [?] in your UV,
[Pablo help me out here PLEASE]
UV editing...
But where this new tool system really shines is when you're in Edit Mode,
because most of the tools that were there already in Blender now have their own active tool. You enable it,
and you will see gizmos around your meshes that will make things so much more easy to tweak.
More visual, more feedback on what you're doing and how to do it...
Making these very nicely working and more accessible.
B U T
if you wanted to do shortcuts, you can always do that.
and the speed of Blender 2.7 and before (what Blender is known for) is still there.
Pie menus were available in 2.7, but now are part of Blender itself. It's built in.
Pie menus are for the most used actions, for like changing the shading type or the mode of your objects.
So if you combine the new looks with the new interactions you get: "Workspace"
These are the new way of organizing your layout depending on which kind of workflow you're in.
So if you're modelling, you have your own workspace. If you're sculpting, you'll see that you have everything
arranged for you to start sculpting right away.
Texture painting or editing your shaders, everything has its own workspace by default,
but you can also make your own and tweak it however you prefer.
These workspaces can have their own different settings for each one of the editors, especially for the
B R A N D
new
#2: Viewport
The viewport in Blender 2.8 is powered by Eevee,
a new PBR render engine focused on real-time with every feature you can imagine.
Strong subsurface scattering to ambient occlusion, depth of field, motion blur,
reflections, refractions,
light probes for cube and planar reflections, and irradiance volume.
You can also preview your Cycles render using Eevee, so it's much as close as possible.
The lights, the shadows, everything, so you can preview it in the new LookDev shading type in the viewport.
Because...
you can do EVERY MUCH ANYTHING with Eevee.
You can model, sculpt, you can use it all the time if you want to,
but if you want to go simpler and focus on modelling and whatever you're working on at the moment,
you can use a new engine: "Workbench"
The workbench engine can help you in any case.
If you're modelling for example or doing layout, you may want to enable the new "random" colors that adds a
random color to any object in your scene so you can spot them more easily.
They're plenty of ways to visualizing your scene in your workbench engine. You can see flat colors maybe if you
wanna do some painting or textures.
You can also have solid matcaps and on top of that you can add specific shading settings. For example,
the cavity shader now also features not only a "world" cavity shader but a "screen" space cavity shader, which
very nicely highlights all of the details on your mesh.
On top of the viewport are the overlays, so even if you're on Cycles rendering or Eevee or
the workbench engine, on top you can have your objects or your wireframes, the grid, the vertex paint,
the weight paint...
Pretty much any information that is not part of the render itself, you can place it on top and combine
the render with the new overlays.
One of these overlays is the 3D cursor, which has been there in the past, but now also features rotation
A N D
if you don't like it, you can hiiide it.
Yes, you can
H I I I D E
it.
#3: 2D Animation
In previous versions of Blender, you could do some basic drawings and coloring and animation,
but in 2.80 there is now a dedicated 2D animation pipeline. You can even open Blender and from
the splash screen you can click to the animation and start it right away.
You will have an active brush selected and you can start drawing. These drawings are now part of a new kind of
object called "grease pencil" object, where you are drawing 2D in a 3D environment.
These objects also have their own layer system within that object, and there is their own materials as well.
This object, just like any regular object in Blender, have their own modifier stack, and - only exclusive for
these objects - are shader effects, a new way to modify how your objects look in the viewport itself.
The layers in your grease pencil objects resemble those in 2D painting softwares. You can even blend
between them using "overlay", "multiply", "areshent" [?], or even "subtract" to get some really creative effects.
This full 2D animation pipeline has already been used in production in the short open movie project "Hero".
#4: Collections & View Layers
Gone is that limit of 20 layers we had in Blender 2.7. Now you can have unlimited "collections".
So this is how you organize your scene. Now all your objects are put inside of collections,
and you can name, and you can even nest them.
You can have multiple ones inside each other, and these ones you can either instance them within the same file,
or you can even link or reference them in other files. Collections live inside of view layers and this is how you
control what you see in the viewport and also what you're going to render,
similar to what render layers were in 2.7.
#5: Cycles
Yes, the render engine. The ray tracing render engine, because not everything is real-time nowadays.
Cycles is now rendering up to 30% faster, and you can even combine your CPU with your GPU
when you are rendering. If you're doing GPU rendering and you run out of memory, you can even
use your computer memory automatically without having to do anything. You're gonna need that power,
because there's a new hair shader that is based on a paper by Disney that just looks gorgeous.
There is also a new node called "principled volume" that would make our lives so much easier now to set up
things like smoke or fire, or basically anything that uses volumetrics.
There are also improvements in the subsurface scattering thing now using "random walk".
It just... sounds weird, but trust me it looks great.
Once you're done rendering and you wanna move into compositing, make sure you enable the new
"Cryptomatte" pass. Yes, this industry standard Cryptomatte is now supported by Cycles,
and the Blender compositor. So you can render your passes, export them, put them in the metadata
of your EXR files, and even composite them later on Blender's own compositor.
*meme review*
In it's own workspace!
heh
And these are just five. Okay, let me name a few more.
Pixar's Open Subdiv now is used in the subsurface modifier and the multires modifier
for super smooth surfaces.
glTF exporters are now a part of Blender. Built-in. Major improvements include simulation.
Even the unit system got improved. Now you can fix a unit and you will see that all across Blender.
Adding drivers now is so much simpler. You can just right click, add a driver, and edit the settings right there
on the spot. And if you want more advanced settings, you can always open the drivers editor.
And I could go on forever because there's not only those features with a name, but there's also the features
that I can't name, like improvements in performance, dependency graph, or even the new Python API,
which is much more consistent.
So much. What now? Go and test it. Go to "blender.org", download the latest Blender 2.80 Beta, and if you
find anything that doesn't work or is crashing, go to "Help" menu within Blender, "Report a Bug", and give us
as much information as possible so we can make it super stable. But also, we want your feedback.
What you think about it.
And if you like what you just saw, everything and all the development that is going on, you can help
to keep this going. You can join the Blender Development Fund, and for only €5 or $6 a month,
you can be part of this movement. You can help make sure that Blender development continues to
move forward.
This is your own 3D software.