Blender 2.8 beta released

The Blender Foundation has announced the official release of the Blender 2.8 beta. This version has been some 3 years in the making and the list of new features and improvements is too large to list in its entirety here, but a few highlights include the completely revamped user interface with harmonised tools, gizmos and shortcuts for a more consistent experience across the application. A part of the UI overhaul also saw the introduction of workspaces that enable the user to optimise the interface for common tasks like sculpting, texture painting or motion tracking. 

The big headline feature for this release has always been EEVEE, Blender’s physically based real-time renderer that can be used both for final frames and to power the viewports. We have reported EEVEE many times before, but in short is a real-time renderer with some advanced features like volumetrics, screen-space reflections and refractions, subsurface scattering, soft and contact shadows, depth of field, camera motion blur and bloom and much more. There’s also second new viewport display mode that has received less hype. Workbench is able to visualize a scene in many ways by combining several lighting and material combinations. 

It’s not all 3D, Blender’s Grease Pencil toolset has also seen significant improvements to create a friendlier interface for 2D artist while retaining the power of the 3D engine that sits below it. Grease Pencil is now a real Blender object with huge improvements to brushes and tools.

Blender’s layers used to be limited to 20 per scene. Blender 2.8 see the end of this restriction with a new Collection and View Layers concept that allows the user to organise their scenes in a more flexible way. Layers are now unlimited and can be nested for a much more flexible workflow. To make managing collections easier,  editing and filtering in the Outliner has also been improved.

Under the hood the dependency graph, the core object evaluation and computation system, has been rewritten. for better performance on modern multi-core CPUs. According to the foundation, this will also the way for new features in future releases. 

Cycles gets brand new principled volume and hair shaders based on Disney research as well as new bevel and ambient occlusion shaders, and Cryptomatte support. The renderer is now able to combine the power of available CPU and GPU plus many more improvements.  

Many smaller improvements are included like the ability to edit multiple objects, improvements to the cloth simulator for better collision, a new driver editing UI and much more. To find out more about this release and download the beta, visit blender.org.