The Blender Foundation has released a release candidate for Blender 2.80, meaning the final release is imminent. Assuming all things go well, this should be the final shipping version, or certainly close to it, You can download it from here and see the most recent Blender Today live stream on YouTube.
Blender 2.80 release candidate available
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It was planned for today, but the release has not been done yet, probably tomorrow or next monday 🙂
As much as I would like to make blender my main 3d tool I still think it is suffering from that horrible decision made years ago to keep the UI as it was or base the new developments on it. while it has been greatly improved since then in functionality it is yet very much “alien” when it comes to trying to use it when jumping back and forth between apps or for newcomers from other major 3d software like Max.
I wish it wasn’t so but for my team and I this has still been painful to transition to even after 2 years of having it installed in the background. Which is why we still use Blender for limited things here and there but not for any production work yet.
I learned to model on 3ds max and used for 3 years, then went to Maya and stayed there for double the time. Some years ago I switched to Blender and can’t get back to Maya or Max, they’re too old and don’t work very well for me anymore, it’s the same software year after year. Give another chance to Blender, you don’t like it yet because you were no commited to it. If Blender was the standard one, then Max would have the alien interface, it’s all relative.
One big improvement I’m hoping for since ages (maybe it happened in v2.8, Juang3d ?): fixing the hover-tips ! When I hover over a button, UI-element or menu-element, I don’t need and don’t want any cryptic “python-paths”. That’s confusing me, and not helpful (at least not when starting to use Blender). Helpful instead would be if the hover-tips would provide a short info about the tool/button AND: the current keyboard-shortcut assigned to it. This way new users or switchers like me would have needed information right under the cursor, and would learn the keyboard-shortcuts (which still play a quite huge role in Blender).
Those python paths are important when you are an advanced Blender user 🙂 because you do “small scripts” really fast to do repetitive tasks, on the other hand, yes, in the tooltips you find the description and the shortcut if it has one, but you find another important thing (that not always work, specially in 2.80 since the documentation is not finished) a link to the manual with the full explanation.
Also in the settings, in the “interface” section, inside the “Display” options, you will find two checkboxes, “Tooltips” and “Python Tooltips”, you can disable the second one and you will stop seeing those python paths 🙂
Cheers!
You should check out the website; there’s clearly an interface overhaul.
http://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-80/
Yes, if you try to go forth and back you will find it hard to start with Blender because the philosophy of Blender is completely different than the one in Max/Maya, the UI and the way of work is different.
In 2.80 you will find some things that will ease your forth and back effort, specially the “left click select”, “right click context menu” and the “industry standard” keymap, but even when I was more than 16 years working with max and left click select I have to say that once I got used to right click select it turned to be my preferred selection methos, it’s a matter of personal opinion, but I fully embraced it and it’s great, my hand suffer way less, back in the day with LMB I had some pain in the hand, the “claw” sensation were my hand was suffering from continuous effort in the same group of muscles, since I shifted to Blender this pain disappeared because of the RMB, so the movements are not so repetitive and now I use more muscles in my hand.
Now you have to think that it’s not “alien”, it’s a different software that has a different view of the way of working, if you want to fully leverage it and use it you should use it as it was designed, I’m sure some of you tried to make the UI and shortcuts to be similar to max/maya, I think that’s a bad idea because it was not designed that way, now the LMB selection mode and the “Industry Standard” keymap is more designed towards that, but it has been a long way until that keymap and until the LMB selection mode were really ready to be used, and they still need some polish.
My advice if you really want to learn and leverage Blender is that you should force yourself and your team to FULLY complete a project with Blender, find solutions to all the problems you encounter in the way, don’t fall back to max or maya for anything, don’t worry you will be able to do everything, but if you fall back to max or maya you will never learn how to properly do it in Blender, no need to be a client project, you may do this with an in-house project, something to test this, but force yourselves to do a project in Blender completely, it’s the only way you will really learn Blender (or any other packages that you really want to learn IMHO)
I hope you enjoy 2.80 once it’s released 🙂
It is not. I also was prejudiced to Blender a while ago in the very same aspect as you, but actually found both the UI, the workflow, and the selection modes more natural, fluent and pleasing. Really. Blender does have its shortages, main being poor instancing workflow and lack of some vital production capabilities (like OpenVDB, hacky Alembic), but currently it is a fully professional 3D animation package.
My main problem with Blender is the performance,
right click selection is bad, the annoying target on the viewport is awful, UI needs to improve, but the worst of all and the main reason I don’t use Blender is that every time I try to do something with a few hundred thousands of polys the performance drops like crazy, is even worse than Maya, which has a really bad performace.
that’s why 2.8 has a new interface, viewport has been updated and a lot of fixes have been done. blender is not maya as maya is not blender every tool has is pro’s and con’s. for a tool that is free to use it’s quiet good.
Global Undo is the most likely culprit as it pretty much saves the state of whole scene which gets very slow with big scenes. Disable it (use Local) and you can work with 50+mil poly scenes with pretty average hardware (M2 drive wont hurt either). Infact upon exporting to max/maya they are the slow ones at least when it comes to modeling (though anim playback in Maya is superb!). Downside is that you pretty much have to learn never to press CTRL+Z unless in Edit/Sculpt or any other Local Undo mode. Obviously it’s a very bad solution. This issue needs to be addressed for professional use. Other than that the guys did amazing job! I have switched several years ago to Blender/Houdini from decades of Max/Maya. I’d have to be subjected to some serious torture to consider returning to either of these stagnated dinosaurs. Read that as warm recommendation not to dismiss it, but to give it a serious try.
Totally true, and that is why this problem is being discussed in the devtlak forum here, more people chiming in, the sooner it will be fixed 🙂
https://devtalk.blender.org/t/blender-2-8-undo-improvements-it-last-45-seconds-to-undo-an-object-movement-in-a-big-scene/2554
Not everything is perfect in blender but we compair here a tool that is developed by a small team vs maya where the total dev teamsize for version 1.0 was upto 120 people!
For the undo system make a fundraise with a solid proposal how it should be fixed.
For this specific fix there is no need to make a fundraiser, as I said, it’s being discussed in the devtalk forum, and it will be solved sooner than later, the solution for this is not obvious because it’s a matter of internal design, something very complex, but making the problem more visible will help to get it fixed sooner, I hope we see something for 2.81 or 2.82.
What will help in general is to subscribe to the Blender Development Fund or to the Blender Cloud:
https://fund.blender.org/
https://cloud.blender.org/
Keep in mind that once 2.80 is released (in about 2 weeks I think they said) we will go back to the normal Blender release Cycles, this is a 2.8x version every 3/4 months, with new features, daily builds will continue to be available with continuous bug fixing and new features, but with somewhat a bit more inestable of course, and anyone will be able to continue building their own Blender version, like us, we have our own version with some Cycles optimizations and speed-ups and some new modifiers like an OpenVDB remesher with CSG operations and an OpenVDB mes her for particles, you can find different versions and branches here:
https://blender.community/c/graphicall
Cheers.
And with the new $1.2 million grant, they should be able to hire 3-4 more full-time developers for three years?
You don’t have to use right click anymore. I was a maya guy then a max guy and now a blender guy. Yes i do feel what your saying but thats all gone now. Ive been with 2.8 since the start of the beta and i can say i will never go back to max or maya. As far as performance blender has great performance the only thing you have to watch out if you apply a sub d modifier and you crank it way to high then your going to hit a bump in performance. Other then that its one of the best packages out there.
Blender 2.8 has amazing VP. But try to select vertices in >300k polys model and move it with G key. Try this in Houdini and you will understand their differences. Houdini is much faster and you can interact with model very well. Why it so?
The same happens in Modo to be honest from my testings. A bit better in Maya and Max is the champion.
But why would you move everything as a vertice? From what I hear from my modelling friends, they hardly make a 300k vertex selection on a character to move it around.
I’m a developer and use Houdini as backend for modeling tools. Houdini used to slow interaction, but not for now.
My tests:
Slow highpoly selection and interaction:
1. Maya
2. Blender
3. Modo
4. 3dsMax
5. Silo
6. LW
Fast highpoly selection and interaction:
1. XSI
2. Houdini
Oh yes… Softimage. Autodesk, shame on you! Used to love playing with that software.
Exactly, the only software I tested that was fast modifying high poly meshes was Softimage (and maybe Houdini now, I have not tested it recently), I suspect this will improve in Blender sooner than later, but I can’s say anything for sure for the time being 🙂
In any case, that is only in Edit Mode, in Sculpt Mode you can move geometry around without trouble, 300k polys are nothing for that mode.
damn, how can I keep living now that I’ve realized I can’t responsively move around 300K polygons? I should prolly ditch Blender immediately despite the fact that it has now gotten a full-fledged PBR environment and loads of production features across the board that all make B3D dope.
No. This is just about one part of Blender that can be improved in future. PBR is amazing….
To answer the question (that I just realized was there “Why it so?” hahaha )
It’s a matter of geometry management, if you go to sculpt mode you will see that you can move geometry around without trouble, in Edit Mode the technique is not the same, I wish we can have a new system underneath to deal with goemetry in edit mode that is as fast as the one in sculpt mode, it will improve, that’s for sure, and that’s what was made inside Softimage with its Gigapolygon Core, and I suspect something similar has been done in Houdini.
The easiest thing that comes to my mind is that they treated the geometry as patches (it’s a bit of a simplification of the technique, but good to explain it) so they “iterate” just over the vertices inside the defined patch, that way the loop over the amount of data is way smaller hence way faster, something like that it’s done in the sculpt mode already, I hope this can be translated to Edit Mode sooner than later (or something similar)