
Blender 2.80 release candidate - crispinh
https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-80/
======
davissorenson
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!

~~~
goblin89
In release notes[0] for Cycles there are a lot of mentions of CUDA. Also many
mentions of OpenCL, with the ominous note that it’s been “disabled on macOS
platform”.

I’m wondering how complex can animations be, with reasonable frame render
times, on macOS with Radeon Pro Vega 16? I know it’s a very open-ended
question but I’m curious for any take.

(For some context, I’m completely unfamiliar with the pipeline/ecosystem, but
wanted to hobby around with 3D for a while. Lacking a suitable GPU, now I’m
considering how viable would this be on latest MBP’s graphics. If not so much,
I might go for a cheaper GPU option & postpone my 3D experiments until I can
have a fixed workstation with fast GPU in addition to laptop I use for work.)

[0]
[https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.80/C...](https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.80/Cycles)

~~~
terhechte
I used to use Blender a lot for a variety of things in the past. However, with
2.8, the UI became so slow on my Mac Mini that I decided to buy an external
eGPU. However, I hadn't read the "OpenCL disabled on macOS platforms" update.
So the eGPU didn't really help. So for me, I'm still on Blender 2.7 as the UI
is much faster there. For reference, I have Blender running on a 5k display,
so there're a lot of pixels to move around. Nevertheless, buying an eGPU won't
help you a lot with Blender 2.8 as the internal GPU is too slow for the UI -
at least in a reasonably high resolution. I was briefly pondering buying a
second Linux box just to use Blender, but that also sounds insane. So until
Apple patches their broken Nvidia relationship up, or Blender supports
something like MoltenVK, there's no good way of running 2.8 on most macOS
devices.

Edit: I didn't test the RC yet. So maybe the performance is better now. Also,
I never tried on a smaller display. It might work just fine on a 1920x1280
screen.

~~~
filipncs
I can't imagine OpenCL in any way being involved with the rendering of the UI.
Maybe you're confusing it with OpenGL?

If you're having problems making use of an eGPU (that's supported by apple,
which rules out nvidia!), you should report that. eGPUs will probably be a
common use case.

------
yodon
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-
outli...](https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/127105/the-outliner-
doesnt-show-parent-child-relations-in-blender-2-8?rq=1)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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.

------
knolan
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
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
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.

------
pre
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
Another renderer? They already have two parallell and partially incompatible
pipelines...

~~~
davissorenson
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
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
Part of the original rationale for Eevee was to replace Blender Internal.

~~~
panpanna
How is performance (ram/cpu) compared to internal?

I used to switch to internal when designing on really low-end hardware (Atom
tablets)

~~~
penagwin
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.

~~~
JTxt
Yes, Eevee is a fast pbr renderer and can give very similar results to cycles
with no effort, except there's some setup needed to do indirect lighting and
reflections... and some tweaking needed for good lamp shadows in some cases,
but the payoff is huge. I have a high resolution render that takes 12 minutes
in cycles, 30 seconds in eevee with no grain... some features are not there
line a shader bevel, but otherwise very similar, and there's workarounds for
that.

------
tannhaeuser
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.

~~~
greeneggs
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.

~~~
HelloNurse
> 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.

------
douglasfshearer
> 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
They make so many good decisions without sacrificing functionality.

I feel Blender should loan some of its UI people to GIMP...

~~~
Ygg2
Why GIMP though? I thought Krita was pretty nice.

~~~
Crinus
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.

------
cannedslime
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
I had a GLTF export problem too! Though I can’t remember what specifically.
Thanks for your help!

------
timonoko
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
You could usually hit space bar and start typing a command to find it and run
it.

~~~
PrototypeNM1
For the curious, search is now mapped to f3.

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

------
DiseasedBadger
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
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.

------
bayesian_horse
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).

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

~~~
mcjiggerlog
In the end I downloaded it through Steam - just select the release candidate
beta channel.

~~~
mpwoz
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/)

------
caspervonb
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
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.

------
verytrivial
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.

~~~
opencl
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
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
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
Last I checked its 1500 a seat... a year.

------
spupy
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?

~~~
opencl
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)

------
beeskneecaps
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!

------
optymizer
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
You’ll probably have to wait before resources are available for the new UI

~~~
JTxt
People have been making 2.8 tutorials for months.
[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blender+2.8+tut...](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blender+2.8+tutorials)

------
cellular
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.

~~~
andybak
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
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.

