
Blender 2.8 - based2
https://www.blender.org/2-8/
======
electricslpnsld
> By default, Blender now uses the left mouse button for selection.

This is probably the biggest feature in 2.8! The super non-standard select
behavior was a (probably unfairly, but still real) turn off to people trying
Blender for the first time. The more Blender can bring its UI in line with
industry standards the better for Blender adoption.

~~~
ryz
oh god, absolutely! It's baffling to me how they did stick to a default like
this for _so long_. It goes against any standard which has been established in
similar software, not only 3ds max/maya/etc. but also engines like
unity/unreal.

Like if some clever game developer suddenly decided to map forward movement to
the right trigger and shooting to analog stick up on a gamepad control scheme
in a FPS.

It's one of these things which you won't be able to measure, but they will
certainly have lost thousands* of people trying to switch to blender by this
very simple default setting. This right here is a UX lesson - take note folks!

*probably, maybe

~~~
knolan
A lot of Blender is completely customisable. It takes a few seconds to find
user preferences, make the required change and even switch to a colour scheme
to match Maya/Max etc.

The thing is, however, Blender is more than just a Maya/Max replacement. It
can do a hell of a lot more. It has After Effects capabilities like
compositing and video camera tracking, 2D animation tools, render outlines to
SVG, video editing and python scripting. It’s a bit of a jack of all trades,
master of some.

~~~
hbosch
If the first thing you have to do to a software is customize it, you’ve
already lost on usability. How many thousands of potential users simply
created a cube and tried to click it, realize that on top of the already
overwhelming UI you don’t even know how to _click something_ in this software,
then just exit and take to the internet to echo that Blender is unusable.

~~~
knolan
You don’t have to do anything, I’ve taught several people how to use Blender
and the right click to select thing wasn’t an issue.

I won’t deny that it’s complex software but so are all professional 3D
applications. Try and use Solidworks or (shudder) Creo/ProE or Maya or Max and
selecting a cube will be the least of your issues.

All of these tools require some degree of training that’s part of the
landscape.

~~~
franga2000
The people who are taught how to use it are not the problem. The problem is
that they need to be taught.

Personal anecdote:

The first 3D software I used was Cinema 4D. I couldn't be bothered to watch a
tutorial, but in a good 10 minutes of clicking around, I could already do more
than half of the most common operations. I tried using Blender several times
before and after that, but after the same amount of time, I couldn't do
literally anything. Not even move the cube! After switching to Linux, I
finally forced myself to watch a few Blender tutorials. I can now do things
better and more efficiently than I ever could in C4D. But the moment I switch
to another tool (Unreal/Krita/Inkscape...), I see just how non-standard
Blender is. There's always the Blender way and the everything-else way.

2.8 is a huge step in the right direction. Maybe one day multi-select will
make sense and then there will be no more reasons not to use Blender.

~~~
washadjeffmad
Blender was my first modeling software, and learning on it made everything
else frustrating for many reasons beyond controls by comparison. I also come
from a Linux background, so modal softwares like vi were not a new concept.

So I wouldn't say that Blender's controls are inherently obtuse or more
difficult than others, but that other popular software follows conventions
that are more familiar to people with a subset of similar experiences.

------
stevebmark
I love Blender, coming from other "industry" tools like 3ds max, Blender has
all the features I want for amature 3d work.

I think my favorite thing about Blender (I still love it) is the objectively
god awful user interface. It's a good learning opportunity to show what
happens when a community designs a GUI (hint: never ever let it happen).
Almost every single possible GUI design decision is wrong or backwards. I'm
excited to try this new interface to see what terrible UI gems lie in wait for
discovery. It's weird and exciting that Blender is so useful and feature
filled and yet so poorly visually designed.

~~~
ohlookabird
It is not "objectively god awful". I for one really like Blender's user
interface and I have used both 3ds max and Maya before. Blender makes it so
easy to switch views and only show things that are important to you. Granted,
I also use Vim heavily. For both I head to read parts of the manual though. In
my eyes, Blender is a production grade tool that can do really complex
workflows. For tools like this I believe it is completely reasonable to ask
users to read about the tool and its design decisions rather than making
everything "intuitive".

~~~
icelancer
Vim is a perfect example of an insanely terrible user interface. That we all
use it because it is powerful and also a shibboleth into
devops/sysops/developers minds doesn't make it a good idea. It's just very
convenient and powerful while also being the height of nerd cred.

Also the OP is right from an objective POV, the Blender UI is absolutely
brutal. I use a lot of tools in this industry for my job but my job is not
specifically 3d work, so I am not expected to have deep mastery of any of the
tools nor does it even help me, really. This is where a decent UI that is
intuitive and helpful is important, and Blender for my colleagues and myself
is practically unusable out of the box.

It is, however, a great piece of software, as you all say. I totally agree
there. But good lord the UI is horrific.

~~~
mikekchar
I often find that people conflate ease of use with ease of learning. Both Vim
and Blender are _very_ easy to use. Blender is astonishingly easy to use, in
fact. I've been using it for video editing and it's ridiculously more
efficient than anything else I've ever used.

Both Vim and Blender are _very_ hard to learn and discovery is extremely poor.
There is just no way to figure it out without reading the manual. Even after
you read the manual, you have to practice it frequently to get good at it.
After that it's a dream.

I don't really like characterising a UI as "good" or "bad" in a one
dimensional perspective, because whether I will choose an easy to use or an
easy to learn application depends entirely on what I'm going to be doing. For
example, with video editing (and also code editing), I'm doing the same
actions over and over and over and over again. I'm also combining actions in
different ways and I want a kind of "UI grammar" that lets me efficiently
express myself without searching around for some drop down or macro. I use
these tools for hours on end, day after day. I don't _really_ care about ease
of learning -- I only care about easy of use and efficiency.

For other things, I _really_ care about ease of use. For example, I make New
Years cards once a year. I want some software that helps me make a mailing
list, print an image without screwing about, etc, etc. I don't want to spend
more than about 30 seconds setting it. It needs to be intuitive. If anyone
knows of such a thing for Gnu/Linux, I'd be very happy ;-).

Frequently ease of use and efficiency are at odds with ease of learning. Best
if you can do both, but often you have to compromise. Both Vim and Blender
compromise a _lot_ , but they are aiming at a particular niche. Not everybody
likes them, but those that do _love_ them. Some other applications compromise
in other ways, and at least for my applications I don't find them appropriate.
YMMV.

~~~
gregmac
I really like the contrast of ease of use vs ease of learning.

However, I don't think designing an interface that is good for both is
fundamentally difficult. The problem comes from evolution. In early versions,
with only a few features, none of this requires a ton of thought. As features
are added, it's rare that an overall UX re-design is undertaken, for a few
reasons.

For one, the people working on it and using it day to day are incrementally
learning changes, and have time to adjust. In some cases they probably don't
even notice the UX learning curve problem as it takes time to become apparent.

For two, existing and power users will freak out if a new release changes
shortcut keys or otherwise "moves the cheese". Think of the outrage if vim
were to announce "we're changing all the commands to be fully consistent with
each other, but it means every command you've spent years memorizing is now
incorrect.

Even for the most UX-focused team it's impossible to predict the feature set a
product will have in 1, 2, or 5 years, so of course by the time you get there,
the UX has issues.

------
knolan
This is a massive release and represents a huge overhaul of how Blender works
from the UI to new technologies. It’s also a bit of a jarring change for
everyone to get used to but it seems like it’ll be worth it.

The new real time eevee renderer is an incredible achievement for the open
source community and, I believe, its direct compatibility with the Cycles path
tracing renderer is an industry first. (Your materials and textures just work
between the two).

The grease pencil tool and new 2D features are also some of the best. I once
used 2.7* on a video conference call to annotate parts of a CAD model to
finalise changes and it helped considerably.

Really looking forward to the full release this year.

------
nv-vn
Congrats to everyone who worked on this -- this is a great step forward for
the Blender community as a whole!

Andrew Price did a great set of videos on some of the changes in this release
[1] for anyone who's interested in trying it out.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPVpg4_POww](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPVpg4_POww).

~~~
equalunique
I did see his series of videos recommended on YouTube and yes those are quite
explanatory. Good choice.

------
nickmain
Is anyone else worried about about the future of Blender on macOS with the
deprecation of OpenGL in favor of Metal ?

This thread offers some hope, but there is still no definitive roadmap:
[https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-
committers/2018-Decem...](https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-
committers/2018-December/049683.html)

~~~
opencl
Blender has a _lot_ of OpenGL code, including shaders that are dynamically
generated at runtime. There are definitely not enough resources to maintain
multiple rendering backends.

If Blender is going to continue working on MacOS at all it is probably going
to be through a wrapper like MoltenVK (if Blender eventually moves to Vulkan).

Apple is being actively hostile to cross platform software development with
their graphics APIs so I will not be surprised if a lot of projects drop Mac
support entirely when they finally remove OpenGL.

~~~
dana321
Thats one part of moving away from apple i'm happy about, not having to deal
with constant feature removal on both hardware and software.

------
fimdomeio
While I'm not that much into 3d nowadays, tried the beta a few weeks ago and
it has some amazing improvements in usability.

Would love to read more about how things get organized behind the scenes to
accomplish such a complex and polished piece of open source software

~~~
Joeboy
They have money to pay developers, which differentiates them from the vast
majority of OSS projects. Obviously that's not all there is to it, but I'm
sure it makes a huge difference.

~~~
village-idiot
And I can't imagine that the kind of devs who can work on rendering engines
come cheap either.

~~~
UncleEntity
Brecht wrote the initial Cycles implementation during the time he was away
from the Blender Foundation working for some other (who's name I forget)
renderer company -- so, basically, for free.

Back when I used to hack on the low-hanging Blender fruit my impression of the
core devs was they did it for the love of doing it, any one of them could've
gotten a job paying a lot more but they always stuck around because they liked
it. And that was when they could only afford a couple fulltime devs who I
imagine weren't making a whole lot.

Also, they couldn't pay _anyone_ enough to mess with the spaghetti code of the
old builtin renderer...

~~~
SpliffnCola
SolidAngle is the company he was working for, creators of the commercial
Arnold renderer.

------
Animats
This is still the beta version. The add-on API was only frozen a few weeks
ago, so many add-ons aren't ported yet. Now all the Blender tutorials and
answers on line are out of date. Add on developers and document authors need
to move now, but end users can wait a bit longer.

~~~
slavik81
Yeah. The add-on API docs for the beta are a little inaccurate at the moment.
For now, developing new extensions is experts only.

I'm not familiar enough with the API, so I switched back to 2.79. I didn't
want to go back, because the human interface is vastly improved... So, I'm
really looking forward to the 2.80 release.

~~~
Animats
Yes, open source stuck state. Version N is no longer being worked on, and
Version N+1 isn't fully ready yet.

Commercial products tend to avoid this, because, in that state, sales of the
product drop as customers wait for the new model.

The Blender API has changed incompatibly, too. I'm holding off on porting my
personal add-ons for now. 2.8 looks great, but not fully here yet.

------
heinrichf
The demo video [https://youtu.be/EAhRiv-FKbI](https://youtu.be/EAhRiv-FKbI) of
the real time renderer is really impressive (see
[https://www.blender.org/2-8/#eevee](https://www.blender.org/2-8/#eevee))

------
nicoburns
Awesome to see an established OSS project put such a focus on usability (and
do it well from the looks of things).

~~~
mrspeaker
I agree! I'm so impressed they could defeat the spectre of OSS UX (at least
for me). Blender is now an app I am _excited_ to open up and play with (even
before 2.8, I thought they had made some great improvements).

Gimp and Inkscape still give me a little bit of dread whenever they start.
They're functional and work well - but they aren't a joy to use. I hope the
Blender-vibes start rubbing off.

Seriously, I know it's (really really) hard and I don't know how Blender
managed to pull it off, but hats-off to them!

------
unmole
It's in beta, not yet released.

------
emmanueloga_
I was curious which UI framework blender uses. It implements its own using
OpenGL. A lot of the UI code seems to reside in
/source/blender/editors/interface. [1]

1:
[https://git.blender.org/gitweb/gitweb.cgi/blender.git/tree/H...](https://git.blender.org/gitweb/gitweb.cgi/blender.git/tree/HEAD:/source/blender/editors/interface)

------
bhouston
Meanwhile Autodesk Maya missed it's planned release date by 7 months and
counting.

~~~
electricslpnsld
Well, given that Autodesk shifted Maya ownership to their life support
division and fired most of the Maya R&D team, this isn’t too surprising. Good
news for SideFX I suppose!

~~~
Silhouette
It's funny how such things can happen a relatively short time after a big,
expensive product moves to a subscription model.

------
stesch
Someone should add " [BETA]" to the title. People are getting very excited.

------
jordache
I have not done 3d stuff extensively for years now...

The current iteration of Blender looks amazing. How does it compare to
commercial 3D tools from Autodesk?

~~~
astrodust
It's in many ways 80% as good as commercial offerings like Maya...from three
to five years ago.

It trails behind the leading edge in many regards, but if you're not pushing
the limits it's actually really great. If you don't need that 20% you won't
even notice.

Blender can do almost anything Maya can do, but it can often take longer or a
ton more fussing because of a lack of tools. It's like using a really great
IDE for coding versus being stuck with vi. Both get the job done, but your
workflow might be easier in one.

For example, Maya can do a lot of things for animation with driven keys but
Blender's equivalent is really weak. It "works" but it's quite clunky.

~~~
thedaemon
Not sure of your experience level with Blender, but it's rigging tools are
about on par these days. Drivers are easy to setup and with a few add-ons it
can be one click. That's part of the issue with Blender, finding the right
addons or programming your own. I've even made my own character animation
addon. :P

Blender, Maya, 3ds Max, they all can do the same things in the end.

~~~
astrodust
It can do it, but what's easy in Maya is kind of clunky in Blender.

Maya does a few things that are great that Blender should totally steal, and
one of them is having really easy driven keys.

------
antoineMoPa
The video is really impressive. It looks like there are a lot of new real time
features that I have to try. I wonder if there is the possibility to code our
own real time shaders in glsl/osl for the viewport.

------
vinniejames
Has anyone tried using Golem for rendering tasks?
[https://golem.network/rendering/](https://golem.network/rendering/)

------
person_of_color
Any good Blender MOOCs or courses with a relatively recent version?

~~~
bookseller
You can try
[https://www.udemy.com/blendertutorial/](https://www.udemy.com/blendertutorial/)
by Ben Tristem on Udemy. I haven’t taken it but it looks legit from rating and
content freshness point of view. It’s got 4.5 stars from 23.9k ratings. It’s
also been updated this month (12/2018), covering Blender 2.77 and up.

------
golergka
Am I the only one who's irritated by how they treat 2.8 and 2.80 as if it was
the same version number? In any sane use of semver, they are 72 minor versions
apart

~~~
alliecat
Not everything uses Semver (which is primarily aimed at software libraries).
Blender's versioning scheme is consistent and reasonably well documented.

