> 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.
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!
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.
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".
I've been using Blender for a while now, and I actually miss its UI features in other apps now. I would agree that it's very unconventional and immediately baffling to new users, but not that it's "objectively god awful".
While it has a learning curve I think the UI is one of the best I ever used.
And I am not sure about your statement that everything is wrong and backwards. I think it's the result of thinking how to do things right so the user can be productive.
Also: Ton has a very strong voice in the project. I don't think it's all undirected community work.
I never used Blender, but I always thought that its interface was the "vi" of 3d design tools: not easy to learn yet very powerful. But perhaps I was wrong about that.
I dunno, it's not like the 3dsmax or Maya interfaces are really paragons of user interface design. If anything I think Maya is (was? haven't used in a long time) at least as weird and idiosyncratic as Blender. Meanwhile, even though Blender's UI design is weird, it does have some charm in how consistently weird it is.
How did you get to this? After using 3ds max I can't believe that they actually charge money for it, it's amazing. And the worst part is the interface.
I'm reading what you say again, like maybe I misread, but are you being serious?
I agree, and I wonder if a lack of hierarchy plays a part - the programmers may not be great at design, but designers would have to tell the programmers what to do. I don't know about others, but I prefer not to be told what to do!
You could say the same of Gimp, to a lesser degree.
It’s interesting that features can probably be coded by committee and volunteers (as both programs are featured packed) but UI seems to require a unified vision.
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.
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.
There has been a lot of progress with MoltenVK and polyfill backends like gfx-rs in other emulator backends. I wonder if either would be suitable for Blender in the future?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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]
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!
This is just the beta, which came out last month but gets new builds daily. And at the time of the beta release they said the final version will be March of next year at the earliest[1].
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.
You can try 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.
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
They're not the same, but 2.80 is the first release in the 2.8 series, so this is the release of both the specific 2.80 version and the 2.8 series. Next will be 2.81, etc.
(Except it's not, because it hasn't been released yet. Still in beta.)
Because they are not the same version number. See https://www.blender.org/download/releases/. There does not look to be a 2.8 based on your description because it would have been called 2.08.
[+] [-] electricslpnsld|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] stevebmark|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Joeboy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pasta|7 years ago|reply
And I am not sure about your statement that everything is wrong and backwards. I think it's the result of thinking how to do things right so the user can be productive.
Also: Ton has a very strong voice in the project. I don't think it's all undirected community work.
[+] [-] amelius|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TylerE|7 years ago|reply
Blender spent the first 7 years of it's life as closed-source commercial software.
[+] [-] jchw|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kobrad|7 years ago|reply
I'm reading what you say again, like maybe I misread, but are you being serious?
[+] [-] esistgut|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] linuxblender|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vbuwivbiu|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tambourine_man|7 years ago|reply
It’s interesting that features can probably be coded by committee and volunteers (as both programs are featured packed) but UI seems to require a unified vision.
[+] [-] gregosaur|7 years ago|reply
What about non amateur work - what's missing? Asking as a curious amateur.
[+] [-] kyriakos|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] knolan|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] equalunique|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickmain|7 years ago|reply
This thread offers some hope, but there is still no definitive roadmap: https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2018-Decem...
[+] [-] opencl|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tiles|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Asking4AFriend|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astrodust|7 years ago|reply
Annoying but not fatal.
[+] [-] thedaemon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fimdomeio|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slavik81|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] heinrichf|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicoburns|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrspeaker|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emmanueloga_|7 years ago|reply
1: https://git.blender.org/gitweb/gitweb.cgi/blender.git/tree/H...
[+] [-] bhouston|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] electricslpnsld|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] opencl|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://code.blender.org/2018/11/blender-2-8-beta/
[+] [-] stesch|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jordache|7 years ago|reply
The current iteration of Blender looks amazing. How does it compare to commercial 3D tools from Autodesk?
[+] [-] antoineMoPa|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vinniejames|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] person_of_color|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bookseller|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] golergka|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alliecat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tempest1981|7 years ago|reply
And a max of 10 minor versions per major version (2.70-2.79)
[+] [-] danellis|7 years ago|reply
(Except it's not, because it hasn't been released yet. Still in beta.)
[+] [-] enzanki_ars|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blensor|7 years ago|reply
2.4x branch, 2.5x branch, 2.6xbranch, ...
Every time they move the first digit after the comma something major changes.