Blender 2.8 anyone?

[Anna Nova]

I've been away for a bit, not building much, and now I notice that Blender 2.8 with the Eevee renderer is out in a stable Beta.  It installed easy on my big Linux box, and I will be playing with it for a few things.  

But I wondered if I'm alone, or perhaps you all tried it and said neh!

 

[Kurshie Muromachi]

I've mainly been watching the development video releases, tech demos, and Blender user reviews for 2.8 on YouTube and definitely liking what I'm seeing so far. I've downloaded it and messed with it a bit. Seems great so far. Realtime Eevee is cool as well as LookDev for quick PBR stuff. Collection management is a much better organization approach and left-click select default and left-click drag select is a relief (will take some time to readjust).

[Luna Bliss]

I love the interface...seems much more intuitive...kind of like a graphics program.

[ellestones]

i downloaded it. I like :)

i might even use it now

[animats]

Oh, nice. Is the add-on API settled yet?

[Callum Meriman]

6 hours ago, anna2358 said:

But I wondered if I'm alone, or perhaps you all tried it and said neh!

I like it. There are some things that I miss, but I've rectified a lot of them in preferences.

I will stick with it

[Aquila Kytori]

I downloaded Blender 2.80 beta yesterday and found all the changes very confusing when trying to do anything. Thankfully Andrew price has already made 3 short video tutorials explaining the new UI and why some of the changes were made. I feel a little more confident about using it now.

 

 

 

 

 

I am not at all a fan of the new mono chrome flat icons. Looks "cool" but I find them less readable than the old ones.

 

 

 

[Kurshie Muromachi]

4 hours ago, Aquila Kytori said:

I downloaded Blender 2.80 beta yesterday and found all the changes very confusing when trying to do anything. Thankfully Andrew price has already made 3 short video tutorials explaining the new UI and why some of the changes were made. I feel a little more confident about using it now.

I am not at all a fan of the new mono chrome flat icons. Looks "cool" but I find them less readable than the old ones.

Interestingly enough, Andrew Price is one of the guys who made a video a long while back digging deep into the usability of Blender and got much support for it. That's why I like these set of videos for 2.8 because he compares it to 2.79 and goes into differences. I agreed with many points he brought up. It's great to see he's happy with some of the changes.

I agree the icons are a bit off to me. As Andrew points out, some of the icon symbolism is odd. I'm not sure if say individual multicolored icons could be done with the new theme adaptation. Although, some of the tool icons on the left side when in edit mode show different colors. So, it seems like it's possible to adapt that to other areas of Blender? Not sure. By the way, there's a nice "Call for Content" topic on Blender Dev Talk showcasing some themes people have made if anyone's interested.

[Ana Stubbs]

I've played with it a bit, but couldn't get my preferred keyboard shortcuts to work. It seemed harder to edit the default ones than in 2.79.

I'm very envious of the collections though. 

[Kurshie Muromachi]

3 hours ago, Ana Stubbs said:

I've played with it a bit, but couldn't get my preferred keyboard shortcuts to work. It seemed harder to edit the default ones than in 2.79.

Have you tried exporting your key configuration from 2.79 and importing it into 2.8? There's export/import buttons at the bottom.

[Ana Stubbs]

8 hours ago, Kurshie Muromachi said:

Have you tried exporting your key configuration from 2.79 and importing it into 2.8? There's export/import buttons at the bottom.

I did, but it didn't seem to make any difference. Could have been a PEBKAC error, of course. 

[Beq Janus]

I've been dabbling, between doing Firestorm stuff.

For the most part, I like it. The main issue I have at the moment is that I need to rebuild my addons and I haven't got time to investigate that at the moment.

Question for those who've played a bit more. I really miss having the tris/polys count in the top bar, and notifications when you remove dupes etc. Am I just using the wrong view or is there a preference I need to tweak to get that back?

 

[Aquila Kytori]

4 hours ago, Beq Janus said:

Question for those who've played a bit more. I really miss having the tris/polys count in the top bar, and notifications when you remove dupes etc. Am I just using the wrong view or is there a preference I need to tweak to get that back?

 

 

 

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/interface/window_system/introduction.html?highlight=status bar

[Beq Janus]

hah! that would explain it. It was covered over by the windows task bar. Thank you that makes a lot more sense now. 

[Aquila Kytori]

With the latest version of 2.80 Beta

1 step forwards :

  Coloured Icons are back for the tabs in the Properties editor  😊, (and for those who do like the mono chrome look then they can be changed back to white again,  Edit > Preferences > Themes > User Preferences > Icon Colors).

 

And 1 step off to the left :

Say goodbye to an old favorite.  Remove Doubles has been replaced by   Merge by Distance.  😖

or Alt M to open the Merge menu.

 

[Janet Voxel]

I’m itching to play with it....it should come out of beta in June right?

[Anna Nova]

Note to self: Repeat after me 'thou shalt rebuild blender-2.8-git every few days'. (I use ArchLinux, da, I know, hypergeeky)

Things seem to be moving fast now, and every new build looks more like something ready for release.

 

 

[Aquila Kytori]

19 hours ago, janetosilio said:

I’m itching to play with it....it should come out of beta in June right?

2.80 Release date planned for July. https://code.blender.org/2019/04/2-80-release-plan/

 

[Crias Rowlands]

I'm already using for some of my projects, and honestly can say,  2.8 is the best Blender so far. Even it's still beta, seems pretty stable too!

[Beq Janus]

A shortish account of my 2.8 experiences so far.

The giant troll at my Fantasy Faire build was entirely sculpted in Blender 2.8. In fact, without 2.8 he would probably have never come into existence. 

Hugh (as he became known) was my second ever sculpture (I use the word sculpture here because even though it sounds clumsy it avoids the fact that in SL the word sculpt has been polluted 🙂 ). My first was a little "snow fox" that I made in early Jan.  I grabbed 2.8 to see how badly it broke my addons (the answer is completely) and to work out how I'd go about redesigning them. My Addons used the old layers system so they need to migrate to collections as well as some other changes. 

While I was there I thought I'd give sculpting a go, there was a "competition" to build a snowman/creature in New Babbage so I made a lumpy snowfox. It turned out OK. My artistic abilities are generally pretty woeful so "OK" was a step up 🙂 

One of the problems I had though was Retopology, none of the decent retopo tools appear to have been migrated yet. (I need to check the latest status)

The solution I found was to run both 2.79 and 2.80, you can then copy/paste between the two far more easily than attempting to export/import. I then retopologised it in 2.79.

I decided to make sculpting in 2.8 my challenge for doing the Faire this year and thus Hugh was born. Because of his size, and the fact that he is effectively disposable, not for sale or general use, with judicious use of decimation tools I didn't need to worry too much about full on re-topology, keeping the polycount sensible was enough. 

Sensible, in this case, was more challenging than you'd think. On one hand, you have a vast mountain of a sculpture, so low resolution is where you want to be targetting, but at the same time people were going to be standing in his mouth (we hosted poetry and writing open mic sessions and readings/interviews with authors such as the award-winning SF and Fantasy author Elizabeth Bear, right inside the cavern that was Hugh's mouth. The installed Hugh (you can see him in my video linked on this thread in the Machinima forum) came in at about 300K triangles. Because of the scale, he had to be sliced up into SL-bite-size chunks of 64m, resulting in around 40 separate pieces, which also adds to the geometry of course. I wrote a custom 2.8 Addon tool for doing this and I will be releasing that at some point (once I make it safe for people other than me to fly it). I actually produced a single mesh version that retained the same UVs etc. and came in at a more respectable 32K triangles, again without "proper" re-topology tools just the judicious use of selective decimation tools.

Sculpting in 2.8 with my Wacom tablet was brilliant, highly responsive to input, and intuitive enough for me to be comfortable. Not that you cannot exchange blend files back and forth. 2.8 will import 2.7 but it will convert them to use collections and will save them as such, this, of course, cannot be read by older versions.

Conclusion

Blender 2.8 is brilliant, don't wait for the "stable release", you can run it alongside your 2.79 if you want, but the "release" is not going to be a magical transformation from the nightly beta builds, it will be whatever the nightly build was on the day the seal the release.

Things to consider:-

Many of the larger, more complex add-ons are still being updated. You can often find a work in progress on the Addon's github page. all Addons should have a source repo available because Blender is GPL licensed (commercial add-ons exist but you are paying for the support in effect typically by supporting the author via gumroad or patreon)

If you are not ready to migrate yet, you can ease your migration. Switch 2.79 over to left click select and retrain that muscle memory. I did this quite by chance last year because I was fed up with switching tools and clicking the wrong button. 2.79 works quite adequately with left mouse, it also makes using a wacom tablet easier as it happens. You can, of course, choose to run 2.8 with old-style right click too. 

Finally, for no reason than showing a silly image, me reading a human-scale (stone) book, laying on a stone book that is resting on a stone book that is..........

 

 

 

 

[Kyrah Abattoir]

I found most of the changes bearable, the removal of blender render combined with the inability to bake normal map using eevee is a big minus in opinion.

[Coffee Pancake]

I've been using it exclusively for a while now, It's taken a lot of the pain out of the modelling workflow. Texture baking is doable but not entirely without headaches, but that will improve. All in all, it's an excellent and long over due shift in direction for the better.

[Anna Nova]

13 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

I've been using it exclusively for a while now, It's taken a lot of the pain out of the modelling workflow. Texture baking is doable but not entirely without headaches, but that will improve. All in all, it's an excellent and long over due shift in direction for the better.

Me too.  I hated it at first.  But now I hate it when I have to go back for something.