Blender 2.82

[animats]

Blender 2.82 annoyances:

• Where did they hide that menu item? (about 6x)
• Why is my toolbar at the bottom when the documentation shows it at the top?
• Trying to find the magic button that enables the pop-up toolbar.
• Guessing what material node type SL wants. Principled BSDF is like using a sledgehammer to drive a tack, especially since most of the channels do nothing. Diffuse BSDF seems to work.
• Having three different ways to make something disappear from the screen, in different places in the menus.
• Importing Blender 2.79 files and having those options set to make stuff disappear.
• Not checking "Exported only selected UVs", uploading to SL, and discovering that the default seems to be no UVs.
• COLLADA export options are not stored in the .blend file. I think.
• Trying to figure out if the SL default export modes are set.
• Having to run Blender from a shell so that Python messages appear. Blender has a Python console, but do they appear there? Nah. Someone now sells an add-on to fix this.
• Struggling to get out of circle select mode.
• Figuring out how the new scheme for adding and deleting screen panes works.
• Reading documentation that says to use the FOO icon in the BAZ toolbar, without showing a picture of either.

Things that should take seconds take minutes. Things that should take minutes take hours.

Blender user.

[ChinRey]

5 hours ago, animats said:

Things that should take seconds take minutes. Things that should take minutes take hours.

Thank you! I'll stay away from it for now then.

[Da5id Weatherwax]

The "Specular BSDF" gives the best results for "Making it look like it will in SL when you're previewing it in Blender" but it only works with the eevee render engine, cycles renders every material using this shader as black.

This is a problem because eevee can't bake, to bake stuff from your nodes you have to be in cycles.

However, the Specular BSDF is a tweaked subset of the Principled BSDF shader. You can set up almost everything there, even though for SL you aren't going to be using most of it.

My approach:

Start in the cycles engine.
Set up (pre-bake) materials in Principled, avoiding stuff that I know SL will ignore like clearcoat. Make it look as good as you can in blender at this point.
Bake the diffuse (Setting influence to color only, ignoring direct or indirect lighting) and save it.
Bake the AO and save it.
Bake any normals from higher-poly models and save it.
Bake a roughness map and a specular map. Save them.
Bake transparency if you are planning to use alpha modes "blended" or "mask", or an emissive map if you are planning to use alpha mode "emissive". Save it.
Now switch to your graphics prog of choice.
Combine the baked AO and diffuse map to get a SL diffuse texture.
Add the transparency or emissive map to your diffuse textures alpha channel.
Invert the roughness map to make a glossiness map and add the glossiness map to your normal maps alpha channel.
Apply any tints or color overlays to the specular map
Now go back to blender.
Switch to eevee and setup your (post-bake) materials using the Specular BSDF. Connect the "SL textures" you've just made to the correct inputs.

You now have the best preview blender can give you (barring some serious node-wrangling)  of how the SL rendering engine will show your object.

Tweak the "SL textures" in your 2d graphics prog until you're happy.

Time to hit the uploader and pray!

[Wulfie Reanimator]

8 hours ago, animats said:

Things that should take seconds take minutes. Things that should take minutes take hours.

But once you get used to the changes, things that used to take hours take minutes.

2.8 was a massive rework, so re-learning the UI is expected, but it's much better overall now.

Edited April 16, 2020 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Janet Voxel]

3 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Thank you! I'll stay away from it for now then.

You believe that?

[Wulfie Reanimator]

9 hours ago, animats said:

Struggling to get out of circle select mode.

It's no different from "regular select." You just always have that tool selected until you select something else. Hold left click on the Select tool icon.

9 hours ago, animats said:

Trying to figure out if the SL default export modes are set.

9 hours ago, animats said:

Figuring out how the new scheme for adding and deleting screen panes works.

What do you mean? Like splitting the view so you can have 3D view + UV editor open? It works exactly the same as in 2.79.

Drag a corner or right-click between the views:
 

9 hours ago, animats said:

Reading documentation that says to use the FOO icon in the BAZ toolbar, without showing a picture of either.

Correct me if I'm wrong but 2.79 has the same issue, the reference manual is largely unchanged in style.

[Kurshie Muromachi]

To add to Wulfie's response...

9 hours ago, animats said:

Where did they hide that menu item?

There's a dev entry for providing search (F3) enhancement to find where something is in the menus. They have an example screen there so you can see what it looks like. I'm not sure what the status of this is in terms of making use of the feature and which version it's in.

7 hours ago, animats said:

Why is my toolbar at the bottom when the documentation shows it at the top?

Something doesn't sound right. The toolbar should be at the left, tool settings at the top and status/info bar at the bottom. Do you have a link to this particular doc you're referring to?

8 hours ago, animats said:

Trying to find the magic button that enables the pop-up toolbar

This can be set when you run Blender for the first time. You choose between that, search and playback timeline. You can change this in Preferences > Keymap > Spacebar Action. There's also the pie menu for those who like that feature. That's located in the same settings window but enable "Tab for Pie Menu" and I'd also recommend "Pie Menu on Drag".

8 hours ago, animats said:

Having three different ways to make something disappear from the screen, in different places in the menus.

Not sure what you mean here. What exactly are you trying to disappear? If you're talking about an object, are you talking about deleting or hiding?

• Deleting - The usual X key or right-click Delete
• Hiding - The Outliner at the top-right with the eye icons is just for that. Just click the eyes. If you need it to be hidden from render, you click the Filter icon in the Outliner pane and enable the render icon. With those filter options set, you can then toggle those directly from the Outliner per object listed.

8 hours ago, animats said:

Having to run Blender from a shell so that Python messages appear. Blender has a Python console, but do they appear there? Nah. Someone now sells an add-on to fix this.

I'm not a fan of this either. I would prefer having a built-in option to allow people to dump the errors to the built-in console so there isn't swapping between windows especially for people with single monitors. I did find a script that someone provided that may be of use to you and it's free. Tested it and it seems to work.

8 hours ago, animats said:

Reading documentation that says to use the FOO icon in the BAZ toolbar, without showing a picture of either.

If it's referring to the toolbar, it should be the toolbar on the left side. In this case, it may be helpful for you to expand/resize the toolbar so that you see labels. Hover your mouse just to the right of one of the icons and a drag cursor will appear. Expand it right till it shows labels for the icons (single column > dual column > labels).

I can't help much with the DAE/SL related stuff.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

For baking for sl I typically use principled BSDF for diffuse & normal maps and a special animated node group to quickly switch between baking mode (i bake specular/env with emissive shaders)

In addition I made my own "all in one" mixer for assembling the final output both as a normal shader (diff/norm) and to also assemble spec/env at the same time.

Then each of my materials is in a "wrapper" that either produces spec/gloss values directly, or exposes a fixed color/value (as a passthrough) for tweaking.

[Coffee Pancake]

Very similar to m my workflow

[ChinRey]

Blender 2.79:

Blender 2.82:

Obviously, this is totally useless.

VERY IMPORTANT POINT TO ANYBODY WHO WANT TO GIVE 2.82 A TRY:

Do not under any circumstance use the Windows installer. Instead, download the zip file:

Unpack the zip file and add a new folder new config inside the 2.82 version folder.

That way you can keep your old 2.7 running and building with it while you struggle to figure out 2.82 and if you - like me - decide this new version is rubbish, all you need to do is delete it and you're back to the good old Blender.

Edited April 16, 2020 by ChinRey

[Janet Voxel]

Wouldn’t it just be easier to start a Blender 2.8 help thread instead of this nonsense?

[Kyrah Abattoir]

I think it began as a rant.

[ChinRey]

2 hours ago, janetosilio said:

Wouldn’t it just be easier to start a Blender 2.8 help thread instead of this nonsense?

Maybe but I don't even know where to start asking questions.

No, first question is of course how do I get rid of those shadows that makes it all but impossible to see the actual object?

I suppose I'm just generally frustrated. Learning the Blender interface once was sheer Hell! And now we're supposed to start all over again.

Edited April 16, 2020 by ChinRey

[Beq Janus]

I didn't have any of these issues when I switched, not sure why, I suspect it is mostly because I rarely use GUI components and so I tend to have my standard keyboard controls which for the most part have not changed and then for other stuff I just search for the command using the good old search.

[ChinRey]

5 hours ago, Beq Janus said:

I didn't have any of these issues when I switched,

That's nice to hear but I was not exaggerating when I called it totally useless. At least it's useless on my computer. Look at this:

From some view angles those big shadows or whatever it is totally obscures the model.

Others may disagree with me here but I feel that actually displaying the model on the screen is a rather vital function every 3D editing program ought to have.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

1 hour ago, ChinRey said:

That's nice to hear but I was not exaggerating when I called it totally useless. At least it's useless on my computer. Look at this:

Is there any chance you could send me the blend file? I'm super confused/curious about what's causing that.

Also they're not shadows, they're literally just mesh planes stretching into infinity. It's a relatively common phenomenon in 3D rendering, for example if you log into SL with a viewer that doesn't have rigged mesh implemented.

[ChinRey]

1 hour ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Is there any chance you could send me the blend file? I'm super confused/curious about what's causing that.

The example I used was a direct import from a dae file so I'm just sending you that - much easier. I doubt that will help though since I get similar problems with all meshes I've tried to open in 2.82.

 

1 hour ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

Also they're not shadows, they're literally just mesh planes stretching into infinity.

Yes, that's what they look like but they're not static. They change depending on which file I have open, the view angle, and far too many settings to list them all. Also sometimes they are semi-transparent, soemtimes they are solid.

[Ada Radius]

It took me about a week to figure out where stuff moved, and about a month for my hands to get used to 2.8x, starting last fall. I love it now, except that I'm still not used to a very different weight painting routine and I keep hitting wrong buttons that bork the whole thing. That will get better. It's much easier, now to switch between Blender and other software.

Suggestions: In every mode, go through every menu choice and option, in all of the tabs in all of the editors and workspaces, try out everything on Suzanne or whatever. Make a cheatsheet until you memorize the stuff you need and where to find it. You'll be going ooo ooo that's a cool new thing, in between all the cussing.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

11 hours ago, ChinRey said:

The example I used was a direct import from a dae file so I'm just sending you that - much easier. I doubt that will help though since I get similar problems with all meshes I've tried to open in 2.82.

I imported the dae and it's perfectly fine.

11 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Yes, that's what they look like but they're not static. They change depending on which file I have open, the view angle, and far too many settings to list them all. Also sometimes they are semi-transparent, soemtimes they are solid.

Yeah, I know what you mean and that's still "normal" as far as the glitch goes. The calculations are messed up and the artifacting is affected by camera position, usually. (Sometimes they stretch toward a single point, depends on the exact error that's happening.)

[ChinRey]

9 hours ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

I imported the dae and it's perfectly fine.

Yes, I expected that since there's nothing special about that particular file.

[Richardus Raymaker]

I can only say a few things. Blender 2.8 is not a update but a new program with extreme steep learning curve. 2.8. It's a terrible program. I can only say stay with 2.79 what i do. And hope the devs wake up and rewrite 2.8 to make it more userfriendly and compatible with 2.79.

For now 2.8 i <censored> program.

 

Also, the removed the so important texture tab. So it's not usable anyway. And the important and easy blender render is gone to.

Edited April 18, 2020 by Richardus Raymaker

[ChinRey]

22 minutes ago, Richardus Raymaker said:

I can only say stay with 2.79 what i do. And hope the devs wake up and rewrite 2.8 to make it more userfriendly and compatible with 2.79.

I feel pretty much the same way but to be fair, Blender was never made for Second Life. It has all the functions you need to create SL content (partly thanks to add-ons provided by various SL'ers) but they tend to be buried underneath a heap of functions irrrelevant to our use. If I remember correctly, it started off as an in-house program for a Dutch animation studio and when the studio went bankrupt, the owner started a fundraising campaign proisign to release the software as open source if people paid enough.

Blender has evolved into a general purpose 3D modelling application with all bells and whistles you can possibly think of. But game/VW assets is only a microscopic part of 3D modeeling as a whole and SL/opensim is just a microscopic part of game/VW assets. It really isn't realistic to expect the Blender developers to spend a lot of time and effort on such a minute part of their user base.

 

[Da5id Weatherwax]

I started forcing myself to get used to 2.8 by only leaving 2.79 on my backup machine - it works there just fine but compared to the main one its just enough slower to be mildly irritating.

I have to say that inside a month I was used enough to 2.8 that the 2.79 UI was actually starting to feel clunky. 

I do still use both but the more I retrain the muscle memory to reach for 2.8 shortcut keys, the more I grumble whenever I have to fire up 2.79 

[Kyrah Abattoir]

I just set 2.8x to use 2.79 shotcuts personally, these are configurable for a reason after all.

[ChinRey]

3 hours ago, Da5id Weatherwax said:

I do still use both but the more I retrain the muscle memory to reach for 2.8 shortcut keys, the more I grumble whenever I have to fire up 2.79 

Is that because you're getting used to 2.8 and forgetting how to sue 2.79 or is it genuinely more user friendly? I mean, it's hard to think of a UI worse than Second Life's but we are all used to it so we hardly ever think about how we use it and would probably feel very uncomfortable if LL changed it to something that was technically and from an inexperienced user's point of view better.

I'll probably leave this thread now because it's not really relevant to me but speaking for myself - not anybody else - what I want to do is make more performant content for Second Life and opensim. I've yet to hear any mention of anything 2.8 has and 2.79 doesn't that will allow me to do that. So the only reason I can possibly have to update is if it can help me get the job done faster and I can't see any way it can deliver there either.