Blender 2.8 released!

If you have been on the fence about using Blender in the past few years, I’d recommend trying this out, as the UI finally has a significant overhaul.

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is it getting similar to 3ds max/maya in general usage?

(i’ve tried to start using blender so many times, but cannot get over how the windows and picking system works…and just end up with 10 windows/panels that i cannot close, and a cube that i cannot pick : )

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Yes, at least according to my memories of older 3ds max releases.

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I would check it out for yourself, but for those that couldn’t get past the right mouse button selection hurdle, it’s been changed by default. (It never really was a valid argument though, considering the option to change it has been in well ever since I started back in 2013 or so, at least. The real problem is that most tutorials out there need to stick to defaults, or else people get lost so easily.)

Just check out the link, and there are loads of images of examples of what has been changed.

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I use it now as my main 3D App.

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Swapped from full maya to this and its genuinely better in every way. I cant even begin to describe how much better than old blender it is. Its like its an entirely different program.

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This puts Blender into a more competitive position in 3D content authoring than ever before. I’m excited about it. Especially knowing the backing that Epic and Ubisoft are providing.

This reminds me of the times when Visual Studio went to free Community editions after IDEs/compilers were way too expensive to afford for decades. And the time Unity went free after charging $1500 for so many years. And the time Krita came out and threatened Photoshop as a paint tool.

To me, it feels like 3D DCCs have been the very last professional gamedev tools to go free and/or open source, and I’ll be interested to see how Autodesk reacts to this movement.

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I recently started using Blender on Steam, so I just opened Blender last night and it’s “Surprise! Everything’s different today!”

One of the most obvious things that I noticed is that they eliminated a lot of the huge redundancy in the UI. It seemed like in 2.79 half the features had duplicate places you could access them at- at least one roll-out, one tab, one drop-down menu, one context menu. etc. For every feature, I’m sure every one has there favorite place that they learned to access that feature, but then the rest of the UI becomes a lot of wasted space (sprawling and disorganized too). A lot of people recommended ignoring the UI and just memorize all the keyboard short cuts.

Now it’s more like there’s just one place for each thing in the UI. It’s not necessarily the place I’m used to, but I think once I start to remember where everything is then I’ll be a lot faster then before. I’m sure it will be less intimidating to new users too, since the new UI is tiny compared to before.

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Hopefully autodesk will eventually go under, they are one of the main reasons 3D programs are so expensive. Look at how much a single program license costs from Autodesk compared to a full Adobe CC license. Its just nuts, and its not like adobe are not a megacorporation too so they really have no excuse to be charging so much .

What I find funny is that autodesk continually talk about how they have a very high % of pirate users yet dont seem to do anything to address the reason behind it - price.

And finally only because blender has forced them have they released an indie option for maya and 3ds max. A little too late, the ship has already sailed for many out there.

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I’ve encountered some issues with visibility of “collections” (formerly “layers”) when opening old 2.79 files in 2.8. Does anyone happen to know the fix, or a list of common transition issues and their fixes? I didn’t have time to search yet.

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Yes, this was annoying. It really does originate from the fact that one of the original design tenets of the software was to make ALL features ALWAYS visible, so development went against dialogs and popups for years. Over time, the design has eventually changed to a more context-based UI, only showing what’s needed for operations at hand. I think there’s still a long way to go in this regard, but they’re making progress.

Ultimately, once users spend enough time with Blender, they migrate to using keyboard shortcuts for a majority of their commands. It’s by far the fastest method for using Blender, and the intermediate, fancy UI becomes less important to getting things done.

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2.8 seems to have removed some of the old shortcuts to make space on the keyboard for adding more of your own. Also there is a quick menu that you can add functions to. I accessed most things via search and hotkeys in the past. The switch to 2.8 will take some getting used to for me. But Eevee makes it worth it I think and long term there’s no point for me in sticking to 2.79 I think. There are shortcut settings for the old 2.79 hotkeys iirc, but I feel like fighting the way 2.8 is meant to be used would be short sighted, so I’ll try to adapt.

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Not sure about them going under. Although game studios are probably a large chunk of the userbase, there are still other industries that use their tools. Well, AutoCAD, really, and I don’t know much about that industry. Also, I know EA uses Maya at a lot of studios. That would mean they’d have to rewrite all their tools and scripts that sit on top of Maya, and retrain their workforce. That’s a lot of coin.

The irony here is that all of us aspiring 3D artists grew up knowing and coveting 3DS Max or Maya, and writing off Blender as a train wreck. Blender fought and fought, and is incrementally succeeding at swaying converts. Blender is truly the tortoise to Autodesk’s hare.

I guess I’m passionate about this topic, to the point of crazy.:smile:

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I started off learning in 3DS Max and Maya, but I honestly never liked them. I also constantly encountered bugs and instability when using them, especially when rendering video. It’s insanely frustrating to have the program crash in the middle of rendering a video. When the video in question takes several minutes to render a single frame, you can be looking at hours worth of rendering ruined through an unexpected program crash.

When I discovered Blender and started using it, I encountered the usual learning curve. But it didn’t take me long to get over that particular hump. And once I got my feet under me in using Blender, I never looked back. Even in the earlier versions, Blender was extremely stable and reliable. I could push it as hard as I pleased, and it would always keep on working.

Even then, I was interested in programming, and I honestly think that my affinity for programming heavily influences how positively I respond to Blender. Blender is a 3D program that wasn’t built for artists, but for programmers and developers. It comes from that kind of mindset, which is why there is often a disconnect when artists familiar with using commercial 3D programs try to learn it. The interface is rigged up in a way that makes it more clear to developers familiar with object-oriented design. Your average artist just doesn’t approach projects in that manner.

I fired up 2.80 and the new interface is looking pretty slick. I was able to confirm that most of what I “need” in the standard Blender interface was still there, so I have no fear of not being able to adjust my workflow. I can still tell what’s going on just fine. I kind of want to play around with some of the animation workflow. I need to brush up on track manipulation and audio syncing.

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@RichardKain Thanks for that. I remember rendering frames and have those programs crash too. It actually reminds me of the first time I used 3DS R4. I built some complex boolean subtracted mesh, and it’d always crash. Hell, I didn’t know what I was doing! But yeah, with Max and Maya, I’d typically have to render a sequence, and then go back and re-render some frames that were messed up.

I haven’t actually done any rendering with Blender, since I’ve just been using it as an editor for Unity export. I did use the Video Editor a month ago, and while it wasn’t Premiere, it was pretty functional for my purposes, and I was pretty amazed about the results. I just used it for resurrecting some old project videos, not any 3D rendering though.

As much as I’m thrilled about 2.8, I actually haven’t upgraded yet. lol. Because I use a lot of my Python tools that I’ve written for 2.77, and I read that you’ll most likely have to update them.

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Blender’s UI has been the biggest issue holding it back. Excited to try this out.

True, but that only benefits the users who are making or updating models all the time. It really hurts people like me who make a few models as needed. I make a few models, code for a few months, come back to Blender to make something else and I need to relearn all the keyboard shortcuts again because the UI is garbage.

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Try using the search function more. Since you already are used to typing and probably can remember how most the functions that you use are called, it’s simple to just pop up that search bar and type the thing you want to do. If you need it often enough, learn or re-learn the shortcut that is displayed next to it. Or add it to the quick menu in 2.8… For me this has been the most intuitive way to use such a tool, that I’ve ever seen.

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Using the search function is still bad. Modern UI’s are built so whatever you need are easily accessible and fairly obvious. If the team who designed the earlier Blender UI designed a car you’d turn the wheel to the right to turn the car left, there would be 5 different controls for activating the windshield wipers, the controls for the car stereo would only be accessible from the back seats, and the brake peddle would be hidden inside a closed utility box.

Telling the car buyer to just search through the manual for how to operate the car, even though they already know how to operate every other car which conforms to the defacto standard in car UI design, doesn’t make bad UI design any better.

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Eevee is amazing. I like the grey UI. My only wish is that Unity UI has that grey tone.

I yet have to try it out if fbx import in Unity and Unreal works.

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I think it’s a bit dark. I like the new Unity grey more (darker than the old light theme, but lighter than the Blender grey)
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