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Blender 2.8 Development Demo - Layers and Collections 1

22

One of the first 2.8 demos! Dalai Felinto is showing how the new layers and collections may work.

Demo showing the interface, with the layers, collections and visibility control.

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

22 Comments

  1. This is looking super interesting, is this meant to replace the outliner?, because it seems to be serving kind of the same purposes (at least for interacting with the objects in a scene) or are they going to function in parallel.
    Anyway great work guys, always grateful to you for working on these cool features, and sharing your progress with us.

    • It's hard to say, but the Outliner editor plays a different role in Blender usage and is one of the best editors when we need to manage Blender data-blocks deeply.

  2. Three panes just to manage stuff? I certainly hope this doesn't replace the outliner but rather improves it with the new functionality in a folder like system.

  3. Is it planned that it becomes part of the outliner? I can't see a reason not to integrate it, this is where most users would expect a layer manager. Maybe you should look how Adobe Illustrator or Indesign handles the action of changing the layer of an object. I haven't seen a faster and more comfortable way.

  4. Rombout Versluijs on

    Looks nice but isnt this sort of what super grouper already does now? I think the the outliner is much more powerful than this. ALso this design takes in way to much space, look at the spacing between the groups. Think of having a scene with tons of objects. The list would be very very long.

    PS that is the new viewport shading right or is this due to the low viewport rendering?

  5. Hey, this looks cool but still a bit complex to understand completely and use it naturally without thinking. Yet it looks like it could be a good update to the current outliner. Is it supose to replace it ?

  6. Interesting.

    Am I the only one who is a little confused watching the video? Admittedly I don't have the sound on with it right now, maybe it makes more sense with someone explaining it (is there any voice over?), but yeah, a little confusing.

    • I'm also confused watching the vid' (there is no oral explanation). But then this is my first look at the feature and I'm not too worried about not understanding straight away. I guess that with an explained tut' everything will be clear and awesome. :)

  7. I've read the paper about this 2-3 times. It was quite complicated and a little confusing. Plus it stated that current functionality (layers, outliner) will be preserved and these are all additions to that.
    Now that I see a glimpse of it... I find it just as confusing :D
    The initial idea of collections and layers is great, but accessing them from 3 new panels (fields?)? For me it looks easy to get lost in a complex setup like this. What did I turn on/off and where? What viewport options I've assigned to what? Huh. My hope is a more userfriendly Blender 2.8, not an even more complicated one.

  8. I don't understand the video... Will be good see all features in a panel like the outliner and don't lost the outliner (i don't think that but I see a lot of comments about this)

  9. Functionality wise,this is amazing progress and great job done. Especially because it required going deep into blender code to make such changes.

    On the UI side, let's hope this is prototype,or a bad joke. All this stuff belongs into outliner ;)

  10. I hope this will not replace layers at this stage.

    I also hope, that default (cumulative) 20-layers concept will stay back just with different name.
    It was a time-proven convinient solution.

    Also, on my mind, it is much preferable to fix and enable selection ability in outliner, it is still broken and needed just hardly.

  11. Will this allow us to finally animate the visibility of objects for rendering? I hate hacks like having to create a Transparent shader node in the material.

  12. I have not read this entire thread so forgive me if this has been stated already. One thing that would be nice is to be able to generate alpha masks at render time for objects by their material. This includes objects with multi materials. I have may instances where I will have lot of trees in a scene or building with many materials and the client will say can you change the color of the leaves or the concrete. To just have a quick alpha map makes it so easy to. My projects have hundreds of layers so it make it hard top with layer render system because i never have enough layers to isolate objects. Maybe in the new layer system you can integrate an easier way to render out quick alpha masks like how it is done in Maxwell Render.

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