Dalai gives a quick overview of what's happening with Blender 2.8, the plans for SIGGRAPH, and how you can get involved. (PS: I'll be at SIGGRAPH too this year - see you there?)
It’s been too long. Do you remember Eevee? A lot of development happened in the past month, so listen up.
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.
8 Comments
Great stuff!
bye bye Marmoset!
Will enjoy working with this (and the Principled shader)!
Can't wait !
Well.
I love Blender, I love the Blender devs, I regularly donate, but so far 2.8 is quite confusing.
As it currently stands the viewport seems broken in the current Blender 2.8 testbuild, lots of crashes switching in and out of edit mode for objects. I'm kinda left perplexed by the direction they're going with it too. Cycles now apparently doesn't have any viewport mode other than real time rendering? Does this mean the entire context of viewport shading is being replaced by switching Render engines? If so, isn't that going to get annoying? I mean I switch back and forth between viewport shading modes about 10 seconds while I'm modelling..
Also why are the vertex dots so huge for some of the editor modes? It will make working with dense meshes pretty hard. And why is there no wireframe edit mode for Eevee, Clay, etc? Are they being added in later? If not, how are you meant to edit meshes efficiently? Also the wireframe mode in Blender Render seems broken, I either get instant crashes switching to it or massive rendering glitches, followed by crashes.
I'll hold off judgement for now, I assume things which are broken now will be fixed before we get a proper build to experiment with. Just very confused so far by the changes I've seen. Especially after all that talk by Ton about 'no more wireframes!'.. I literally & seriously could not work in Blender if it didn't have a wireframe mode.
I love Blender, I love the Blender devs, I'm sure they won't 'break' Blender. But yeah, pretty confusing looking at 2.8 so far..
Couldn't agree with you more. I understand it's all very much in development, but the current demos make it look like Cycles is being superseded by something called Eevee, and considering none of my existing Cycles materials 'worked' when switched to the Eevee viewport (but newly created materials did work) it seemed like even Cycles materials would have to be replaced with Eevee materials. I will cancel my Blender Cloud subscription if a clean vertex/wireframe mode ever disappears from Blender, since I spend much of my editing time in wireframe mode.
eevee has it's own material outputs so cycles mats aren't exactly compatible.
it's realtime pbr like unreal engine or unity. so with eevee what you see in the viewport should be what your eevee render looks like and it's going to look nice without a load of rendering time.
cycles will still look better (with proper material setups) especially in some areas where realtime pbr stuff is weaker but honestly eevee is probably a better option for people who don't want to spend more time rendering or are on lower end hardware to get nice looking materials.
it will also be good for people making games to more easily determine what their models will look like in game.
eevee isn't replacing cycles the same way cycles didn't really replace blender internal. there's still a lot of people who use BI because it's better for certain things than cycles.
eevee is just another option and i think it's a good one to have.
i do get what you're saying. the materials are a bit distracting while you're modeling. i'm not sure i'd say just pure wireframes are clean but having a solid shading mode and hidden wire options like we do now is certainly preferable.
I get the impression Eevee is a realtime engine for people making content to plug into game engines. It's a shame it's not directly attached to cycles. This would make it entirely useless to me, as it didn't use Cycles materials.