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Blender 2.8 Preview - Pie Menus are Default now - The properties Layout is Responsive - TAB for Edit Mode is Back!

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Gottfried Hofmann writes:

The development of Blender 2.8 happens at a rapid pace and the developers are actually listen to the user base. That means TAB for edit mode is back, pie menus will be on by default, the properties panel now has a responsive layout and much more:

About the Author

Gottfried Hofmann

Founder of BlenderDiplom.com, co-author of the Cycles Encyclopedia. Blender enthusiast since 2.50 alpha 0. Got a knack for simulations and teaching.

12 Comments

  1. I'm so glad Tab for edit mode is back! Moving it to the 2 key was like a bad dream (or an April fool's joke). Everything about the Tab key makes it the logical choice for the fundamental operation of entering/exiting mesh edit mode in a mesh editing program... it's a large key, it's in an easy to find position, and the symbol on the key is exactly right.

  2. Personally I don't like pie menus - they are too complicated and require too much interaction; key presses are better, like 1, 2, 3 in edit mode to select vertex, edge, face - all very fast.

    So to work exactly the same way, in object mode can we use 1 - 6 to select the different editing modes - Object, Edit, Sculpt, etc. This means you also have Edit mode on the 2 key (simply because it's logical to do that) but we still keep Tab as the primary way to enter Edit mode.

  3. With regards to the Pie Menu. Though i'm more for shortcuts, it still seems Pie Menus give even more interaction.

    Example. Pressing CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+__ vs __ and to the left in the pie menu. Option 2 wins in speed. And once muscle memory is developed, it becomes significantly faster. Overall, the longer my hand stays in the home row the faster i get things done.

    I fully agree on the tab topic too. ANd I'm happy that Blender Institute is actively testing other options to see if the old way still is the best way. So this part reconfirms that certain key's should not be remapped.

    The worst part is to try to download latest versions to see how it works and each time (well most of the time) there are uncomfortable changes like key changes that take time to relearn and then they remap them again. I know it is still under dev, and these videos are awesome to see what they are doing. So keep them coming.

  4. What the hell happened to the space bar?*sigh* it´s dedicated to the 3d cursor now? And my tilde is not there. That´s a bad choice, as that particular key is moved around a lot on different language keyboards... I guess I just have to remap everything...

    • I haven't downloaded 2.8 in awhile, so maybe it's changed again, but last I saw if you pressed Spacebar twice it would bring up the Old spacebar menu.

    • My keyboard has ` and ¦ on that key, but it still makes the 'space bar' menu appear in Blender. It'll just make documenting the function harder: "To display the search box, press the top-left-of-keyboard-below-Esc key."

  5. it's really useful update. and since Pie menus is blender's default item we need a way to edit the pie menus itself. I know there is a pie menus editor add-ons out there. but it needs to be on the Blender too.

  6. Can selected mesh have different shading compared to rest of model.e.g. selected mesh is shaded and rest of background meshes are wireframe or vice versa?

    • Yes, it can.
      But you have to set the other objects to wireframe manually
      You could easily write an addon to have this specific behaviour when selecting, but regardless 2.8 has better / more modern options imo (alpha, xray etc)

  7. The ~-key is on every international keyboard at a different location and often not easy to find. So I think that it is not a good idea to put a important feature like search on this key.

  8. Because this function of having background meshes in different shading mode helps a lot in both modeling as well as saving RAM thus making modeling faster. Because when u have full model in one shaded mode, it is slightly different because then u don't have a quick visual difference between active mesh and rest of background especially if u have multiple viewport in multiple monitors. Im saying by my personal experience.

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