On July 30, Blender 2.80 was released, the biggest and most significant release ever. Version 2.80 was a new beginning in the life of the Blender Foundation and brought the 3D modeling tool to a whole new level of professional software. Thousands of people worked on the creation of Blender 2.80. Well-known designers have developed a completely new interface that allows you to solve familiar tasks much faster, and the entry threshold for beginners has been significantly reduced. The documentation has been completely revised and contains all the latest changes. Hundreds of video tutorials on version 2.80 have been released in a month, and new ones appear every day, both on the Blender Foundation website and on Youtube. Without any modesty, no Blender release has ever caused such a stir in the entire industry.
Major changes:
- Completely redesigned interface. It has become simpler, more powerful, more responsive and more convenient in all aspects, as well as more familiar to users who have experience in other similar products. Also added a dark theme and new icons.
- Now the tools are grouped into templates and tabs combined under one task, for example: Modeling, Sculpting, UV Editing, Texture Paint, Shading, Animation, Rendering, Compositing, Scripting.
- Eevee's new GPU-only (OpenGL) renderer supporting physically based real-time rendering. Eevee complements Cycles and allows you to use its developments, for example, materials created on this engine.
- Developers and game designers have been given a new shader, Principled BSDF, which is compatible with the shader models of many game engines.
- A new Grease Pencil 2D drawing and animation system that makes it easy to sketch 2D sketches and then use them in a 3D environment as full-fledged XNUMXD objects.
- In the Cycles engine, a dual rendering mode has appeared, which uses both the GPU and the CPU. Rendering speed on OpenCL has also increased significantly, and for scenes that exceed GPU memory, it has become possible to use CUDA. In addition, Cycles introduced the creation of substrates for compositing using Cryptomatte technology, shading of hair and volume based on BSDF and the use of random subsurface scattering (SSS).
- The 3D Viewport and UV Editor have been updated with new interactive tools and a contextual toolbar.
- More realistic tissue and deformation physics.
- Support for import/export of glTF 2.0 files.
- Updated animation and rigging tools.
- Instead of the old Blender Internal real-time rendering engine, the EEVEE engine is now used.
- The Blender Game Engine has been removed. Instead, it is recommended to use other open engines, such as Godot. The BGE engine code has been separated into a separate UPBGE project.
- Now you can edit several meshes at the same time.
- Reworked dependency graph system, main modifiers and animation evaluation system. Now on multi-core CPUs, scenes with a large number of objects and complex rigs are processed much faster.
- Many changes in the Python API, partially breaking compatibility with the previous version. But most addons and scripts have been updated to version 2.80.
From the latest Blender news:
- Epic Games Donates $1.2M to Blender Foundation and Joins Blender Development
- Ubisoft Joins Blender as a Gold Contributor
- Japanese anime studio Khara switches to Blender
Small demo: Tiger - Blender 2.80 demo by Daniel Bystedt
Source: linux.org.ru