Bforartists 2 Alpha 0.1.0 released

[Draise]

I've been missing SI lately but the pain has been numbed by using the Blender fork Bforartists. It's quick to pick up, and I got ahead of my peers in Blender houses in no time. I've happily used it a year and half now.

I'm sure you've heard all the hype around Blender 2.80, but where has BFA gone with all that?

Well they have managed to merge and continue work.. best feature set from the fun in Blender (winning Annie awards and everything) mixed with a decent more logical UI of bforartists.

So.. the UI and workflow is manageable. With free add-ons like sverchok and animation nodes, Things feel like they are shaping up again... And it's nice to have iconology, an easier discoverability included, and a more streamlined workflow defaults built in with this fork.

So here is the lead Dev's (he's a German) note on the alpha:

Hey there,

It’s been a while since our last release. But now we are back at the track. Here comes the first alpha release for Bforartists 2. For those who doesn't know yet: Bforartists is a fork of the popluar open source 3d software Blender. With the goal to deliver a better graphical UI and a better usability.

This Bforartists 2 alpha 0.1.0 release is the first release in the Bforartists 2 development cycle. Many thanks to the team.

The binary downloads can as usual also be found in the download section of the official webpage. Note that there will be no 32 Bit Windows version anymore. https://www.bforartists.de/content/download
The sourcecode can be found at Github. https://github.com/Bforartists/Bforarti ... /tag/0.1.0

And the release note can be found here: https://www.bforartists.de/wiki/bforart ... senotev010

The focus of this release was to merge of Blender 2.80 code into Bforartists and get everything working again. Means we have started to get everything back into the state where Bforartists 1 already was. Icons everywhere, readding the toolbar, readding our (still) better readable standard theme and our keymap, reorganized menus, removed double menu entries, and so on. Some of the issues are still from Bforartists 1. But were done after the official Bforartists 1 release. All in all we have over 200 fixed issues in this release. Plus the merge, which already carried quite a few things from Bforartist 1 into Bforartists 2. Oh, and we have colored icons, not monochrome! The ones that made it into Bforartists 2 will vanish in the near future.

It’s of course ways not finished. It is the first alpha release, in the middle of the consolidation process. And Blender 2.8 is also still in development. and brings changes with every new release. So don’t expect things to work flawless. But it is in a useful state again. Have Fun with it

Kind regards

Reiner

[Rork]

Interesting.

Would love to see the differences between this and Blender 2.8 in a short video.
So, will this build be equally quickly updated? Or at least within the realms of once a month?

rob

[Draise]

Interesting.

Would love to see the differences between this and Blender 2.8 in a short video.
So, will this build be equally quickly updated? Or at least within the realms of once a month?

rob

A dev build usually is compiled and uploaded once a week or so.

Concerning differences, great idea! Though probably best after an official release once Blender does their official release.
I could give you a comparison of Blender 2.8 and/or 2.7 and Bforartists 1 though, as right now they are just reconciling the milestones from BFA1 that got broken with the merge into 2.8. The concept and philosophy would be similar.

[AceMastermind]

I've always just used Blender as a format conversion tool until now, I tried out this Bforartists version for the first time and was actually able to perform several operations on geometry right out of the box without searching through any docs.

[Rork]

I, and some other people, recently started to look into Blender more seriously and every time 2.8 is surprising me. (can't stand 2.79...)

Most of the functionality is well layed out, with some really useful tools/additions that I missed in Softimage, Maya or others.
Yes, there's workflow stuff in Blender that is aggravatingly stupid, but it's a work in progress...
So far there's not much I missed for my daily work, often it's the names or command locations that makes it a bit of a learning curve.

And addons/plugins are very affordable, and with a handful of them you can do some really nice work.

For me Blender 2.8 will become a part of my workflow, in whatever form or build

rob