Blender 2.80 to arrive in 2018

[Mathaeus]

Played last weekend with Eevee samples for Blender 2.8 - all downloads are at bottom of page. Have to say a big WOOOW. First to describe the Eevee thing, as it is for now, closest could be a Marmoset Toolbag, sort of artist friendly gamedev style renderer. Things like screen space reflection or occlusion, so on. Great for artists to get desired look, still transferable to real time shading. Also a 'king of portfolios', good for showing the characters, and other cool modeling work. They managed to get it to work with standard Cycles shader networks. While result is ( expectably ) not the same, this makes a chance to use Eevee in combination with other Blender renderers.
Supplied examples are especially impressive, better and richer than perhaps anything offered by commercial apps. I mean, theoretically the same should be possible to do with Maya Viewport 2, but in practice, there's only a bunch of highly technical shaders, poor examples, and.... 'traditional' minute or two for first launch of Maya Hypershade .

Another interesting moment is ability of Cycles to use CPU as addition to GPU rendering, about 15 - 20 percent faster here. Not that much, but wouldn't hurt .

[Bullit]

Well 15-20% faster is much in my rule book. it means 1/5 to 1/6 less time.

Thanks for feedback.

[Mathaeus]

When we are about rendering speedups, denoiser is already there in last version, that's 2.79. Afaik, current denoiser in Blender is not based on recent Nvidia machine learning methods, seems to be something simpler, but it still takes the 3d data directly from rendering process, render tiles are cleaned one by one. Yet another ''wouldn't hurt'', I'd say.

[NNois]

I just find out that autodesk has a PBR game engine integrated "3ds max Interactive" !!

Whoah ! They just cut down the news of the blender eevee !

( commercialy speaking thought, because in fact they just added a "sent to stingray button" but with a speak like that 95% of folks would not see any differences, that's the sad part )

[Bullit]

Stingray is dead.

[Mathaeus]

I just find out that autodesk has a PBR game engine integrated "3ds max Interactive" !!

Whoah ! They just cut down the news of the blender eevee !

( commercialy speaking thought, because in fact they just added a "sent to stingray button" but with a speak like that 95% of folks would not see any differences, that's the sad part )

As Bullit already said, Stingray is dead, perhaps they'll remove that Interactive thing from next Max. If I'm correct, they actually added some automatic conversions of shaders and such to Max implementation, while in Maya that's a plain gamdev style shader authoring directly in Maya, vectors, dot products, so on.
Honestly, don't know that much about Stingray, literally 100% of anything related to me is dependent on Unreal Engine, as an contemporary Autodesk (or Adobe) of gamedev world.

As an interesting related moment, HumanIK Middleware is dead too. It's not clear does 'dead' applies to Human IK Mocap solutions in Maya and Maya LT. If so, it won't be anything good for Maya position in gamedev, despite the possible replacement, or typical thinking that ''any studio already have another solution, so it doesn't matter''.

[sirdavid32]

eevee all the way. I believe the devs can surprise us with an GL exporter so we can view all of eevee with html. That will link up with bge (blender game engine) and all of the sudden you can custom-logic whatever you may publish on the web (not limited and also) considering virtual reality.

[Mathaeus]

That I know, current state of EEVEE and Marmoset, where only parameters are (possibly) exported, things like metalness map and such, seems to be more convenient than creating the code. In reality, generated code is never matching good enough for programmers, so they already have their interpretations of parameters. Also, I hope that Blender developers won't be too much occupied by next Blender Game Engine (according to internet forums, they already are on that not-too-much path) except for psychological reasons, for people who just want to have an impression of all-in-one app. In other word, they should be working on connections to Unity and Unreal.

In any case, all that real time rendering is far away of results of modern renderers like Octane or RedShift, as expected. It's a world of completely different, really low criteria, perhaps closer to Renderman concepts before Renderman played seriously with ray-tracing - minus hair, point/particle rendering and usable displacement. Tons of baked and 'faked' data, brutal approximations like screen space reflections, some occasional realistic result here and there.
I mean, great to have something like EEVEE in Blender, but, I don't see great future outside of games, or maybe some long representation where is acceptable to forget the quality in favor of real-time playback, and.... someone have a time and knowledge to set up all that....

[bb3d]

Interesting interview with the master himself...

[Draise]

Ton mentioned Softimage explicitly in another video interview, during a developer recruitment announcement. He'd love devs from Si. He considers it the best 3D software to have been developed. He said it was a shame Autodesk shut it down. I'll grab that vid too.

[owei]

Yes..nice video and a nice guy, so it seems had to laugh loudly about BlenderGruru´s cluelessness what really "big business" is (car industry for example) and AD numbers in comparison...
I took a deeper look into Blender recently (and "Animation Nodes" can do a lot of stuff...) and it feels far less painful then expected..some things are to hotkey heavy and hard to pick up..but in general, not that bad at all. For my daily generalist stuff it might be the best choice...let´s see what 2.8 bring UI and workflow wise..collections and a proper layer editor is already a good step forward

cheers,
oli

[bb3d]

BTW, if you want to support the Blender 2.8 development you can do that by participating in the "Codequest" campaign
https://www.blender.org/2-8/quest/

[luceric]

Ton mentioned Softimage explicitly in another video interview, during a developer recruitment announcement. He'd love devs from Si. He considers it the best 3D software to have been developed. He said it was a shame Autodesk shut it down. I'll grab that vid too.

I don't know; wasn't there a lot of people already who have written blogs and made videos about how to make blender UI better(*)?




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* better is subjective and can be a matter of opinion and a person's personal background.

[Rork]

I don't know; wasn't there a lot of people already who have written blogs and made videos about how to make blender UI better(*)?

---
* better is subjective and can be a matter of opinion and a person's personal background.

Well.... Apparently they finally start listening.... Or admit some ways are need to be changed for a quicker adoption of Blender. So.. a little bit more 'standard' stuff.

After spending some days with Blender 2.79 to really get my feet wet this time, I have to say I do like some of the ideas floating around in Blender. The Node editor and composting inside Blender are very nice and easy to pick up. No surprises there.
There's also some nice plugins around to make these even better with additional functionality. Another plus for Blender, lot's of devs.

On the other hand there's a lot to be desired, and not just the (handling of the) UI:

- Modeling tools are nice, but are prone to 'lost geometry', e.g. one can easily extrude edges and points without closing them back into the geometry as faces. Lightwave had/has that same 'feature', often resulting in bad models and issues with exporting/importing.
- The SRT tools are maddening, not just for moving your model around, but also for modeling etc. Yes, you can quickly lock an axis but typing x, y or z, but often you have moved your model/selected geometry already just by clicking a SRT button.
- Forget about the snapping and SRT tools when modeling or just moving stuff around. In Blender it's useful and maddening at the same time.
- Like in SI, scale and dimensions of a model are two separate entities, which also can mess up with modeling operations like e.g. bevel.

- There's no real way of setting up system wide layouts, as everything is locked to a scene. Also it's not really (but with a hack) possible to set up dual screen layouts, or a custom dual screen startup for new scenes.
- Also, no way to lock a custom layout down. It's easy to accidentally add a window to your UI, with no real clue how to get rid of it. One of the major gotcha's for new users. At least in Maya 2017/8 you can lock the UI reshuffling.

- Default options for camera and rendering are annoyingly separated from each other, and took me a while to found out how to do 'normal' navigation in the render view.
- Also, the link between the renderview and it's viewport size are a stupid hidden shortcut. Just silly.
- On the other hand, Cycles is quite fast for setting up renders. It's like using Redshift or the Arnold RenderWindow for setting up shading.
- UV'ing is a tad tedious, but I've already seen some really nice plugins that may help sanding off some of the rough edges.

Those are my first experiences and annoyances, but for something this capable and free, one cannot really complain

Ton Roosendaal even did a request for SI coders to help with the Blender UI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tqo-MVK ... e&t=44m49s
Maybe we should help the SI>Blender initiative out a bit more

rob

[Mathaeus]

With inevitable 'don't want to be negative' disclaimer, fact that they are thinking about SI developers to help in Blender GUI, now in 2018 ..., sounds that they are out of ideas, or they don't know what to do, or it's just a 'political' act in getting some SI users. No good, anyway.

About GUI, yeah layout is saved with scene or startup file, so AFAIK only way to get particular scene in another GUI, is playing with "load UI" option, somewhere at bottom of file browser window. Startup file first, then load the another scene without 'load UI'', something like that. There's appropriate 'load ui' preference in ''file'' preferences tab, for default load - no load UI.

As an general SRT like tool, I'm preferring the 'grab' tool, that's like Max's 'select and move' or SI tweak tool, while it works for objects and components. However, if I'm correct, getting the Grab tool to work properly is not possible from Maya style keyboard input ( at least I never been able to get it, staring from there), even customized one. So, always had to build the customization on top of Blender input.

Now about customization of hotkeys, Blender can do a lot here, including mouse actions, for example it's possible to get edge loop select by double click and such - but, it's about user to take care about possible conflicts (so, new user want to forget this, not easy to know what it is conflict created by customization, what is standard behavior). On bad side, it's not easy to assign a custom sequence of commands to hotkey, not even close as this is easy in Maya, for example.

[Mathaeus]

- Modeling tools are nice, but are prone to 'lost geometry', e.g. one can easily extrude edges and points without closing them back into the geometry as faces. Lightwave had/has that same 'feature', often resulting in bad models and issues with exporting/importing.

A bit of nit picking... Houdini works in that ''unconnected way'', too, in many cases exactly that allows H to do splits of geometry in easy way, still keeping the same IDs, applying the wire solver on top of polygon grid, easy creation of RBD constraints, whatever. So, old fashion way in Blender, unexpectedly turn it into probably best ''direct modeling supplier'' for Houdini.

Other than that, after two years of modeling in Maya (and a bit of ten years old knowledge), now I'm almost 100% in Blender when it comes to any ''direct'' creation of geometry. In normal circumstances, SI alive or at least affordable licence of Max, most likely I will not even looking at Blender, but......
..... my probably last modeling experience in Maya 2018 Sp1, it was corrupted mesh after a bit of sculpting (lost polygons all around), crash, automatic reload of crash save ( new feature in 2018), with same corrupted polygons *and* destroyed workspace, caused by warning window .
Even if Maya will be stable app with modeling, still, I simply do not have power to fight against everyday 'Maya candid camera show', like non existent modifier stack, weird hotkey combinations, not existent *permanent* display of basic info like vertex position or transformation axis (no, what they are calling 'modeling kit'' is not an option), and completely pointless features like new Smart extrude which is asking for more actions than old extrude, pointless DASH input which is also asking for another weird hotkey combo. In older Mayas (I think prior to 2016), at least it was possible to have a fixed component mode based on object's selection, now even that is intentionally f.....d up in favor of ''slippery'' switching to another occasionally selected object, making Maya practically unusable for editing more than one object in scene...... that (now destroyed) old style component mode was a last, last argument for Maya against Blender.
---- to be fair, modeling of any kind always was unwanted guest in any Maya, I was that idiot who expected real changes. So businesses as usual, Maya as playback and rigging machine, Blender or Max for anything else, Houdini for special cases, that's it.