Blender 2.8 Beta

nicstt · December 2018

Matt_Castle said:

wolf359 said:

"Yeah, the big names in 3D are hurting because this will start hurting them with their big ticket priced software.
.......... Blender a free 3D complete suite that can compete with the big boys. "

This is a very common misconception most often made by people who have never worked in the VFX industry on any major production.

On a major production level, maybe, but the closer Blender gets to things like Maya and 3DS Max, the more likely some smaller potential customers are going to weigh the cost of subscription against the potential lost man-hours and find the scales tip the other way. (Of course, that may then push the cost of those suites higher in order for Autodesk to redress the balance, thus changing the scales again). The more capable that open-source software gets, it obviously does impact on these companies to some extent. (Even if it's just that fewer people choose to pirate it!)

~~~~~

Personally, I'm holding off on Blender 2.8 for now, as I know that many of my plug-ins simply won't work with it, and any talk of new, more user friendly interface overhauls just means that everything is going to be somewhere other than where I expect it.

I'm seriously surprised at how much the left-click thing has been an issue for people. I personally like the right-click select, as many programs really don't take advantage of the mouse having multiple buttons to separate and therefore reduce the ambiguity in how the computer tries to interpret your gestures.
But aside from that, who are these people who've only used one program? Anyone who'd used more than one program would know that no programs ever agree on control layout anyway.

Indeed.

I find it a protection against accidentally selecting something I don't want.

k410 · December 2018

This was exciting news to me. I like the looks of the new GUI, which seems to borrow some design choices from Daz Studio (e.g., the widgets in the upper-right of the viewport). The inclusion of Eevee is a big deal. I am just now relearning Blender using 2.79b (so I can follow along in various tutorials, and also so I can use current addons -- my previous attempt was circa 2001).

Joe.Cotter · December 2018

Wendy_Carrara said:

will Sensii format work with it too or is that now moot?

2.8 won't necessarily be the deal-breaker for most add-ons but 3.0 might be. That's when the whole underlying structure is supposed to get rewritten.

Joe.Cotter · December 2018

Actually all of this is missing and important point and one that I was making in the original discussion in the blender forums when the original discussions were going on after Andrew Price's opening volley. While your point about the big companies and support is valid, the question is how much of the future Market is going to be made up of those customers. What my point was, is it the market going forward is going to be made up of a wide variety of people and groups with very disparate needs. We are seeing it already at the blender conferences, where presenters are from non-traditional communities like medical, scientific, educational, simulation creators, etc, etc... each of these groups have new needs, uses, and work flows. I was stressing this, and the term workflow which I pointed out would be the term going forward in the future as focus switches from just getting something done to how efficiently we get it done. The industry is going through a maturing process in the fundamental shift right now as we discuss this. The wide new variety of uses that are developing, the huge expanding user base with totally different needs, the need to be much more efficient, are all going to be defining factors going forward. This is Blenders real strength. The open-source aspect of Blender allows these communities to join in on the development process, and they have been. If one has been following the Blender conferences over the past few years this will have become increasingly obvious as various groups have contributed free additional code and even paid for programmers to work with the blender staff for a year or more at a time. This is a Cooperative effort at a level that commercial software companies very well might find very hard to compete with. We may be seeing an entirely new dynamic come forward in the marketplace. Don't get me wrong, the blender team and other open source projects have been touting this for a long time but it looks like at least in Blenders case this might really take off at this point in time, especially with the rewrite coming with 3.0 In the end, what we are seeing with 2.8 is the beautiful sunset of a previous generation. With 3.0 what we should be seeing is the sunrise of a totally new generation. This is the difference between what Andrew Price and others were arguing for and what I was pushing for. As the discussion progressed, it became obvious to me that a simple redesign of an interface wasn't enough. Rather, a whole new approach a whole new conceptualization was necessary. As the concepts I was pushing for gained traction, the need for a new base totally refactored won out. This is the piece of the puzzle that most people are missing on I think, since most people are still focused on a simple interface redesign.

"Yeah, the big names in 3D are hurting because this will start
hurting them with their big ticket priced software.
.......... Blender a free 3D complete
suite that can compete with the big boys. "

This is a very common misconception most often made by people
who have never worked in the VFX industry on any major production.

First, I just watched the 3 part series by Andrew Price
and 2.8 beta looks great!!!,I will personally dump all previous versions of
blender and not look back when a stable full release of 2.8 goes live.

On the matter of the "big Boys being worried", Just ask anyone
who has worked on a major film production with Full 24 hour tech support
from SideFX or Autodesk ,if they would like to "Save money" by dumping
their 24 hour phone access to a programmer at one of those companies
in favor of googling for a solution to some critical pipeline blender failure
that enthusiastic , clueless hobbiests & fanboys have never encountered.

Blender is great, however it does dont really do anything better than any of
the Major 3DCC programs.
Not in the area of modeling, Character animation or Visual effects such as fluid sims ,smoke& fire etc.

However its ability to intergrate with existing pipelines, is Dismal to put it charitably

Of course if you have your own team of skilled programmers to trouble shoot
intergration like the makers of the "Nextgen" film did ,with custom code to bring
in smoke & pyro from Houdini ,you will be fine.

But of course those programmers cost money and will have no option
to Phone "Manny" at Autodesk who will get two Maya TD's on the line
and have custom a patch built and delivered to fix any production issues.

With blender you are left to the online community whom are mostly hobbiests
working only in blender.

The actual software license cost is the least expensive factor for a company Like
"The Framestore"(Avengers Infinity War)

The true costs come from Labor and any time lost with unproven software stopping
production is not worth the risk.

kyoto kid · December 2018

...well said.

wiz · December 2018

Joe Cotter said:

Wendy_Carrara said:

will Sensii format work with it too or is that now moot?

2.8 won't necessarily be the deal-breaker for most add-ons but 3.0 might be. That's when the whole underlying structure is supposed to get rewritten.

I'm not all that worried about the year 2035.

Joe.Cotter · December 2018

hehe :)

nomad-ads_8ecd56922e · December 2018

Another factor that is going to change the balance more in the direction of opensource systems like Blender in movie production is that there are a growing number of small budget mini-studios coming along. Someone buys an old warehouse in some small town, converts it into a soundstage, and then churns out $100,000 budget sci-fi movies, and sometimes also rents it out to other low-budget movie projects. These are the type of productions that are far more likely to use the likes of Blender rather than those big, commercially-licensed graphics related packages the blockbuster-budget epic-moviemakers tend to use. There will be many more of these mini-studios coming, and we may very well see the multi-billion-dollar movie studios start to shrink in size and importance, though they probably won't go away completely.

Sylvan · December 2018

I have tried Blender on and off but found the UI not intuitive and came back to Hexagon and Silo3D every time. This update makes me curious enough to give it another try!

kyoto kid · December 2018

...you should.(and this comes from a die hard hHexagon user).

Siciliano1969 · April 2019

Using some 1980's lingo.......Blender 2.8 beta rules!

DustRider · April 2019

I've been using it pretty much non-stop for about a month now (for things totally not DAZ related), and I've been throughly impressed. I'm doing a couple of projects like I would normally do in Carrara, but these are on a scale that would totally choke Carrara (30-60 million polys). I've done several animations with Cylcles and with a compatible GPU, GPU memory is no issue at all thanks to it's out of core capabilities. I used a 4Gb 960 on my largest scene an there were no problems at all. I'm really enjoying how responsive the viewport is too! The animations would have easily been 10+ minutes frame in Carrara, but with Cycles they were running at 2 minutes a frame CPU only, and 30 seconds a frame on a borrowed machine with dual 1080 Ti cards (the 960 was doing 1:30 a frame). 2.8 is definitely worth checking out!

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