The next big Blender release – expected later this year!
From an updated viewport to workspaces and dependency graphs.
Blender 2.8 brings updates all over the board.
Up until now, the viewport was lagging behind the rest of Blender. Not anymore! Blender 2.8 brings the minimum OpenGL version to 3.3, with even newer features for compatible hardware.
The main use of this technology is Blender’s new real-time render engine: EEVEE
EEVEE Showcase by Daniel Bystedt
EEVEE is a fully-featured PBR (physically based-rendering) engine for real-time visualization. With advanced features such as volumetrics, screen-space reflections and refractions, subsurface scattering, soft and contact shadows, post-processing effects such as ambient occlusion, depth of field, camera motion blur and bloom, to name a few.
EEVEE Animation Test by Glenn Melenhorst
Blender’s 2D drawing capabilities have been greatly improved with 2.8. The new Grease Pencil focus is to create a more friendly interface for the 2D artist, while keeping the advantages of having a full 3D suite underneath.
Grease Pencil is no longer just a stroke, it’s now a real Blender object with huge improvements to brushes and tools.
HERO – Grease Pencil Showcase
View Layers & Collections
Gone is the limit of 20 layers per scene. Blender 2.8 introduces a new concept to organize your scene with Collections and View Layers. Read more on code.blender.org.
In order to ease the management of Collections, filtering in the Outliner has been improved. Check out the demo video.
Workspaces
Workspaces will allow users to build up their working environment for a specific task. For example there could be workspaces for modeling, sculpting, animation and motion tracking.
Dependency Graph
At the heart of Blender, the dependency graph is getting a complete overhaul. Not only delivering better performance but also allowing overrides on data in a way not possible before. Read more.
Asset Management
This long awaited feature is finally coming to the 2.8x series. Read more.
Blender 2.8 Design Document
This document is for Blender developers and other contributors to the 2.8 project. It is meant to provide focus and general agreement on technical design decisions, state the goals of 2.8 and the big picture.
Blender 2.8x is undergoing heavy development. It’s not only unstable but it can harm your data if you save your files with it.
* Do not use in production. With great power… *
Check out the features by yourself by playing with these files provided by the community.
By Daniel Bystedt
Video demo
398 MB - License: CC-BY-NC-SA
By Dominik Graf
350 MB - License: CC-BY-SA
By Mike Pan
71 MB - License: CC-BY
66 MB - License: CC-BY-ND
By Alessandro Chiffi / ONdata Studio. Video
18 MB - License: CC-BY
Made by Marek Moravec. Early video demo.
195 MB - License: CC-0 Public Domain
Video Logs
Blog & Social Media
The official hashtag for Blender stuff is #b3d. Also #blender3d is very active on Twitter, Facebook and other social media.
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Blender is Free Software.
Free to use for any purpose. Forever.
