Blender, made by you

The 2.80 release is dedicated to everyone who has contributed to Blender. To the tirelessly devoted developers. To the artists inspiring them with demos. To the documentation writers. To the Blender Cloud subscribers. To the bug reporters. To the designers. To the Code Quest supporters. To the donators and to the members of the Development Fund. Blender is made by you. Thanks!

A Fresh Start

Blender 2.80 features a redesigned user interface that puts the focus on the artwork that you create. A new dark theme and modern icon set were introduced. Keyboard, mouse and tablet interaction got a refresh with left click select as the new default. Quick Favorites menus provide rapid access to often-used tools.

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Blender 2.79 Blender 2.79
Blender 2.80 Blender 2.80
A Whole New Workspace

Templates and workspaces let you quickly get started with tasks like sculpting, texture painting or motion tracking. They can be customized to create your own efficient working environment.

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What You See Is What You Need

Thanks to the new modern 3D viewport you will be able to display a scene optimized for the task you are performing. A new Workbench render engine was designed for getting work done in the viewport, supporting tasks like scene layout, modeling and sculpting. The engine also feature overlays, providing fine control over which utilities are visible on top of the render.

Overlays also work on top of Eevee and Cycles render previews, so you can edit and paint the scene with full shading.

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Tools & Gizmos

The 3D viewport and UV editor have new interactive tools and gizmos, along with a new toolbar. These make it easier for new users to start using Blender, and for existing users to discover and use tools that previously required obscure key combinations.

Besides gizmos for tools, various elements like lights, camera, and the compositing backdrop image now have handles to adjust their shape or other attributes.

Intuitive Widgets
Intuitive Widgets

A set of simple yet functional controls will make 3D interaction fun again.

Toolbars
Toolbars

The new contextual toolbars enable you to quickly access and discover the right tool for the job.

Real Time

Eevee is a new physically based real-time renderer. It works both as a renderer for final frames, and as the engine driving Blender’s realtime viewport for creating assets.
It has advanced features such as volumetrics, screen-space reflections and refractions, subsurface scattering, soft and contact shadows, depth of field, camera motion blur and bloom.

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Eevee materials are created using the same shader nodes as Cycles, making it easy to render existing scenes. For Cycles users, this compatibility makes Eevee work great as a realtime preview. For game artists, the Principled BSDF is compatible with shading models used in many game engines.

2D Animation

Grease Pencil is now a full 2D drawing and animation system. This unprecedented integration of 2D tools in a 3D environment will enable you to create next-level concept art, storyboards and animations.

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Grease Pencil objects are a native part of Blender, integrating with existing object selection, editing, management, and linking tools. Strokes can be organized into layers, and shaded with materials and textures. Besides a draw mode for strokes, these objects can also be edited, sculpted and weight painted similarly to meshes.

Modifiers can be used to deform, generate and color strokes. Commonly used mesh modifiers such as array, subdivide and armature deform have equivalents for strokes. Rendering effects like blur, shadows or rim lighting are also available.

Cycles

Cycles now provides industry-standard functionality such as Cryptomatte, BSDF hair and volume shading and Random Walk Subsurface scattering. Many rendering optimizations were done including combined CPU and GPU rendering, much improved OpenCL start and render time, and CUDA support for scenes that don’t fit in GPU memory.

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Principled Hair BSDF
Principled Hair BSDF

Rendering physically based hair and fur is now easier and no longer requires setting up a complex shader network.

Cryptomatte
Cryptomatte

Cryptomatte is a standard to efficiently create mattes for compositing. Cycles outputs the required passes, which can be used in the Blender compositor or any compositor with Cryptomatte support.

Random Walk Subsurface Scattering
Random Walk Subsurface Scattering

The new Random Walk subsurface scattering method provides more accurate results for thin and curved objects.

Subdivision and Displacement
Subdivision and Displacement

New offscreen dicing scale helps to significantly reduce memory usage, by reducing the dicing rate for objects the further they are outside of the camera view.

Cycles has been used in high-profile short and feature films, and is receiving a growing amount of contributions from the industry. The full list of improvements is available on the wiki release notes. Here are some highlights.

Compatibility

Python API

Blender 2.80 is an API breaking release. Add-ons and scripts will need to be updated, both to handle the new features and adapt to changes that make the API more consistent and reliable. Read more

Removed Features

A number of features that were no longer under active development or did not fit in the new design were removed. By removing the maintenance burden, developers can spend more time on new features and redesign the user interface and implementation to be more optimized.

  • The render engine Blender Internal was removed, replaced by EEVEE, the new real-time engine.
  • The Blender Game Engine was removed. We recommend using more powerful, open source alternatives like Godot.
  • Dupliframes and slow parent were removed, as these are incompatible with the new dependency graph and never worked reliably in the old one.
Special Thanks

The Blender developer community is being supported by the organizational powers of Blender Foundation and its spin-off Blender Institute. The people who work for the Foundation and Institute did a tremendous job to bring Blender is where is it nowadays.

Special thanks goes to Tangent Animation and Aleph Objects, who funded 4 additional developers to work full-time on Blender 2.8 during the crucial 2017 period. This enabled us to work on the viewport, Eevee, collections/layers, UI and tools redesign.

Thanks goes to everyone who contributed to the Code Quest, the massively successful 3 month workshop in Blender Institute during spring 2018.

And we thank everyone who joined the Development Fund in 2nd half of 2018 and 2019. This helped us to keep the core of Blender contributors together to work on 2.8.

And last but not least: special thanks to the blender.org community – the developers, documenters, bug reporters and reviewers – it is thanks to them that we can start this wonderful new era of Blender 2.8x!

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