A few days ago, November 29th, 2018, Blender 2.8 officially entered the Beta phase. That means its feature set is complete and won’t be drastically changing, and the next goals are polishing and stabilization.
I took the opportunity to finally download it and try it out a bit.
Things that immediately stood out to me:
- The UI looks really different. So tasteful. Much modern.
- They reorganized a lot of interface layouts to finally make more sense, and be much friendlier for new users. But for people who are familiar with the older UI, it might take some getting used to. It’s not always immediately obvious where certain old options were moved to, partly because the old UI was so all over the place to begin with. If you were using Blender before and need it occasionally, now seems like a good opportunity to acquaint yourself with the new UI.
- The Eevee renderer looks promising. A more realtime, modern-game-engine-like renderer right inside Blender.
- Why am I right-clicking to select like an idiot? It’s left-click to select now, and that’s more logical.
You can find the download link and the official blog post about it here: https://code.blender.org/2018/11/blender-2-8-beta/
