Blender news

bubblesort

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Thank you so much for keeping this thread going, Dakota Tebaldi !

I have been away from blender for a few years, but I just picked up Avastar so I"m giving myself a crash course refresher on it, and this thread got me back up to speed fast. Nowhere else has all the things I missed laid out so nicely.
 
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Grandma Bates

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This is not the right place for this, but I cannot find a better thread. There is a group of national security people who engage in crowd sourcing photos to determine the geo-location where a picture was taken. Once they figure out where a picture was taken and the orientation of the camera, the next step is to figure out the time of day that the picture was taken.

One of the tools being explored is to use the sun position and the fspy add-ons in blender to approximate the position of the sun based on the shadows in a photograph. Once they get the position of the sun, they can work backwards to get the time of day.

 

Eunoli

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2.82 is crashing less for me and I'm just waiting for a chance to use the new UV tools.
 
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Dakota Tebaldi

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By the way - not really SL-relevant, but more for Blender users generally. If anyone had any questions about the power of 2.8's "Eevee" realtime rendering engine, this video was rendered using Eevee. In fact, aside from the real-life video and RL photos used for texture sources, this entire project was made, lighted, and even composited entirely inside Blender. It's powerful, yo; this is easily TV-show quality stuff.

 
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Fionalein

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While rendered realtime is impressive no matter on what... I remain curious: on what kind of machine?
 

bubblesort

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If you need help running multiple versions of blender, this is the best tutorial I found on doing that. I mean, if you have, say, primstar, sparkles, and avastar... the latest primstar runs on 2.59, the latest sparkles runs on 2.79b, and the latest avastar runs on 2.82. So you might want to run multiple versions for different things. (I think they are planning to update sparkles to 2.82 at some point)

If you currently have blender 2.79 installed normally and want to run multiple versions, you will probably want to uninstall the normall blender install and set up every install as a portable install, as described in this video. That's what I did.

 

Dakota Tebaldi

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Okay - some huge Blender news was announced today and it will take a little bit of explaining.

First, one small thing - the much-hyped Cloth Brush has officially been added to the 2.83 alpha build. And all reports are, it works beautifully! 2.83 is expected to be released this spring; but here's where the big news begins.

Blender 2.83, when it comes out, will be the first edition of Blender that will have something called LTS, or "long term support". This idea might be familiar to people who have used Linux builds, like Ubuntu. Just by way of example, a new version of Ubuntu comes out like every six months; and that may be okay for an average user to keep up with, but for something like a business with lots of computers...well from a system administration standpoint it's like just not practical to upgrade your OS company-wide every six months. So Ubuntu has this thing where a new "LTS version" comes out every 2 years, and as a business, you get that version, and you just keep it for the next two or three or more years, I believe Ubuntu supports LTS versions up to five years - but anyway, so while you won't be getting any new features or upgrades or anything like that, Ubuntu has promised to provide bug fixes and security patches for these particular versions of the OS for the length of the LTS period. Other new versions of Ubuntu keep getting released every six months of course, but you ignore them until you finally decide to upgrade to the newest LTS version.

Blender has decided it might be a good idea to do the same thing. The dramatic improvements that came with 2.8x have attracted industry interest, but with new versions with crazy new features coming out every couple months, potential users like large production studios aren't going to want to start working on a year-plus-long project with the latest Blender edition only for it to be more or less left behind in three or four months. So similar to Ubuntu and other companies, every so often Blender wants to declare a given new build to be an LTS version, which will be "feature frozen" but still continue to get fixes and support for the next while - right now, the Blender Foundation is thinking roughly 2 years. So the big players with the long-term projects can confidently use whatever version they start with for the whole project. And in the meantime of course, the rest of the Blender user base can still get the regular updates with the new and more "experimental" features in them which will continue to come out at the same pace.

So, 2.83 will be the first LTS version of Blender. Once it comes out, if you're a weird person who is tired of the constant barrage of minor changes and new features and would rather stick with a single version for a while, just get 2.83, and rest assured that it will continue to get nothing but bug fixes and stuff like that.

So I guess the next logical question is, why will 2.83 be the first LTS version? What's so special about it? Well, it might be easy to guess that "well it's simply the next version, and they've just now decided to start doing this", but that's not the real reason, and the real reason is Big News #2: Blender 2.83 will be the LAST 2.8x Blender version.

That's right: Blender 2.83 comes out this May; and the next build that comes out this August will be 2.90. Yes BLENDER 2.9 IS COMING OUT THIS SUMMER. Blender 2.7 was released in 2014, and it took five years to finally arrive at 2.8, which came out last summer - July of 2019. And yet 2.8x will only have been around for ONE YEAR when we move to 2.9 this coming August.

And that's not it either. Blender 2.9 is also slated for only a year's worth of development, expected only to reach 2.93 before, NEXT summer, in August of 2021, BLENDER 3 WILL BE RELEASED. What the heck is going on????

Well it's just the case that the speed of development has vastly increased. The Blender Development Fund was an enormous success and the combination of individual donation and corporate grants has given the foundation enough to hire some 12 or more full-time developers and they're turning out new stuff like it's raining code because improving Blender is their whole actual job now. Features that it was assumed would be coming out in a few years are coming out in a couple of months. If the pace of new announcements and new releases has seemed frenetic over the last year, that's because it absolutely has been.

Which means that the next "big" Blender step will be coming out in just a few months; there's just no time to go through more little incremental releases. DO NOT WORRY, the change from 2.8 to 2.9 will not be even remotely like the shock overhaul of the switch between 2.7x and 2.8. There will really only be one huge new feature set to learn - particles. Blender 2.9 will feature a new node-based particle system, replacing the current particle system which hasn't been updated in many years. And of course there will be other little changes and improvements - the odd new brush or UV functionality maybe - but nothing like having to learn a whole new interface and a new menu layout and all this. It's possible you might not even notice any changes at all, if all you do is model stuff for use in Second Life.

If the new Particle Nodes is the big thing that justifies jumping from 2.83 straight to 2.9, what in the world awaits us next year when we jump from 2.93 to 3.0? Right now, this isn't quite known; at least, it hasn't been announced. If you've been following Blender development for a while, there's some possibilities; sometime in the near future, an overhauled animation system (also node-based, or at least partly so) is planned, and that will be particularly huge. A new internal asset manager is also planned - it will allow you to create a "library" of models, materials, textures and what not that will be a little easier to use and better organized than having to dig through your file browser to import these things with each new project. Maybe these will be part of Blender 3. Who knows? What we do know is that once 3.0 comes out, the numbering system will proceed at a more "normal" software versioning pace - the next build after 3.0 will be 3.1, not 3.01.

So, that's the big news. Damn the torpedoes and all that, looks like.
 
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Dakota Tebaldi

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While rendered realtime is impressive no matter on what... I remain curious: on what kind of machine?
I have no idea. Although, Hubert mentioned that the video took 7 hours to render via Eevee - basically an overnight job, while rendering it with Cycles he says was estimated at about a month. He said he was able to preview the whole scene in realtime via Eevee with the volumetrics turned off; but obviously he needed all the steam and fog for the final video, plus he rendered it 4k, so not quite a realtime job in the end.
 
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Dakota Tebaldi

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Blender 2.83 is now in beta. Meaning 2.9 is now in alpha state! They keep on trucking. Many of Blender's new full-time developers already work remotely and the ones that did not are easily able to do so for the most part, so development has continued at the same pace. This is not to say that Blender development is some kind of major priority in the grand scheme of things given current events; but I think every little bit of normalcy is a candle in the dark.

So hey speaking of which, look at this:


Right now, internal extrusions in Blender only really "work" if the extruded face is surrounded by other geometry. If you extrude inwardly a face that is on the "edge" of an object, it will leave unwanted faces on the side that should be open, and they'll have to be deleted and some vertices merged. It's maybe not that huge an amount of work if you're already used to cleaning that sort of thing up; but it's not very elegant. There are addons you can get that would make internal extrusions "clean" like this, but it would be awesome if Blender could do this by default!
 
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Aribeth Zelin

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Sheesh, I feel I'm still at like 2.82 or something...
 
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Kamilah Hauptmann

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I'll just put it here.

 

Dakota Tebaldi

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....do you see what I see....?
 
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