Software » Animation 3D » Blender 2.79b / 2.80 RC1

Blender 2.80 Release Countdown
A Release Candidate is the final step before the release. Blender has been built and packaged just like the official release, and is available for a short period of testing. Please download it and give it a good try. If things go as expected, the final release will be one week after.

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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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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Sculpt
Model
Animate
Edit & Grade

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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Random Colors
Colored Wireframes
Look Dev

Tools & Gizmos
The 3D viewport and UV editor have new interactive tools and gizmos, along with a new toolbar. These make it easier to 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
A set of simple yet functional controls will make 3D interaction fun again.
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
Rendering physically based hair and fur is now easier and no longer requires setting up a complex shader network.
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
The new Random Walk subsurface scattering method provides more accurate results for thin and curved objects.
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.

Principled Volume Shader
Bevel Shader
Ambient Occlusion Shader
Performance Optimizations
GPU+CPU Rendering
IES Lights
Disk Area Lights
Vector Displacement
...and more!
But Wait, There's More!

https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-80/

Photorealistic Rendering
Blender now features a powerful new unbiased rendering engine called Cycles that offers stunning ultra-realistic rendering.

The built-in Cycles rendering engine offers:

GPU & CPU rendering
Realtime viewport preview
HDR lighting support
Permissive License for linking with external software
Rendering in Blender with Cycles
Modeling in Blender
Fast Modeling
Blender’s comprehensive array of modeling tools make creating, transforming and editing your models a breeze.

Blender’s modeling tools include:

Keyboard shortcuts for a fast workflow
N-Gon support
Edge slide, collapse and dissolve
Grid and Bridge fill
Python scripting for custom tools and add-ons
Realistic Materials
With Blender’s new rendering engine the possibilities for materials are endless.

Key features are:

Complete Node Support for full customization
Physically accurate shaders like glass, translucency and SSS
Open Shading Language (OSL) support for coding unique shaders
Materials in Blender
Rigging in Blender
Fast Rigging
Transforming a model into a posable character has never been easier!

Blender offers an impressive set of rigging tools including:

Envelope, skeleton and automatic skinning
Easy weight painting
Mirror functionality
Bone layers and colored groups for organization
B-spline interpolated bones
Animation toolset
Whether it’s simple keyframing or complex walk-cycles, Blender allows artists to turn their still characters into impressive animations.

Blender’s animation feature set offers:

Automated walk-cycles along paths
Character animation pose editor
Non Linear Animation (NLA) for independent movements
IK forward/inverse kinematics for fast poses
Sound synchronization
rigging
Sculpting in Blender
Sculpting
Experience the joy of sculpting organic subjects using the built-in sculpting feature set of Blender.

Sculpting in Blender includes:

20 different brush types
Multi-res sculpting support
Dynamic Topology sculpting
Mirrored sculpting
Fast UV Unwrapping
Easily unwrap your mesh right inside Blender, and use image textures or paint your own directly onto the model.

Blender allows for:

Fast Cube, Cylinder, Sphere and Camera projections
Conformal and Angle Based unwrapping (with edge seams and vertex pinning)
Painting directly onto the mesh
Multiple UV layers
UV layout image exporting
UV Unwrapping in Blender
Compositing in Blender
Full Compositor
Blender comes with a fully fledged compositor built right in. That means no more exporting to third party programs, you can do it all without leaving the program.

The compositor comes with:

Impressive library of nodes for creating camera fx, color grading, vignettes and much more
Render-layer support
Full compositing with images and video files
Ability to render to multiLayer OpenEXR files
Multi-threaded
Amazing Simulations
Whether you need a crumbling building, rain, fire, smoke, fluid, cloth or full on destruction, Blender delivers great looking results.

Blender’s simulation tools include

Fluid – Realistic water and fluid simulations.
Smoke – Billowing smoke with flames and scene interaction.
Hair – Beautiful wafts of hair that blows in the wind and interacts with collisions.
Cloth – Amazingly realistic cloth simulations for clothing and environments
Rigid Body Physics – Makes any object destructable and collidable
Particles – For creating things like rain, sparks and shrapnel
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Blender Game Engine Screenshot
Game Creation
Included in Blender is a complete game engine, allowing you to create a fully featured 3d game right inside Blender.

The game engine includes:

Ability to port your models to any third-party game engine
Create or code your own game logic
Full Bullet Physics integration
Python scripting API for advanced control and AI
Support for all OpenGLTM dynamic lighting, toon shading, animated materials as well as Normal and Parallax Mapping
Playback of games inside Blender without compiling or preprocessing
3D spatial audio using OpenAL
Camera and Object tracking
Blender now includes production ready camera and object tracking. Allowing you to import raw footage, track the footage, mask areas and see the camera movements live in your 3d scene. Eliminating the need to switch between programs.

The Camera and Object Tracker includes:

Auto and manual tracking
Powerful camera reconstruction
Real-time preview of your tracked footage and 3d scene
Support for Planar tracking and Tripod solvers
Camera tracking in Blender
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Library of Extensions
With a large community of enthusiasts and developers, Blender comes loaded with a vast array of extensions that you can turn on or off easily.

Some existing extensions include:

Generators for trees, terrain, ivy and clouds.
Fracture Objects.
3D Printing Toolbox.
Rigify meta-rigging system.
Import and Export format support for AfterEffects, DirectX, Unreal Game Engine and more!
Plus many more that you can download here

Video Editing
Blender even comes with a built-in Video Editor.

The Video Editor allows you to perform basic actions like video cuts and splicing, as well as more complex tasks like video masking.

The Video Editor includes:

Live preview, luma waveform, chroma vectorscope and histogram displays
Audio mixing, syncing, scrubbing and waveform visualization
Up to 32 slots for adding video, images, audio, scenes, masks and effects
Speed control, adjustment layers, transitions, keyframes, filters and more.
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Exporting in Blender
File Formats
Blender comes packed with import/export support for many different programs.

Including:

Image
JPEG, JPEG2000, PNG, TARGA, OpenEXR, DPX, Cineon, Radiance HDR, SGI Iris, TIFF
Video
AVI, MPEG and Quicktime (on OSX).
3D
Alembic, 3D Studio (3DS), COLLADA (DAE), Filmbox (FBX), Autodesk (DXF), Wavefront (OBJ), DirectX (x), Lightwave (LWO), Motion Capture (BVH), SVG, Stanford PLY, STL, VRML, VRML97, X3D.
Flexible Interface
Novice and advanced users will love the ability to customize their layout completely. From simply splitting their viewport, to fully customizing it with python scripting, blender works for you.

Blender’s interface also offers:

Consistency across all platforms
No disruptive pop-up windows
Crisp text (support for retina on OSX)