Blender 2.8 has finally ready for release, it's first release candidate arrived last week. It'd been saying for a while that once 2.8 arrived, I would return to the world of 3D modelling creativity. And so I have.
My feelings from the first few hours:
The difference between 2.79 and 2.8 is vast. Development on 2.8 has been ongoing for nearly half a decade, so this really is a whole new version of Blender. Blender founder, Ton Roosendaal has said that he felt that shifting the number to 3.0 would have felt dishonest, or at least a breach of trust. It's a noble attitude, although what the hell can they deliver to justify the jump to 3.0 after refreshing and updating almost everything?
Some very foundational interactions have been changed, the most obvious is the shift to left-click selection, a complete reversal on the previous default. Many users have argued against the change but I remember two times I downloaded Blender to try out and gave up after 5 minutes because I didn't know it reversed the left-click/right-click convention used by EVERY OTHER Windows application. The UI refresh is outstanding - I used to do a lot of mucking around, creating customer layouts, I no longer feel the need to as there are built-in layouts that provided obvious UI modifications for working on a particular area, such as UV editing.
I got a bit frustrated because I couldn't add an array around a fixed point of rotation -- which I soon realised was a flashback to 3DS Max. The solution was only a Youtube tutorial away, although Blender makes the job fairly convoluted.
More soon!
