5's alive!

 Yesterday's Internet issues looked like they would scupper all the releases. In the end, everything got released.

Blender 5.0 is now officially released, and I got it installed and braved bringing in 4.5 settings, saving me a considerable amount of time - providing it didn't break Blender. There were a couple of addon failures that got instant resolution:

Meshmachin3 tools and True Sky 2.x were both updated within minutes of installing Blender. All sorted. Phew! True Sky 2 didn't get much use because of the release of a brand-new version... see below.

Other addons may cause problems, but these can be tackled as and when they reveal themselves. Worst case: I'll delete and perform a complete fresh installation. 

True Sky 3 

The Internet disruption only slightly delayed the release. I came home late and purchased it in a bit of a rush. I didn't notice that my discount was accepted, but it wasn't applied, so I'm probably the only person to pay full price on day one. Superhive will hopefully resolve the issue. [Edit: They did, just a few hours later]

Early Test: 3 Cloud layers at 600 samples

What's it like?

First impressions. Oh boy! The evident capabilities of this addon are breathtaking. It's not an incremental update on version 2.0 that adds some improvements here and there; what you get is a completely rebuilt system that changes and improves everything.

Some things to hold in mind as the giddy superlatives fill the air: This is early access. There are some rough edges, some missing elements, and, most significantly to me, after a couple of hours, this is not like True Sky 2, where you turn it on and get a lovely base sky. This gives you a lot more control, and right now, it doesn't offer any defaults, so you have to attend to various settings. It's a shame that there isn't a mode that lets you run the addon in "simple mode", where it outputs to the True Sky 2 default setup. Being a from-the-ground-up rewrite, there's no attempt to read True Sky 2 scenes, so any old scenes that contain True Sky will need to be redone. Early access is what it is. Some things might be technically too difficult or impractical to implement, while other things might be added soon.

This is such a big change and complex... It's not complex; it's parameter-rich. There are so many parameters; there are countless ways to change the sky. Some are very direct and obvious, while others are ambiguous or extremely deep in the maths weeds. It's twenty steps forward, put a gentle push off the edge of a cliff.

I should do an episode of Blender School that performs a deep dive.