2.80 almost ready what will Blender 2.81 bring?

General Forums Blender Development Discussion
21

Severin is right. The mule was overloaded.
I am happy to see that they all agree on the idea of “technical debt”.

Pressing a button and what is supposed to happen does not happen. Hiding button is just not a solution. If button was created, it was to be used. So, it is obvious that somebody’s workflow is impacted by that.

There is a temptation of denial of reality in developers world, sometimes. “If I can’t fix something, I will try to remove it. If nobody complains, today or during the week, that means that nobody uses it. One or two users are complaining, two weeks later. That is not so many people. They are conservative and don’t want to evolve. Then, months later, there are several dozen of users that are complaining.”
That attitude changes to “I put the thing on stand by status.”

I was not surprised that 2.80 was not delivered in 2018.
That is a coherent idea to refactor many big areas of Blender, at same moment, to install a coherence between them. I think that communication went well between developers. It is normal to confront developers and users point of views and to go through an iterative process to obtain that coherence.
Here, the denial was to proclaim that process will end-up after 6 months when it took 2 years for a stable 2.5 that did not contain so many tools.

I was surprised to how smooth feedback process went in last quarter of 2018.
At that moment, several wrong ideas were purged by users feedback. And, at same moment, technical debt relative to 2.8 designs started to accumulate itself. But 2.8 beta stayed mainly usable.

I did not really understand result of Homestretch in May. IMO, some UI changes pushed away 2.80 a little bit more, bugs were weirdly prioritized and importance of technical debt was probably underestimated, at that moment.
There are lots of bugs in bugtracker with a normal priority. When few conditions are just slightly different from default scene without being uncommon or rare conditions at all, a button, a feature just doesn’t work anymore.
Although, that makes 2.8 unreliable on many areas, it is incredible popular and many people are telling that they are using it exclusively. On many areas, 2.8 design is reducing technical debt of previous releases.

IMO, situation is going a lot better than during 2.5 as Jeroen said.
There will probably be some things that will force some users to keep 2.79 during a significant period. But if technical debt is significantly reduced in 2.81, only several months after 2.80 ; that will be impressive.
Clearly, they are talking about serious topics and long-term tasks that could not be solved in 2.81 and that could considered as technical debt older than 2.8.
So, I don’t expect 2.81 to solve every issues.
But I really expect that everything possible in 2.79, will be possible in 2.81.
That when user press a button, it simply does what it was introduced for.

I hope they can quantify technical debt, quickly.
I hope they can build a roadmap for 2.8 series that would satisfy users. If it means that release cycle should take more time, I think they should not hesitate to go to a 3,4 or 6 months cycle.

22

From the mailing list thread, it seems the developer don’t think the tools system is being used and may have been a waste of time.

Perhaps it would be useful to actually make a pool in ba and confirm. Otherwise the Dev’s may start neglecting that part of blender going forward.

Also for those who actually use it they can explaine there workflow and how the tools system could be improved

23

I do hope that for 2.81, developers will add the ability to Select and use the Transform Tools at the same time, using the toolbar on the left :

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24

There are thousands of ways to use Blender. Here, they are just saying that artists at Blender Institute have to deliver productions and they can’t do it quickly with 2.8 because 2.8 is lacking some tools.
So, they don’t use 2.8 on productions that are not open movies.
That does not mean that tools in 2.8 are not well designed or unnecessary.
That just means that set of tools at disposal in 2.8 is not sufficient for BI artists.
It does not mean that is not sufficient for everyone.

25

They were talking about the new tools system made by Campbell, the one you activate from the sidebar. They are saying that it was not used (self correction : much) at all during spring production and the animators didnt think it was useful for animation work .they were not talking about all blender tools in general

Who are we making Blender for?

With 2.8x and the introduction of tools,
it strikes me that artists at the Blender Institute are not using it much
(just my impression, maybe this changes over time).

This is a good point. I know for a fact that the animators aren’t using the new tool system at all, because it doesn’t make sense to them – the “tools” as introduced in 2.8 are conceptually incompatible with the animation tools they need. Tools for them are things like the pose library (+the pose thumbnails add-on), selection sets, the Blenrig control panel, and tools in the dopesheet editor. The tabbed T-panel had space for the tools they need, but that’s been removed with the promise of something better. Only, that “something better” hasn’t arrived yet and also hasn’t even been presented yet.

26

its called asset wizard

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Toolbar is dedicated to active tool concept with left click. Conceptually, transform tools are not different than ones present in 2.79. But animators are used to push buttons to confirm, to lock, to change a status of a bone. William agreed that toolbar should accept more things than just active tools.
So, it is partially true that some animation tools will not fit active tools concept.
That does not mean they don’t have their place in toolbar or that active tool concept have to be questioned.

To sum-up : addons. So, animators are complaining about unavailable addons.

It is true. T column is no more referring to buttons or properties of addons.
Now, an addon tab is added to N sidebar. (what is weird is that he is mentioning addons that don’t use toolbar in 2.79, either). That does not mean that is an ideal solution.
But that does not invalidate concept of only icon buttons in toolshelf, properties in sidebar, small menus in header, gizmos in 3D Views and tool options in topbar to work in a 3D Viewport that is less cluterred.
If only, it was just UI of addons that have to be refactored to take into account this concept.
He forgot to say that widgets using face maps was a promise for animators.

Work on UI is needed to give quick access to buttons to animators.
IMO, putting buttons inside popovers does not make sense.
The ones from Playback or keying set popovers should be directly accessible into a toolbar or a header or a topbar.
There are only 3 tools relative to pose mode into toolbar and they are grouped instead of being directly accessible.

That does not mean that present UI have to be thrown into the canal with bathwater.

That means that ability to customize a workspace for a workflow implies work to set-up this customization.

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28

Thanks Taholmes. :slight_smile: I went hunting for it and found that right here at BA:

I’ll install it and see if it works for me.

29

to be fair Blender animators probably use only hotkeys in their work as it’s faster to do things that way & even 2.79 keymap or so, the toolbar really doesn’t add much for them since the only extra tool for pose mode is “the breakdowner” but the grease pencil team probably used the new tool system extensively, so maybe more tools will be added for the 3d animators in the future.

30

From the developers notes i see there is great attention for a stable blender versions, 3 month cycle release might be to narrow as some opted here.
To me major releases, or daily builds do mostly the same job, most of the time i use the daily builds for work. (i’m a frequent downloader) sometimes it wont work, often it works a few days later, i dont see that as a problem but rather a fast growth. And i prefer seeing growth then seeing a blocking slow development path.

There are automated test tools for code, using them can reduce a lot of problems. Me as a blender user find blender almost too stable currently :wink: not afraid for a hang once in while, and i wouldnt mind if cycles would get a bit more complex to configure, all blender users becomme technical eventually so no need to over simplify. currently lots of attention goes to the GUI, maybe time to think about expansion GUI can still later be changed tuned (it wont stay forever like this, i guarantee, so why bother)

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31

The active tool system has some use in the form of the loopcut tool, the spin tool, and the box select tool at least. Having the spin tool being tweakable from a graphical standpoint is extremely useful and being able to do many loopcuts in succession is nice.

Still, the tool system could be improved, we need the mouse wheel tweaking of loopcut slices back for instance. It’s also a bit slower to actually get the 3D cursor to where you need it, because placing it is itself a tool.

For much of everything else, I still use the menu entries or the hotkeys. The tool system would still have a lot of utility for allowing the graphically-based tweaking of more complex operators that have a lot of tweaking options after the fact.

32

Jacques Lucke has been given (it seems) time to work almost eclusively on the everything nodes project, during a bugfixes only development period, indicating that they might look at introducing a first iteration early in the 2.8x cycle.

Not saying this will happen for 2.81, but it´s looking very promising, and Jacques is already making a lot of progress with Particle nodes, meaning the underlying system is already in an advanced state. If they go for 3-4 moths release cycle for 2.81, that would mean feature freeeze late sptember/early october

He´s a coding machine :slight_smile:

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33

He well he was the original coder of blender games, so its wise to let him in charge of it and not be working on other work, (make wise use of each others specialism).

34

Maybe if some of those tools got a bit more advanced, ea array modifier with a simple way to put things in a circle (we can put things in a circle, but if we could simply say how many and how much of a circle degree could be easier) In fact i use those tools quite a lot. …or is this not what they mean?

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35

thats a different guy i forgot his name. that other guy is working on the interactive mode, althogh he seemes to have gone quite . hopfully he is just waiting for the function branch to mature so he can use it to make the interactive mode

36

*and a few weeks later …Magicabula Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo!*
€ 66732 / month = almost 10 Developers
this means that theoretically blender 2.81 / next cyclic year will have the double workforce of blender 2.80 …
let me dream of the moon here … heheh

at € 100k / month
20 Developers

guys go wild with your imagination and the shopping list, I’m too curious here …

37

Ok, here are 3 projects for 2.8x I’m looking forward to see how will be developed & implemented :

  • Asset Manager (including integration with online resources)

  • Everything Nodes (how will nodes and the modifier stack be combined ?)

  • Templates/Blender 101. One of the targets for the 2.8 codequest campaign, but have taken the back seat to get 2.80 across the finish line.

As part of the last project I’m curious if Julian Eisel’s bWidgets toolkit (or something similar) will be implemented, so Blenders UI can be more simple to maintain and customize.
And one thing I hope for in the future, is a Blender UI with that added option to drag & drop editors/panels around the interface (something Julian Eisel, for one, also seems to think is a good idea).

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38

I hope 2.81 will bring enhancements for the curve tool :

https://blender.community/c/today/2fdbbc/

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39

Not 10 developers but 12 to 15 developers , 10 devs was if the fund reach 50.000euros but as you can see the fund it’s way bigger now :wink:

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40

there is a thread in the mailing list about the developers intentions for 2.81 and it is jam packed with all kind of features link allot of patches are planed to go in hopefully performance work too, brecht is talking about it briefly

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