Another thing that hasn’t yet been brought up much is this. By the time the devs. manage to clean up BI and connect it back to Blender in a similar method to Cycles, features like light groups, halos, and stars could’ve already been added to Cycles or Eevee (but any NPR feature more likely goes to Eevee).
I also don’t know if the edge pass would even be needed in the near future if LANPR gets merged in, in many cases it’s like a far more powerful version of the old edge pass.
The way to go I think would be to convince the devs. to implement modern versions of features not brought over from BI. For instance, stars should be generated as a texture and the halos should be a true volumetric shader (or possibly as a volumetric texture type).
a justification for a proposed project or undertaking on the basis of its expected commercial benefit.
“we have to put a business case forward to the managers as to why the training is necessary”
The business case you think you are making has an expected commercial benefit to you not Blender or the Blender Foundation. With limited resources available to them, I am sure a sizable percentage, if not most users, would prefer the devs spend their time refining 2.8 and adding new features, rather than prop up a legacy renderer. If you don’t have the money to lay out for developers to do what you want then, frankly, you have to accept it. Or go with a commercial package that has the resources to provide such support to their paying customers. 2.79 will work fine for a long long time.
I don’t think Eevee can bake anything yet can it? That’s a pretty big hole in functionality.
Are you selling them animations or are you selling them feature parity because this doesn’t make a lot of sense. Customers don’t tend to care how you get stuff done as long as output is what is agreed to. Also since it apparently can’t be said enough around here: Blender 2.8 isn’t production ready. Blender 2.8 isn’t production ready. Blender 2.8 isn’t production ready.
New graphics cards are going to break in 2.79 releases(not builder) quite quickly, I think Nvidia’s already are.
Eevee can’t bake, but Cycles can. And they use the same material nodes. Cycles has some issues still with some types of bakes, but fixing those is on the roadmap.
I’ve switched to 2.80 for all my projects and I don’t miss BI at all. For a while the only advantage it had was NPR, but that is making good progress in EEVEE and LANPR. I haven’t found anything where I need BI or the project will be impossible.
I don’t understand why you’d care about the advantages of 2.80 in a BI project when most of the new features in 2.80 are Cycles or EEVEE related and won’t be of any benefit.
@sundialsvc4, you’re likely not going to get what you want here. However, if working in the updated environment of 2.80 is that important to you, have you considered working in 2.80, and rendering in 2.79 for these legacy projects?
And now you’re about to say, “It’s not backwards compatable, Cody! Duh!”
True! But you can still export to various formats and import to 2.79. I don’t know what type of work you do, but most disciplines (modeling, animating, layout, etc) have an export counterpart that can be reintagrated into your 2.79 scenes. Essentially, you treat 2.79 as a stand-alone 3rd party renderer within your pipeline.
Just a way you might not have thought to look at it.
This thread makes no sense to me: if your customers bought a video made with 2.7x, you can sell them updates done in 2.7x as well, all the technologies are already there, no need to change blender version.
The only thing code wise reasonable to ask is to have 2.8 files to open in 2.7x, so that you may work in 2.8 with all whistles and bells, and then open 2.7x shade and render
From time to time a video previously made is updated and this consists of adding or replacing shots within a larger presentation. I really don’t want to have to be "split’ between 2.79 and 2.8x and I also feel that it is unjustified to take BI completely out of the product.
Having pulled it out, clean it up and make it work consistently with the new interface model. Then, put it back in as an available option. It is still a very powerful and viable rendering technique, and there are a helluva lot of still-important [commercial …] Blender projects out there which use it and still need it.
No, now that I have Eevee and Workbench, I don’t plan to use BI in the future, but that is not my point.
Since Blender is free and portable versions are easy, it’s a really good idea to just store the version of Blender(and it’s configuration) you used for a production and then just use that for future updates to that. You never need to worry about what the current version of Blender is because when you go back to make those updates, you do it in the version that worked and produced what was required.
Just keep using 2.79 for any work on the project that’s already underway, and probably for other commercial projects too since 2.80 is still under heavy development. On the side, start learning 2.80 and once you have enough confidence in it, make the switch.
I think the chance of the BF backporting Blender Internal to 2.80 is zero.
It’s not that uncommon for people to split themselves between versions of an app, especially if the new version is a big overhaul that is not fully backwards compatible.
As hinted, there is perhaps a rationale for not having multiple versions of some commercial apps. installed at once because they leave files that interfere with each other, but many Blender users (on Windows at least) just download the builds as a .zip file, so 2.79 and 2.8 end up acting independent from each other. The only time you might have problems is if you load a 2.79 file in 2.8 with Load UI checked or you try to load a file saved in 2.8 with 2.79, but a smart user would initially save a 2.79 scene to a second .blend file to serve as the version in 2.8.
Officially the answer if you have existing work out there that was done in 2.79 stay on 2.79. If you want the new work you are going to have to migrate.
It is easy (ish) to rip out the renderer, it is another task to wrap it in a manner that it can be used again in a decoupled way. The word from Ton Roosendaal, who wrote it in the first place, is that the code was 25 years old
This feels very similar to the python2 → python3 move. It was assumed that people would migrate to python3 over time. It original EOL for python2 was 2015, that had to be bumped 5 years because there was so much legacy work deployed that it was not considered feasible to sunset python2.
At the moment blender 2.80 has not been officially released, so technically the clock on the 2.79 → 2.80 has not even started yet. However with all the news in the past year about how blender is finding it way into commercial tv and movie production it may begin to rattle out how hard / expensive or unready it is for people to migrate.
So the question for the OP and anybody who gets paid for work that they use blender for. If you want Blender Internal, how much is it worth to you or how much will it cost you? If you are either stuck on 2.79 and can’t take advantage of new features in 2.80 or you must take the time out to migrate to 2.80, it has an associated cost. Would you take that money and put it towards and effort to port Blender Internal? If so, how much? a $10, a $100 a $1000?
As an FYI this is the definition for a business case:
a justification for a proposed project or undertaking on the basis of its expected commercial benefit
I politely advance the thought that "it is simply another renderer." Yes, it is one that has a ompletely different concept of materials and textures, which means that many things about the interface would change substantially when you picked it. I don’t link it with BGE. Neither do I link it with the clunky interface that was used to reach it.
Seems to me the issue isn’t the renderer itself but the lack of features that you need in 2.80 that were tied to the BI in pre-2.8. Unfortunately that’s the price of progress. The BF has limited resources and propping up 25 year old code just isn’t feasible especially when the issue is adding some of BI’s features to EEVEE or Cycles.
Cycles and EEVEE are superior to the BI, they are modern, and they are maintained. If the OP wants the BI back it’s just not going to happen, what they should be focusing on is getting the features from the BI that they want in EEVEE and Cycles. That will still mean some work on the OPs part to port, but that is the price of progress.
