It’s true, they have decided for two reasons …
the new is advanced, and the old blender internal was too much spaghetti monster to get real profit by keep it … (same reason for the cut of the blender game engine) so they decided to cut it short and exclude it from blender 2.8
having said that, I remain convinced that a half straightened to convert the effects of the old blender’s shaders in internal to similar effects in eevee / cycles could be a useful way, and it would be a good compromise to satisfy the most …
That add-on works fine but it requires some manual adjustment if you use masking and multiple textures mixing in a Blender Render material. I don’t think the developers will reinstate the BR or GE, but there are plans for the future, so stay tuned!
Having two Blenders that use similar formats but are non-interchangable is becoming a nightmare on my end.
It seems so easy, somehow 2.8 should import blender internal mats/tex as simple default nodes.
I can’t implore you enough to understand why this is important.
I must support two versions of blender now for all of my plugins because 2.8 loses BI shader data.
I must keep 2.79 installed at all times, because 2.8 can not open legacy .blends (which account for almost 99% of all .blends in existence).
My webserver uses headless blender to open and process files, I now need run both 2.79 and 2.8 and an overly complicated method to feed the proper file to the proper program.
All because 2.8 abandons the data related to BI shaders. Which makes it impossible to use 2.8 without also maintaining 2.79, serves to only hinder the adoption of 2.8.
As of now, Blender 2.8 has better support for .obj materials than it does it’s own legacy format.
Which is a damn shame.
Could someone please add some kind of default BI conversion??? PLEASE!
Most likely backwards compatibility was not included because the BI code was a massive headache for maintenance. Because of how blendfiles are stored on disk, support for reading old BI materials would probably have meant leaving a significant amount of that code in blender. This was obviously not an easy decision for the blender devs, but was necessary to be able to keep growing and maintaining blender.
2.79 is still there and perfectly usable. If you want to use 2.8, you’ll need to convert before opening in 2.8, its that simple. Trying to juggle work across both versions is always going to introduce headaches.
exactly my thoughts…
i have the same problem here, and have dozens of highly detailed models on wich i worked for months sometimes… if i have to retexture them all i’ll probably be dead before i can start a new model.
and who said you cant make realistic renders in BI?.. people keep telling me that cycles produces more realistic renders…
i dont agree with that at all… cycles takes forever to render, and the result is way more grainy than the BI renders on my system…
instead of continuously learning new things, maybe you should try to get the best out of the old before grabbing the new…
anyway, im suprised to see how many people still use BI… i thought i was the last one fidling with the good old BI…
maybe they should reconsider removing the BI engine… remove cycles instead, thats a pile of crap anyway… slow and complicated…
I know of a lot of people who MUST still use the internal shaders. They are the Unity community, included myself.
The Blender dev’s forgot how the “open-source” nature of Blender actually inspired many companies to invest time in tailoring their software to depend on certain core functionality that was “at the time” considered to be the foundation of Blender it’s self.
So to properly use Unity/Blender together was by using an ‘.fbx’ as the model and the ‘.blend’ for shader information. But in 2.8+ it is impossible as nodes are just way too complex for basic inter-application design, and Blender’s internal shaders were excellently suited for just such a case.
I’m sorry to say but Blender has evolved into a beast (though be it a good one), but has just shed a skin making it into something completely differnt. Blender 2.8 is not “Blender” anymore and should be re-named (including the .blend file extension!!!). To .blend2 for instance, to avoid confusion.
BI is only clean and fast if you do not make any use of its distributed raytracing features like soft shadows and blurry reflections. Once you make heavy use of the raytracing, your render becomes slower than it would be in Cycles without caustics and with the denoiser active.
2.8 will still be in beta for two months yet, give it time. A number of addons are still to be ported and we must not forget that all of the major game engines now offer node-based shading. To note, I would think the future of exporters would read node trees and generate a tree in the engine on export.
That’s a great idea, let’s neuter Blender’s rendering ability to the point where you would get better results making your scene in Unity, Unreal, and even Godot. The concept of a render engine that is fast and clean in exchange for bias (ie. for purposes like animation) is why Eevee exists.
Take a hard look at any image in the forum gallery and tell me those scenes can render out with the same result in BI.
@francozero
““maybe they should reconsider removing the BI engine… remove cycles instead, thats a pile of crap anyway… slow and complicated…””
I was always lead to believe that ‘Cycles ray tracer’ was considered to be among the finest of naturally accurate techniques in the rendering engine universe. And with abundant processing ability, an artist who uses ray tracing (like the Cycles engine) can prevail over any other rendering technique in the category of visual realism. If that is true then please keep Cycles around!
i always use ray tracing for all my projects, its the only way to go… but BI is still lightning fast compared to cycles.
i never liked cycles and i never will. and i agree with people saying that without BI, blender isn’t blender anymore… they should’ve made it a different program all together and leave blender as is…
but hey, the answer is simple… i just keep improving my work in 2.79 and forget they ever released 2.80. i’m not gonna start all over again and trow away years of work.
so, in the future we probably get 2 blender communities… 1 for 2.80 (and later), and the “old blender” group. therefor they might as well have released 2.80 as a new program and leave blender alone…
what is blender without the blender engine anyway… a freak imo.
It doesn’t matter what kind of result can be produced with Blender Internal, because the decision to remove it was based on technical reasons.
For programmers it became increasingly more difficult to work with it and to maintain it. For Sintel, they started to modernize it, but decided it was not worth it to introduce the changes into the official version. That’s for sure one of the central reasons why Cycles was even started.
Just leaving Blender Internal within Blender in this major update was not an option because of several reasons.
There were no plans to enhance or improve it. Keeping it as a official renderer when you don’t even want to maintain it would be dishonest and potentially lots of people would waste time to learn it.
Blender Internal was (too) tightly integrated into Blender and it became a burden when Eevee was added. It would have taken additional work to just disentangle and reintegrate Blender Internal again just to keep it alive. With this sort of work, there is usually a high risk to break at least some old files, which leads again to more work on an abandoned engine.
If you feel that Blender without Blender Internal isn’t Blender anymore, that’s okay, I totally understand that. This sort of decision can not be made based on nostalgic reasons or feelings. To keep software alive, it has to be modernized, it has to use newer techniques. Otherwise, people are not going to use it anymore. Because of this, it is sometimes necessary to let old stuff go.
blender isn’t blender anymore… they should’ve made it a different program all together and leave blender as is…
If they made it a separate program it would just be a name change. 2.79 is not going away and Blender Foundation can develop both 2.79 and 2.80. They have to make choices and can’t make everyone happy.
so, in the future we probably get 2 blender communities… 1 for 2.80 (and later), and the “old blender”
I would expect the 2.79 community to be very small to the point of being insignificant. I have not jumped to 2.80 yet, but I will at some point. EEVEE is a much bigger addition to blender than BI is a loss. Blender now has an amazing realistic renderer and an amazing real time renderer.
I bet you could recreate a lot of your work in EEVEE and benefit from real time performance. It will take some learning but if you don’t want to learn anything new, you will be left behind anyway.
all that doesn’t matter to me at all… just because hair looks better in cycles doesn’t mean they have to evolve their program around just that…
you say people would have wasted their time learning BI?.. well imo that’s exactly what we have now isn’t it?.. many people HAVE wasted their time with blender because now they decide to drop it…
but like i said before… to me it doesn’t matter anymore as i have made up my mind and change blender for a real 3D program like solidworks… blender 2.80 will never be on my system as it is a freak imo…
2.80 to me is like having a lambo of wich i removed the lambo engine to swap it for a ford engine just because it would be smoother to handle in the city… maybe it does, but it wouldn’t be a lambo anymore…
i’ll just keep working with 2.79 untill i found a replacement for blender that can handle the blend files i have. then i will get rid of blender all together…
just because blender is free doesn’t mean we have to like every change they add to the program… i’ll go for a paying version of a 3D program, that manages to keep its identity and its original engine… that way i don’t have to get nervous with every update…
You are mentioning plenty of subjective reasons, which is totally fine.
But there is absolutely no reason to believe you need to “get nervous with every update”. Pretty much all versions are backward and forward compatible to ensure you are able to open your files across different versions of Blender. For 2.80, they made it very clear early on that this isn’t going to be the case.
Claiming that you would need to get nervous with every update is totally unjustified.
They can’t please everyone, it’s still a small team of developers. it’s sad that blender looses some users by dropping BI, but I am sure there will be many more gained with 2.8
