he’s just planning ahead for when he ragequits and his username is turned into anon###### after his posts are anonimized.
see GCHarb’s old posts, as an example. He’s now username @anon54214979
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Simple: Transparency.
After all, Ton & Co. from the beggining were always transparent with what they wanted vs what people wanted (In the beginning Ton always wanted his fully interactive artistic tool from the future™, and people wanted edit mode n-gons and better tools) so they started announcing projects, in the old forum in the pre 2.6 era and in their developer page in the 2.8 era. As example: EEVEE was planned for work in 2016, but you know, was deemed ready only in 2018-2019. Most GSOC funded by google didn’t reach master until several years (Freestyle integration took years, LANPR i think this is the 2nd or 3rd year of development) and so.
And now, people are starting donating to the BF in a big fashion. Ton & Co. (or nowadays: Sidi-Felinto & Co.) just want to be transparent to everyone, donating or not. Because ultimately, they want (and for the most part have) this thing called TRUST. And even if some projects are delayed or take far more time than estimated, they are getting where they can call “ready for production”.
Some people (like you, for what i’ve read) might not like it, but to everyone it’s own.
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So Blender 3.0 is slated for September.
I guess I will put off recording my lectures for next semester starting in September then 
I hope some of the remaining UI inconsistencies will be solved.
Teaching Blender last semester was a blast with the better getting UI.
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Blender 3.0 is going to be the conclusion of a significantly longer release cycle than usual, and I believe one of the reasons for it is to give time for Cycles X to be a part of it (that is not to mention the possible inclusion of other major optimization pushes such as in editmode and sculptmode, and to give the Asset Manager more time to debut as a highly robust system).
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The asses manager will help students a lot with managing materials - they really look forward to it
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Unless you’re teaching advanced info that rely on the newest features I don’t see a need to wait. I used 2.79 videos to teach a friend 2.80 and later when he was stuck on a much older laptop I explained 2.80+ tutorial videos to him in a 2.79 compatible fashion. The basics aren’t really all that different across the versions.
Will it actually do this?
As far as I’ve heard from the Cycles X introduction and the Blender.today’s that mentioned it, Cycles X is scheduled for Blender 3.1 release.
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Maybe, maybe, being 2.93 shifted, there’s time to make cyclesX ready for Blender 3.0
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Thinking logically the number of potential differences between cycles x and old cycles even if it’s just one or two things, but Major things, is enough reason to not include it until version 4.0 … or wait a very long time to deliver it in 3.0.
What I don’t get is why they’re not taking advantage of the fact that Cycles is a plugin. It should literally be called “Cycles X” and ship along with “Cycles” in the Blender download. This way if there’s any problems people can still go back to the old Cycles without having to go back to an older Blender.
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Because multiple Cycles versions would need to be supported, increasing the maintenance requirements.
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Theoretically, they could maintain the Cycles version of the LTS versions and the most recent point release afterwards. they still have to maintain the old versions for the LTS anyways. Atleast then you could update cycles a few months after the point release and the devs could schedule specifically for Cycles (with additional overhead for users in case they want to update, that is).
But they don’t have to deal with API incompatibilities and don’t have to consider multiple versions in there. That’s usually not a big deal, except if major changes are introduced. It simply introduces bugs and takes more time to maintain.
It is doable for sure, but they obviously decided that it is not worth it. Likely also because you can always use older Blender versions to use older Cycles versions.
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To me, the point of it is a dynamic GI.
Currently, in official release, GI is baked for no more than one frame.
That is disappointing to wait a baking time to put no more than one frame in cache.
I prefer to bake Cycles GI than to waste time setting up light probes for one frame.
All of those announcements are looking like following EEVEE’s spirit of speed and ease of use.
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Agreed, the whole point of Eevee is to be a less accurate, yet extremely fast, high quality render engine for everything from previews to animations. If you want fully accurate and unbiased shading and lighting, that is what Cycles is for (which itself is getting major improvements with Cycles X).
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You missed one little update on the latest rendering meeting notes (25th of May) where Brecht said:
3.0 release is likely to move a few months later, so Cycles X might be ready in time for that.
Source:
In the Cycles X announcement thread, they said it’s a 6 month project (with them already spending the first 2 months on the current alpha build, with the current 3 months release cycle, that would make Cycles X not ready for 3.0, hence why they postponed 3.0 a few months to make it in time, and because they didn’t specify exactly how many months of delay, they can take as much time they need for 3.0.
That way they have enough big guns for 3.0 “marketing”, something like this:
Hey look interested ppl ! this is Blender 3.0 the beginning of a new era !
- Cycles X rewritten from scratch to meet today’s new hardware advances.
- Better, Faster, shinier, you name it !
- EEVEE 2.0 also rewritten from scratch.
- This & that.
- Go on with all the flurry of new and improved features.
Bam Bam Bam ! turn a few heads, annoy the competition, attract more dev fund, etc
If they kept the current 3 months cycles (at least for 3.0) it would have come out like this:
Duh, here is what we could cram in 3 months worth of development, see you later for 3.1…
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And SSGI will do nothing to address that for most scenes. You still need the baked irradiance probes or else you will get temporal instability whenever bright surfaces appear on camera. Some scenes will work, but it’ll be fiddly at best.
Temporal instability won’t matter for stills, but then, if you’re only rendering one frame, you might as well use cycles, it won’t really be that much slower.
Why is this a waste of time ?
Because like all screen space effects, it has issues that can’t be solved - mostly in that it’s temporally unstable. It’s a thing that belongs in a game engine with a 16ms frametime budget, not in Eevee. There are a number of GI techniques that would fit Eevee much better.
Traditionally the Blender devs stayed away from such problematic techniques, and rightly so. This is uncharacteristic of them.
I’m only thankful it won’t be a big waste of time since it’s mostly already implemented.
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What are they?
I don’t know what the best GI solution for eevee is, but the volumetric probe based solution we have right now is pretty much the worst. It’s slow, awkward to setup, and prone to many artifacts. Having anything more than what we have now would be a big improvement.
I don’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good though, and pushing back against what we could be getting because it isn’t the best thing seems like a great way to keep us stuck with the volumetric probe based GI we have for years to come.
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