I’m working on a project and needed to look up how to collage a shots into a single view because I forgot how to do so. And when I looked up at the top of the page, I almost dropped the drink I had in my hand. The last time I’d checked Blender for updates, it was only at version 2.83. Somehow we’ve jumped from 2.8 to 2.92 in less than a year, which is way faster then I’ve ever seen a version increment. I looked over at my other screen where I was working and saw my version of 2.77a and just sort of nervously chuckled. And it made me wonder if I’m the only one still using a four year old version of Blender.
I still use 2.7 because I don’t like the interface when modelling for 2.8, though I render in 2.8 (and I guess soon 2.9?) for my final renders. How many of you still keep using older versions of Blender as well, and what’s your reasoning for doing so?
i keep older versions on my system for specific cases, such as 2.76 for a specific build of animation nodes that some demo files / test I have used and I either don’t know how to, or can’t, convert to the latest version.
Other things there are older addons which I use so keep for them. Mainly now though, I’m operating in 2.91 with 2.83 as my secondary test bed.
Can you be more precise on what you dislike ?
There is no chance that will be fixed if nobody complains about it.
I followed the whole 2.8/2.9 development. Some complaints are legitimate.
And others can be solved, simply, by changing a default.
For example, I dislike the Adjust Last Operator panel. It is outside of toolbar. So, it takes more space.
And it can’t be placed, elsewhere. It is stuck to bottom left corner of editor.
But about X-ray display in Solid mode, you just have to set X-ray slider value to one to retrieve same display as in 2.7. You can use 2.7 keymap. You can hide Tool Settings bar, etc…
its 2.74 for me, and im just now occasionally working with 2.78 (upbge things)
not gonna get into the specifics, but mainly 2.8+ just doesnt feel good (not for lack of trying). everything is needlessly complex. even when first learning blender, it was rough until i figured out the underlying system, then it was a down hill joyride from there. i even learned to code a few tweaks to the ui.
but the new one feels like how people talk about max (or was it maya?).
even before 2.8, the bevel modifier change was one of the reasons i stayed on 2.74. but the bge is still the main reason why 2.74 is king (for me).
2.78 here, and no plan to switch.
I have 2.83 installed too, for some specifical addons that don’t work on older Blender anymore, but I really dislike the new development.
More clicks for the same task is a step back.
Not being backwards compatible is a step back.
Painful procedures to bake simple textures and export objects to .fbx and the like is a big step back.
Dropping blender internal is a big step back.
I don’t need Cycles nor Eevee for my work, so I don’t see a single reason to switch.
I have few old blender versions installed. 2.49, 2.77, 2.79. I love to model and rig in 2.79. Other blender versions I’m using for old plugins which don’t work for newer blender versions. Also newer blender has no BGE - bad! So no reason for me to switch.
I’m still clutching to the faint hope that the “Blender Internal” renderer will be overhauled and re-introduced because this is really the only thing that’s forcing me to keep older versions around. I never agreed with the decision to excommunicate this engine from the Blender roster, and I would still like to see it returned … after receiving a well-earned makeover.
its drop dead simple. it might not look the best, but its very easy to do a wide variety of crazy things. eevee is much too over done, too many settings to remember
One of the biggest problems for me is screen real estate and time between actions. While I admit I can remove much of the new extraneous stuff from the 2.8 interface, Blender 2.7’s interface is much much smaller and with less time spent using it. 2.8 carries over many of the keyboard shortcuts 2.7 has (as 2.7 did all the way back to 2.5), but the time spent scrolling down or pulling out trays at the side of the workspace has increased. I already spend twenty to thirty hours at a time in 2.77a modelling things for animation, and while adding another hour or so overall to that doesn’t seem like much, it can mean the difference between getting something done before time runs out or not.
In my workflow I often have a pen in my hand for sculpting certain things with my tablet, and that complicates things as I only have my thumb and pinky free on that hand. I end up having unnecessary keystrokes in 2.8 that were no problem in 2.7 even with my pen in my hand. Moving the modelling, view, and texture painting layouts to tabs at the top is one such example where there’s unnecessary key strokes. Layouts don’t need dedicated tabs. Shading especially doesn’t need a dedicated tab, because it’s a coin toss as to whether or not it’s used for me as I mostly rely on the older method of materials and in-scene lighting instead of nodes to reduce render time. I liked the old dropdown menu within the window bar that took up less space because it could be placed at the bottom where I could just click it and then hit the arrow keys to move down before pressing Enter to confirm. I’m not sure how to do something similar in 2.8 as of right now. I’m used to pressing Z to get an immediate wireframe so I can check the silhouette and see if the mesh is intersecting itself. In 2.8 pressing Z instead brings up a radial menu that requires me to shift my hand all the way over to the arrow keys and press the Left Arrow. I know I can change the bindings to be something closer (and I did), but that ends up being an hour or two switching all kinds of bindings, and then days or weeks of finding conflicts or physically awkward combinations afterwards that you need to fix.
Moving all the stuff that was at the window bars into the window itself also makes things messy, especially if the scene is complex. When watching animation paths in the viewport sometimes I lose track of small objects because the UI that’s overlaid onto the actual workspace gets in the way. It’s nothing that’s caused major errors because most of the time I catch it when I move the viewport to a different angle, but it’s still annoying.
Plus the lack of bounding box display. Sometimes I want to check the timing on a scene to make sure it lines up with other effects like particles and sound cues. But in complex scenes I have to waste time hiding objects to bring up the framerate in viewport, and if the viewport can’t hit the required 24FPS or 60FPS I need, then doing a short 240p shadeless test render before going back and tweaking animations on the timeline and then do this again and again because I couldn’t just see things as a bounding box. That is the main reason honestly why I can’t stand 2.8 and is a massive deterrent to me to actually modelling and animating in it.
couldnt have said it better. its like its become a game with time sinks. not even going to mention the startup time. no its not “slow”, but compared to 2.74 it feels like ages…
Internal forever, unless I need bells and whistles, which I don’t.
Setting a material with nodes is so painfully slow and unintuitive that the old cumbersome workflow with the need to make image textures active opening them in the UV editor is a breeze.
I really don’t appreciate losing my time with point and click, hate it.
Will I need an physically accurated render one day? Maybe. But I wouldn’t go for Cycles, which I consider slow and noisy.
That is clearly not the expected effect of new UI.
I complained during months against William’s choices.
But I had to concede that, for new comers, things are more readable that way.
They are more arranged. We have to get used to names of all new stuff added.
But honestly, complexity comes from increase of properties and tools. Not from the choices to keep only one setting per line and remove unfortunate abbreviations.
Yes. 2.8 is more complex. But that is also because it is more powerful.
You may not need some of new stuff that was added.
But if you need them, you are happy to have them.
I can understand that seems a lot of stuff to learn to ignore.
But that is not needlessly more complex for everybody.
Looking to release notes, it looks like Bevel modifier’s UI is the same in 2.74 and 2.79.
There were lots of improvements to BGE in 2.75 and 2.76.
So, BGE explanation is a logical explanation if that brokes something.
But Bevel modifier’s reason does not work since 2.90.
In 2.90, UI of modifiers has been rethought. Now, it contains 3 subpanels that are closed by default.
So, by default Bevel modifier is exposing less setting than in 2.74.
Unfortunately, that is inevitable when you change the basic structure of what you are refactoring.
You can write a way for to 2.8 to convert 2.79 layers into 2.8 collections.
But that would be too much work to rewrite 2.79 to handle 2.8 blend files that are containing collections.
That would have slow down 2.8/2.9 development too much.
I agree that baking of textures and texture workflow was underestimated during design discussions.
And I wish this lack will be disappear with 2.93.
Blender Internal was abandoned, not excommunicated.
If there were developers interested and available to pursue it, it would have stay.
Brecht lost interest in Blender Internal. He left, created Cycles on his side.
And Ton convinced him to continue to develop Cycles as an official addon of Blender.
But the last people involved in improvements of Blender Internal were Blend4Web guys.
So, no more BGE, no more interest in Blender Internal, too.
I disagree.
Its material has lots of options to deal with exceptions.
EEVEE’s material has only one Settings panel to tweak Transparency, SSS and Refraction exceptions.
A Blender Internal material has a panel for Transparency, a Mirror panel, a SSS panel, a Shading panel, a Shadow panel and an Options panel.
Its material nodes are really a lot more complex to use and less powerful than EEVEE/Cycles ones.
Its texture stack is tricky to deal with.
With EEVEE/Cycles, you just have to plug desired texture into desired slot of Principled Shader.
They are doing the same things and more with less settings to tweak.
The only things that Blender Internal can do that EEVEE/Cycles can’t do are : baking to vertex colors, baking displacement maps, baking derivative maps, light linking and alternative ways to render particles.
Yes. Only one setting per row implies a longer list.
And currently, there is no workaround. We have to scroll (Page Up, Page Down can help) or to do extra clicks for Solo Mode (Ctrl click on header of a panel).
There is room for improvement.
Synchronization with outliner is allowing to reorder modifier stack with smallest moves.
And we have shortcuts to manage modifiers.
I hope to succeed to convince developers to introduce a snapping of Properties editor, in order to have a properties editor always displaying top of properties and another one always displaying bottom of properties. That way, we could restore a 2 column layout of properties.
You are free to remove unused workspaces from your start-up file and customize those that you use as you want.
Yes. It is no more an Info Editor that can be placed, anywhere.
Topbar is fixed and can be turned into a Bottombar.
But that is less problematic to support workspace containing secondary windows.
Support for multi-windows UI is supposed to be better in 2.8.
But tabs can be reordered to be more pertinent, using the right click menu and you can switch to neighbors of active one using Ctrl Page Up/Ctrl Page down.
That would not be a bad idea to have an operator to directly jump to desired workspace.
That is a way to reveal that Blender has pie menus.
There were introduced in 2.7. But only as addon.
In 2.8, you can have pie menus natively. And Z shortcut is one of shortcuts used to demonstrate that.
You are not forced to click on left arrow, if you end your move before releasing Z key.
So, that is a faster way to deal with 4 or 8 choices.
But it is true that may be slower if you are only interested by 2 of them.
2.79’s way was kept in 2.8 keymap. Z just became Shift Z.
Well. That is too late to readjust each new change that does not fit your expectation, 2 minutes, every day. So, several past years of changes means hours of customization, now.
But when that work is done : it is supposed to be done for future releases, too.
If you are talking about Statistics, you can display them in Status Bar at the bottom instead of 3D Viewport.
Status bar is customizable through the right click menu.
By disabling Region Overlap preference under Interface section of Preferences, you can avoid header and toolbar’s items to overlay 3D View.
OK, there is no more bounding box display mode.
But you can still set Maximum Draw Type of objects as Bounds.
That is Display As property under Viewport Display panel of Object Properties.
Pressing Alt while switching to Bounds, you change Display type for all objects of current selection.
In the future, we should have Custom Display modes to handle all new viewport features as we want.
I have an old version that I only use to import dxf and ifc files. And then I only use it to save the blend, I can’t even rotate the view without risking a complete lockup or crash (big files).
Like the bounding box display type, textured display type was removed.
I suppose that shortcut was lost, at that moment during 2.8 development.
By, default Alt Z is used to enable/disable X-ray display.
Z is offering ability to switch to material preview mode through pie-menu.
If you use 2.7x keymap, Alt Z is switching to material preview mode, too.
Of course in that mode, active texture is displayed.
But also all the other blended textures used by material.
The ability to see only one texture was restored later during development.
For that, you have to be in solid display mode and change Color setting from Material to Texture in View port Shading popover.
I recently replied to somebody who wanted to make a shortcut similar to alt Z in 2.7x.
