Beginner here, although I have used Blender a little bit, many years ago.
Is there a list of missing / incomplete features in comparison to 2.79b?
My project includes:
camera animation,
animation of simple static objects,
animated curved paths with animated objects on those paths
some minimalist low-detail rigged characters,
sun, fog
3D clouds
If I find it difficult to make the objects in Blender, I will import them from another app,
so in that case, I will use Blender 2.8 beta mostly for animation.
So, is animation unit complete?
Should I prefer to learn 2.79b in order to be safe?
Am I asking too many questions?
Regnas
(• I don't speak English "by default", so... )
2
Those things may be a little bit complicated for a beginner.
Currently, 2.8 deserves its status of beta. It has some serious bugs and five times more annoying bugs without being critical ones than a regular release.
As a beginner, you probably don’t have a deadline, don’t have to deliver an animation of high quality.
So, you can use 2.8.
You will probably need time to learn Blender. That is the case of the entire community.
You may encounter difficulties to find tutorials.
Most of stuff that is related to 2.8 is probably one year old outdated demos to attention of people that already have some knowledge of Blender.
2.8 UI is supposed to be easier to read, to discover, to understand and to use for beginners.
I just make those warnings to be honest.
You may have difficulties to make your project. Or you may encounter no issue at all.
But as a beginner that will need several years to explore all possibilities that Blender can give to you, the interest to learn an outdated 2.79 UI is very limited.
So, if you can wait one month or two for a stable 2.80 release with less bugs, learning process will probably be smoother at that moment.
The problem is, I do have a deadline. It’s almost a “mission impossible”…
What gives me hope, is that the project is a minimalist approach (yet it has to look good). I’ll probably remember one thing or two from the last time I used Blender a decade ago combined with other software.
“serious bugs and five times more annoying bugs”
Hmm… that might cause me wasting time in seeking workarounds etc.
I guess it is obvious I have to minimize all risks, and prefer to learn a soon-to-be-obsolete piece of software, at least what is only required to complete this project.
We are one month before the final blender 2.8 release so I could say it’s quite stable ,you can done the job nicely ,iam using and I haven’t encountered any crash
Fighting with bugs in Blender 2.8 depends what tools you are using. To be honest, I didn’t encounter any in many weeks but I do archviz with it, so I don’t use any tool for animations at all. I have switched to 2.88 months from now and I couldn’t be happier with that decision.
I’ve had no trouble with it, other than the usual troubles that one would expect if pushing the value of a property beyond what it should be pushed on whatever hardware you’re using.
Use incremental saves and/or version control, as always.
If the training video price is too high, wait two days and everything will go on “sale” for $10.99, because that’s how Udemy operates. If you’re desperate, there are plenty of good-quality, free videos on YouTube and you won’t be able to swing a dead cat around here without people helping you out.
For the 3d clouds, there is a nice little setup for eevee here. Download the .blend file, append the clouds to your scene, and render. There are also some interesting discussions in that thread, if you want to get a little more sophisticated with the clouds.
I simply switched to it – retaining 2.79 only for legacy projects which use the Blender Internal renderer until such time as it (I hope …) is re-integrated into 2.8x.
I did it for one simple reason: EEVEE. This rendering option allows me to get much better results, much faster, by using my computer’s graphics hardware for its intended purpose.
I work as a 3d artist for a successful commercial agency, and our team all use Blender 2.8 and cycles. We use it for previz and animation as well. We composite and do post work in other apps.
I’ve been using 2.8 for over a year. At first just importing from 2.79 for fast walkthrough animations using Eevee, but in the last 3 or 4 months, it’s been much more complex stuff. I’ve managed to do in one day what used to take me several days since I can do near realtime rendering in directly in 2.8 without having to export to a separate engine.
I’m running a 10 year old Phenom II X6 1055T with a GTX 780ti on Windows. Since RAM and graphic card memory are the two biggest culprits for crashes, if anyone should be crashing, it’s me. It’s stable enough that I’m not bothering with 2.79 right now. I try to keep under 2 million polygons where I can. It only slows down when I duplicate something with a whole lot of polygons, or am working on a scene with 3+ million polygons. Once every few hours get something weird where I’ll add a texture to one certain object and it’ll crash without warning, but I’ve found that if I keep the version number current it may happen once every couple days–and I attribute it entirely to my grey-bearded computer.
