Yes. In my view it is most definitely without a slightest doubt going in a good direction. @anonim.blend I guess you are not making your living using Blender professionally, are you?
Using Blender as a tool for my job 8 hours a day every day, it is hard to imagine going back even a few versions. Working with 2.79 would make my life very hard and unpleasant, compared to today.
It render way slower. Without all improvements to Cycles and AI denoising, my render times would be 10 times slower. This means I couldn’t just render stuff out at the end of the day and would have to wait for the weekend for rendering - this is a huge inconvenience. It changes my life in a big way.
There is no Filmic and the state of color management is way worse. This would make my renders look a lot worse. That’s also a huge deal breaker.
There is no Cryptomatte. That’s insane. Suddenly I cannot do my compositing or have to spend time manually rendering masks. That’s a lot of extra work. I certainly don’t want to do it. This changes my life in a big way as well.
There is no geometry nodes. Modelling is harder without it. Takes more time. I cannot easily model things like these lights for example:
There is no EEVEE. I cannot see a preview of how the materials are going to look.
Modelling is harder without simple every day functionality like loop slide snap, auto-merge split edges and faces, being able to manipulate object’s origin easily and many many more improvements.
There is no cloth sculpting - I have to model my soft furniture in Marvelous designer every time.
And these are only some things from my own situation, what about other professionals who need to work with sculpting more, or who benefit from enormous unimaginable amount of improvements with grease pencil, or rigging and animation features, hair and simulation… New hair system is amazing, it just works and is a pleasure to work with. And this is not all, just a few things that come to mind.
I don’t know. Maybe you don’t use Blender that much to notice. Or what’s the deal here?.. From my perspective it is unimaginable how anyone would want Blender to be as it was 5 years ago.
There are things and annoyances, yes. I have to reassign some shortcuts, change a few things to my liking and there are a few very small things that might have been slightly more convenient, but thats like 1:1000 ratio compared to improvements not even exaggerating. There are really actually thousands of improvements. Not tens, not hundreds, thousands. From small little things in the UI to huge features saving hundreds of hours of work.
I’m using Blender, because it’s very funny to do something in Blender.
In blender 2.7 One of most fun tools was BGE. it was very easy to do something effective with it
And I not say that Blender 2.7 was best. They are things in 2.8 that I like Eevee, easier selection and some other tools. And I thing Blender 3.6 have much more useful tools I undiscovered yet.
But I think I currently stay with Blender 2.83. Why? Because I still use old PC when someone use my new PC, and appending from 2.8 files works in 2.76b (last version for XP)
Btw.
I sometimes transfer blend files to this 20 years old PC with floppy (it has USB, but for retro PC it’s best to use retro methods
Well, I see nothing wrong with that. You do what you want for fun. But why do you care where Blender development is going then? They are not changing 2.79 or 2.83. Those are available for download and I think the idea is that they will be for foreseeable future so people can use them.
I think it would be logical to consider that Blender is not made for fun only. It is a tool meant for people to use for work. None of us use 20 year old hardware for work. That wouldn’t be smart.
In any case, even for fun hardware capable of running newest Blender versions isn’t that expensive. You can use Blender for fun on a PC worth 300 euros with no problems at all. That’s not a lot. I know people who spend way more on fishing equipment because they want to go fishing for fun. If you are into photography let’s say, you will need to spend more on a camera and a few lenses and will still need a PC… Using Blender is very affordable.
We actually missing
File - save as - 2.7 file format,
since 90% of our studio production use 2.79 because it is the latest stable Blender version according to the 4th DMC level.
Yes, undo system that skips entering edit mode is a compositional undo, which allow you to compare compositional changes immediately.
The same compositional undo system is used in sculpting for example - so you can visually compare the amount of a changes that your brush stroke brought to the model without entering edit mode and undoing all the vertices transforms one by one in an extremely distracting way.
Undo system redesign was a big mess though, and for a long time it was directly broken, such kind of a functionality is still missing till today.
Speaking of a keymap, we didnt detected any reasonable changes to it during 2.8 redesign, so we use a custom setup that is built up on the 2.7 keymap which was polished for a decade to reach professional state.
Layers and Collections are two different data management concepts that are designed for different goals. Layers (slots) is a dynamic context system which is used for realtime combinatorial access and Collections is a static context data management system.
Since their goals are different, they cannot be directly compared at the concept level - Layers will be always faster and Collections will always have a higher capacity (its like like RAM vs HDD).
However, it is technically possible to build one system on top of another.
You are right that Blender was very good at version 2.79, but I’m very grateful that the Blender Foundation developed it further and made it much better by 3.6
I think you just need to look at the number and quality of new artworks created in Blender 2.8+ compared to 2.79 and prior; Blender has absolutely blown up since 2.80 was released, and I’m pretty sure it is because Blender is moving in a positive direction, adding new features that users value while improving and modernising old features, fixing bugs and improving performance in a lot of areas (most noticeably in rendering) as well as improving usability by the gradual user interface changes.
You prefer the old UI, but many people do not. Maybe you can’t revert to the exact UI you had in Blender 2.79, but you can move window elements and panels around, choose a different font, scale, colour theme, shortcuts, matcaps etc. and make them the default. Many 3d programs do not let you customise them nearly as much as Blender, and because it’s open source you can find forks with UI or icons that may be more to your liking.
There was a period of maybe a couple of years after 2.80 released where some parts of Blender did feel like they had broken, gotten slower or were now in a state of flux and could not be relied upon, but I think the improvement from 2.79 to 3.6 is just so huge it’s hard to even comprehend how anyone could prefer 2.79 any more, just like it was very weird to hear people saying they still used 2.49b when 2.7x was current.
Actually 1D_… is a very special case ( ) … you may have a look at:
So i totally understand their special situation if they made some very special tools for themself…
And that’s also a special thing about blender… you can still use the older versions… (and interchange data to a certain degree ) well… i guess some day…
DMC stands for Data Management Complexity conditions level.
They are 5 of them:
0th (enthusiastic) - at this level there is no given production, and no production conditions to satisfy, every daily build is your stable working tool.
1st (personal use + vanilla data) - a creative freelancer level.
2nd (pesonal use + imported data) - a technical freelancer level
3rd (collaboration + vanilla data) - a crative studio level. Nice example of this level is Blender studio - everything they do is made from scratch in collaboration, so you can trust all the data you work with. At this level regular Blender release is testing release and LTS is stable release.
4th (collaboration + imported data). The most complex level the studio I represent belongs to, with the highest amount of requirements and limitations to satisfy.
At this level 2.79b is the latest stable release, and all the regular releases and LTS are just alphas for testing and playing around.
This scale represents the requirements to the software solutions quality and is exponential.
Topology research is my hobby, to relax after work (I am a workflow designer that design workflows and compare different softwares at the system level for the company).
I also sell the results of a research to fund different opensource software like Inkscape or Krita, and also local python development.
For example, at the time I supported Sverchok to promote the idea of a procedural node-based modeling in Blender.
This also allow me to keep a diamond Blenderfund donation membership.
Because of infrastructural requirements.
All the hundreds of thousands of files on our servers should be easily opened into one stable version of a software, which is usable, predictable and is free of any downgrades.
As you may know, 2.8+ versions doesnot fit that requirement, so people have to keep 5-7 versions of Blender in order to have an access to some functionality. This fits personal use, but violates collaboration.
I have no other option but to use 2.79b and keep paying 300 euros per month for it, until Blender will reach a DMC4 compatible level. It feels pretty frustrating and vague.
All we can do at the moment is try to make Blender better, fixing critical design errors.
That’s the condition of a diamond donation membership, so I built an infrastructure to reach it to support Blender development.
At the time it was supposed to reach corporate level, but different things simultaneously went wrong.
or have to spend time manually rendering masks. That’s a lot of extra work. I certainly don’t want to do it. This changes my life in a big way as well.
) … you may have a look at:
