So, I still consider myself relatively new to Blender, and one thing that caught my attention was the fact that there is a dedicated population of people here that use Blender 2.80 to the point where this forum has its own Blender 2.80 tag.
As someone who’s new to Blender (relatively), I don’t quite understand why since I kind of just update Blender to every new major version (3.6 → 4.0 → 4.1, etc…), especially since Blender 2.80 is several years old now. What is the benefit of using a version of Blender that’s been outdated for several years?
Is it like Minecraft Java Edition where some versions of the game like 1.7.10 and 1.16.5 remained popular despite being very old compared to modern updates because these versions were before major overhauls that ruined a lot of mods? Are there like, super specific, but important addons that stayed in 2.80 and never updated?
I’d like to know people’s opinions on this because I’m genuinely curious.
Some probably don’t update because it is simply not necessary for them. They might use it little and might not want to get used to new controls every time they use it or download and import their keymaps. Others might use it because some old addon does not work for them or becasue they have old files that only work with 2.8 or something like that.
For a new user 2.8 makes absolutely no sense imo. Perhaps if you have some really old hardware that is not supported by newer versions.
It was used during transition between 2.79 and 2.80. It was a leap for many users to adapt to new UI. So, the tag was there to distinguish new stuff from old one.
That does not make sense to use it, anymore.
But explanation for posts, tagged with it, is just that they are as old as 2.80. They are not new.
Authors of those posts are probably using a recent version of Blender, now.
so you ask why blender 2.80 not popular like old versions of minecraft?
if you see old version of blender like 2.80 and you comparite with blender 4.3 you will see blender 2.80 different with blender 4.3 like ray tracing (if you search it in old blender 2.80 you won’t find it)
the main reason of blender 4.3 popularity that its new version and it has a lot of properties like ray tracing and the eevee of this version is so realistic and it looks like cycle without destroy low end pc
If it does the job what they want it to do and they are “used to it”…
…for example only make some low to mid poly model for some game… visualizing app…
Sometimes people do not have the access to higher technology… yes there are people in this world who simply can not afford it and use over ten year old tech…
Somtimes: because they can…
( I originally wanted to show a link to some doom on any simple hardware… but this also is… some example where people just do the craziest things… in there free time… )
These versions of Blender supported a renderer called “Blender Internal” which simply does not exist anymore. If you still needed to maintain a project that used that technology, you’d have to hold on to those versions. But today, I expect that any contractual obligations would have by now expired. I am one who wasn’t happy when it was “taken away,” but the EEVEE and Workbench renderers are, for my purposes, clearly better. So it goes.
Today, I would not do anything further with these versions. The old “Control + Alt + Shift + scratch-your-nose” interfaces are easily worth forgetting.
Okay, so most of the reasons are reasons I expected. Though, the bit about people not being able to use newer Blender versions is one I didn’t think of. The bit about “Blender Internal” is definitely interesting.
Plus, from version 2.9.something (I think?) Blender won’t run on Win7… There’re quite a few people who wouldn’t switch their system if they can help it.
Yeah more or less the case is that Minecraft was released into a nearly perfection state, so is not that it could have received significant gains in quality and features over time.
However for Blender the case is the opposite, since every amount of polishing is welcomed and every amount of new features makes a ton of a difference. You need to become a feature-geek to know for good which features do what, which requires reading the release logs quite a lot.
[ Such as for example, for me the most important feature in sculpting is the ‘Polyline Trim’ that was something that was recently added. Though for many other thousands of users probably there would be lots of other features. It depends on how much you use the software and then about what you most need to use. ]
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