Another thing to note is that the future of Blender development never looked as good as it does now.

The recently introduced 'Blender Development Fund' already recieves € 37245 every month in donations, which directly goes to hiring more Blender developers.

As impressive as 2.80 is, I'm really eager to see what 2.81+ brings, one area which looks like it will get a major improvement is 'sculpting' where a newcomer (Pablo Dobarro) has been making waves with a lot of interesting development in a separate branch, resulting in hints from the Blender Foundation of him being hired soon.

Good times!

Pablo Dobarro's work around improving sculpting is really incredible, and imho, makes Blender compete as a zbrush alternative (at least as a solid casual alternative). If you want to see this project succeed, you can donate to his patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pablodp606/posts

In release notes[0] for Cycles there are a lot of mentions of CUDA. Also many mentions of OpenCL, with the ominous note that it’s been “disabled on macOS platform”.

I’m wondering how complex can animations be, with reasonable frame render times, on macOS with Radeon Pro Vega 16? I know it’s a very open-ended question but I’m curious for any take.

(For some context, I’m completely unfamiliar with the pipeline/ecosystem, but wanted to hobby around with 3D for a while. Lacking a suitable GPU, now I’m considering how viable would this be on latest MBP’s graphics. If not so much, I might go for a cheaper GPU option & postpone my 3D experiments until I can have a fixed workstation with fast GPU in addition to laptop I use for work.)

[0] https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.80/C...

I used to use Blender a lot for a variety of things in the past. However, with 2.8, the UI became so slow on my Mac Mini that I decided to buy an external eGPU. However, I hadn't read the "OpenCL disabled on macOS platforms" update. So the eGPU didn't really help. So for me, I'm still on Blender 2.7 as the UI is much faster there. For reference, I have Blender running on a 5k display, so there're a lot of pixels to move around. Nevertheless, buying an eGPU won't help you a lot with Blender 2.8 as the internal GPU is too slow for the UI - at least in a reasonably high resolution. I was briefly pondering buying a second Linux box just to use Blender, but that also sounds insane. So until Apple patches their broken Nvidia relationship up, or Blender supports something like MoltenVK, there's no good way of running 2.8 on most macOS devices.

Edit: I didn't test the RC yet. So maybe the performance is better now. Also, I never tried on a smaller display. It might work just fine on a 1920x1280 screen.

I can't imagine OpenCL in any way being involved with the rendering of the UI. Maybe you're confusing it with OpenGL?

If you're having problems making use of an eGPU (that's supported by apple, which rules out nvidia!), you should report that. eGPUs will probably be a common use case.

That probably has something to do with Apple's abysmal support for OpenGL. They have even deprecated it for their proprietary Metal API. From Blender's perspective supporting a proprietary API is not worth it.

If you're just learning then new Eevee renderer in 2.80 is great for 90% of things and is pretty much real-time. For those final shots you can use cycles with your CPU, it's going to take longer but lack of a GPU shouldn't stop you as a hobbiest.

edit: after some more reading I'm not sure if Eevee works on CPU, but I don't have blender 2.8 on a cpu-only machine to test this.

Eevee is a gpu only renderer.

The new 2.8 release comes with the Eevee "real time" 3d engine, which should work well with your current system.

If you need to use Cycles, it'll still work fine with your CPU for now - and you can always either use an online render farm (there are many!) for more complex stuff, or buy a separate rig if you end up using it enough.

Yes, it is unfortunate that Cycles no longer supports OpenCL on macOS. There has been talk in some of the Blender groups about porting it to Metal (Cycles was designed from the ground up to support multiple platforms like OpenCL and CUDA), and they were speculating that it could be done by a skilled developer in 3–6 months [0]. Hopefully there are enough Blender users on Mac to justify this effort. Anyone here have ideas about organizing / funding this?

In the meantime, check out AMD ProRender [1]. It appears to be a viable alternative to Cycles for most things and can run on Metal on macOS.

At any rate, for more substantial renders, I strongly recommend cloud farms. You can make your own using spot instances to save money, and fire up more servers to get your render done more quickly. Getting an overnight render done in less than an hour (without tying up your workstations) is super helpful since it gives you more freedom to iterate. This kind of task (where you need a huge amount of processing power periodically for specific jobs) is where cloud computing really shines.

And there is also Eevee, which is not a Cycles replacement, but I believe it is fully supported on macOS.

[0] https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2018-Decem... [1] https://community.amd.com/docs/DOC-2183

Thank you, had no idea about ProRender and haven’t thought of offloading the renders to EC2. Looks like using a spot P2 instance could be really cost-effective (if prices keep at reasonable levels), definitely worth trying first.

There is a useful tool for this called brenda. The original repo by creator James Yonan hasn't been updated in years, so it uses an old version of Blender by default, doesn’t allow you to choose availability zone (which affects pricing), and doesn't support GPU rendering out of the box. I forked it [0] to address these issues for my own use, and updated the documentation to try and make it easier for people to get started.

[0] https://github.com/gwhobbs/brenda

I actually saw brenda come up a few times while researching readbeard’s suggestions, as you said the original seemed not super up-to-date. Thank you for mentioning your fork! Going to try in the next couple of days.

Even if my experiments won’t justify spinning up multiple instances, this should greatly reduce setup overhead.

> to try and make it easier for people to get started

What do you think about putting a simple GUI in front of this toolset—for those not proficient with CLI (I imagine many 3D artists using Blender may fall into that category)? I’ve been doing something similar as part of a consulting job recently, so couldn’t help thinking along those lines… Would be happy to help make it more accessible, should be an interesting exercise.

http://brenda-web.com/# already exists for that. :)

I'm not sure about the compatibility with the fork but it should not be too hard to adapt it if needed.

I think it's probably cheaper and safer to buy a second hand gpu rig and use it as your reneder farm.

With that said, your initial 3d experiments should run just fine on cpu only.

I am interested in jumping in. I’m concerned that new features, even if better, would make it hard to find up to date documentation and tutorials. Any recommendations?

Youtube has several people frantically creating tutorials for 2.8: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blender+2.8+tut...

'Too hard to learn' was a legitimate concern in the early days... even though the payoff is huge. Perhaps it still is some, but not more than most other 3d suites. The interface is so much discoverable, and has switchable key maps so that it's similar to other 3d apps.

I got started with a tutorial (on Udemy I think) that used a much older version and while it definitely took me longer I think I learned a lot more. I got to poke around and try things and make mistakes that I probably wouldn’t have tried otherwise.

> If you've wanted to get into 3D content creation before, there's never been a better time!

I've heard that several times as this version has been in the works. Will this make most of the tutorials for Blender harder to work through until they are updated? I've heard that the UI will be pretty different.

> the UI will be pretty different.

The is the most frustrating downside - the side effect of all major software overhauls - all of a sudden the wealth of tutorials and guides are out of date!

It'd be interesting if Blender had an interaction recorder for tutorials, which could be turned on and off as desired.

The user would make and record a tutorial entirely in blender, and an interaction text file would be saved.

When a new version comes out, the interactions could be replayed, with the new menu tree, effectively re-rendering the whole video.

Doing so could also allow a user to upload a file summarizing their key bindings, and have any customizations shown in the tutorial.

It wouldn't be perfect, but it'd be neat if it existed.

Most people making tutorials already switched over to 2.8 a while ago, so there is already a large body of tutorials available.

Blender is also related with Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. You can create and edit 3D models of AR/VR with Blender.

Do you mean "create for AR/VR" or "create in AR/VR"?

Any 3D application is useful for the former so I'm not clear on what specifically you're referring to.

If you mean the latter then I'm aware of a "edit inside VR" add-on for Blender but unclear on what the AR connection might be.

This is probably a reference to the integrated motion tracking support[1]. Sure, you can use any 3D application to generate content for AR, but it's a lot easier to overlay 3D object into an existing scene when the 3D application can process a video and automatically adjust the camera parameters to match.

[1] https://lesterbanks.com/2019/07/everything-you-wanted-to-kno...

Sorry, I mean Blender as a 3D application. You can create or edit 3D models and export them to AR application.

what plans does the team has for 3.0 ??? any thing groundbreaking tech ???

Well, they're thinking of overhauling the core.[0] Pablo Vazquez also made a video on why he thinks it shouldn't be 3.0 yet.[1]

[0] https://code.blender.org/2013/06/blender-roadmap-2-7-2-8-and...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJE7vMmOYZ4

That roadmap is 6 years old at this point. I’d imagine plans have changed a little since then.

> there's never been a better time!

Sounds like the best time is "in the coming days." :) But seriously: I'm not sure I want to cut my teeth on a version that hasn't been fully tested for bugs.

It's not a beta, it's an RC. 2.8 has been being tested for bugs for months now.

Anyone can read in the developer blog’s last entry (2 clicks away from blender’s homepage) that the final 2.8 version was scheduled in only 5 days, but OP seemingly wanted the karma points. Otherwise there isn’t any real reason for sharing a RC of a project you are not working with without checking what is the release plan.

Then why is it RC and not release?