SIGGRAPH 2019-Blender 2.8

Blender 2.8 is out! I'm sorry I missed the Blender user group for the first time in years. Monday was super overlapped with Blender, Unreal Engine and the Electronic Theater all scheduled at the same times. But, I could tell there is a ton of excitement around Blender. It's been great to see the progress over the last ten years, and the fact that Blender hasn't been bought, seems to be well managed, and has figured out how to pay developers is a model for other projects to follow. If you care about Blender continuing to be free and well supported, I would encourage you to donate anything you can.

So where is Blender 2.8 for my pipeline? I just downloaded the release versions and put it through a few basic paces:

HMD support: This is a big one, but likely a big project. There is a test build floating around, but folks are talking about how Eevee is too slow to update the HMD etc. Let's try and walk before we run, for those not using VR let me explain. The most basic use of the HMD is in blocking a scene. This doesn't need full fidelity, basic shading is enough. I was surprised the first time I put a headset on in Blender. You can actually see objects, how far away they are, what your orientation is in space etc. Designing in VR is huge, there is so much more information available, once you get the hang of it you'll never want to design 3D in a 2D environment. Long term may Eevee turns into a realtime render engine for gaming, but that's what I use Unreal Engine for so not a personal high priority.

360 stereo cameras: Likely related to above Eevee renderer doesn't support 360 stereo equirectangular camera, bummer. However, I tested the Cycles 360 panoramic camera and it is working as expected. So not ideal as I would like to use Eevee to render lightweight animations where I don't need the excellent (but costly) quality of Cycles.

USD support: Getting data to and from Unreal Engine is vital for my work. USD seems to be the emergin standard, but there is only a very early proof of concept project. I'm hopeful this will see more developer resources. I'll make a blog entry focusing on what I would like to see, but quick and easy back and forth between Blender and UE4 for the entire scene geometry, characters with motion in the geometry, and textures should be able to be edited in Blender and immediately updated in UE4. Export/import "roundtripping" workflows never really work that well.