Archive notice: This article was originally published on September 13, 2017. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Until now, there have been isolated blog posts and articles about upcoming features of Blender’s 2.8 version – now the Blender Foundation has published a brief overview. Anyone who wants to take a closer look at the current Blender 2.79 release with the new Principled BSDF Shader, denoising and Shadow Catcher can also find a detailed article about it in our DP issue 17 : 05.
Expected Features in 2.8
- Realtime Render Engine Eevee is making its way into Blender thanks to OpenGL 3.3. You can read more information about the development of the realtime renderer here.
- With Grease Pencil Blender promises expanded 2D features with 3D functions. You can already see a sneak peek here.
- New Workflow Possibilities, including custom workspaces for specific areas of work, as well as the removal of the limited number of layers. Until now, there was an upper limit of 20 layers.
- Dependency Graph Update for performance improvements and workflow simplifications. You can see exactly how the new dependency graph is supposed to work here.
- New Asset Management features, including “Amber” and “Claude” as asset libraries for local and cloud-based use. More information about this is available here.
You can find the official announcement of the 2.8 features here.
Download and Release
Without an exact date, the jump to 2.8 has been announced for 2018. Anyone who wants to can already download a test build of the new version here.
