Blender 2.8 was released several weeks ago. Since its final release I have been trying to familiarize myself with its new capabilities and vastly changed user interface.

The improvements in the new version are numerous and across the board. As mentioned, the user interface has been massively overhauled; each workflow (for example, modeling, sculpting, UV editing, texture painting and rigging/animation) has been separated out into its own workspace. Many of the modeling tools have become interactive and overall the user interface has been aligned with industry standards. What’s more, Blender’s new physically based real-time renderer, EEVEE, is simply astonishing. That being said, many improvements have also been made to Cycles, Blender’s legacy path tracing rendering engine.

One of Blender’s more unique features is something called Grease Pencil, which can only be described as everything you would expect from a traditional 2D drawing application but inside a 3D viewport. Blender had this feature prior to 2.8, but it has been extensively improved and enhanced with the 2.8 release.

I really cannot do Blender 2.8 justice with a short blog post so I recommend, if you haven’t already, to check it out for yourself.