Blender 2.8

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Blender 2.8 UI - Very easy to read and when you hover your mouse over something, you get a tooltip explaining what that thing does.
This might seem like a review but I wanted to share my views on Blender. Last year, Blender 2.8 was released and I have been watching its development every now and then to see how it compares to other 3D Modelling software. It's been popping up here and there on 80.lv and I found that there is a pivot painter addon for Blender. So I thought I'd finally try out Blender 2.8, after using it occasionally in my spare time. The software is INCREDIBLE! I more or less understood how the software worked. Everything was explained in the UI. I set the keyboard shortcuts to Industry compatible (a bit like Maya's navigation).


3D Cursor in Blender  -
Always there in the way

One thing that did bother me is the 3D Cursor. It feels really odd and always in the way. Does it really need to be there all the time? There is an option to hide it but I wish it would hide away automatically whenever I use a different tool rather than manually hiding it in the viewport overlay.





Option to Hide 3D Cursor
Blender isn't the industry standard but I noticed that some industry artists are integrating Blender into their workflow so its growing and I hope it becomes an industry standard some day. I remember an 80.lv Article that a Ubisoft FX Artist, Francisco Garcia-Obledo, was integrating Blender's fluid simulation into his VFX for Assassin's Creed 3 Remastered. https://80.lv/articles/001agt-behind-the-scenes-blood-in-assassins-creed/ From the videos I've seen, Blender's Eevee (no I don't mean the pokemon) renderer is real-time and fast. I mean just look at this video, it makes you want to cry: https://youtu.be/2hGSDD9-Tkc. I remember the horrors of using Maya's Fluid Simulation last year and rendering it out was a pain😭: https://iby-z.blogspot.com/2019/01/mo-vfx.html It's also got an active and friendly community over at Blenderartists.org and Blender.community which compared to Autodesk forums are a lot faster. I tend to get replies 6 months later with Autodesk forums.

There are a ton of cool features and some of the really cool ones are explained here: https://youtu.be/yyCepAM7Ftc 

Overall, I'm seriously considering moving over to Blender. It's free and it's like an all-in-one 3D modelling package that has everything you would need as a 3D Artist. It's even got sculpting mode a bit like Zbrush! It's like the UE4 of 3D modelling software packages. However, for the current project, I plan on slowly transitioning and learning to use Blender in my free time but for now I'm sticking to Maya. Although I do know how to use the basic areas of Blender, there are some features I still haven't fully figured out like how to smooth a mesh for a high poly workflow. Another reason is that  I don't want to use up time learning Blender especially with the amount of time I have left to spend on this project.

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