The 2.80 release is dedicated to everyone who has contributed to Blender. To the tirelessly devoted developers. To the artists inspiring them with demos. To the documentation writers. To the Blender Cloud subscribers. To the bug reporters. To the designers. To the Code Quest supporters. To the donators and to the members of the Development Fund. Blender is made by you. Thanks!
Blender 2.80 features a redesigned user interface that puts the focus on the artwork that you create. A new dark theme and modern icon set were introduced. Keyboard, mouse and tablet interaction got a refresh with left click select as the new default. Quick Favorites menus provide rapid access to often-used tools.
Thanks to the new modern 3D viewport you will be able to display a scene optimized for the task you are performing. A new Workbench render engine was designed for getting work done in the viewport, supporting tasks like scene layout, modeling and sculpting. The engine also feature overlays, providing fine control over which utilities are visible on top of the render.
The 3D viewport and UV editor have new interactive tools and gizmos, along with a new toolbar. These make it easier for new users to start using Blender, and for existing users to discover and use tools that previously required obscure key combinations.
Eevee materials are created using the same shader nodes as Cycles, making it easy to render existing scenes. For Cycles users, this compatibility makes Eevee work great as a realtime preview. For game artists, the Principled BSDF is compatible with shading models used in many game engines.
Grease Pencil is now a full 2D drawing and animation system. This unprecedented integration of 2D tools in a 3D environment will enable you to create next-level concept art, storyboards and animations.
Grease Pencil objects are a native part of Blender, integrating with existing object selection, editing, management, and linking tools. Strokes can be organized into layers, and shaded with materials and textures. Besides a draw mode for strokes, these objects can also be edited, sculpted and weight painted similarly to meshes.
Modifiers can be used to deform, generate and color strokes. Commonly used mesh modifiers such as array, subdivide and armature deform have equivalents for strokes. Rendering effects like blur, shadows or rim lighting are also available.
Cycles has been used in high-profile short and feature films, and is receiving a growing amount of contributions from the industry. The full list of improvements is available on the wiki release notes. Here are some highlights.
Blender 2.80 is an API breaking release. Add-ons and scripts will need to be updated, both to handle the new features and adapt to changes that make the API more consistent and reliable. Read more
A number of features that were no longer under active development or did not fit in the new design were removed. By removing the maintenance burden, developers can spend more time on new features and redesign the user interface and implementation to be more optimized.
The Blender developer community is being supported by the organizational powers of Blender Foundation and its spin-off Blender Institute. The people who work for the Foundation and Institute did a tremendous job to bring Blender is where is it nowadays.
Special thanks goes to Tangent Animation and Aleph Objects, who funded 4 additional developers to work full-time on Blender 2.8 during the crucial 2017 period. This enabled us to work on the viewport, Eevee, collections/layers, UI and tools redesign.
Reshade 4.9.1 is an open-source Wonderful windows tool for Gamers to enhance graphics in Sim4, Dove 2.0, QuantV, GTA V, and Roblox. It enhances the gaming experience by correcting game colors and graphics.
Added support for "asint" and "asfloat" under shader model 3 using emulated implementation
Improved sorting of depth stencil objects in the UI list to avoid list moving around a lot
Fixed GPU crash when switching depth buffers and missing depth buffer data in some effects in D3D12 (especially in Cyberpunk 2077)
Fixed code generation for loops under D3D9 causing artifacts and extreme slowdowns with some effects (most notably Deband.fx)
Fixed splash bar at the top not disappearing after a swap chain reset anymore
Fixed variable list not disappearing after disabling all techniques of a cached effect
Fixed D3D9 effects recompiling even when no changes were made and they are in cache
Fixed UI problems when uniform variable requests slider widget without setting "ui_min" or "ui_max" limits
Fixed saving in editor not updating the error list after effect reload
Fixed Vulkan depth buffer binding update when effect contains multiple textures referencing depth semantic
Fixed "frexp" intrinsic to write integral exponent rather than floating-point (for GLSL/SPIR-V compatibility, signature is now "float frexp(float x, out int exp)")
Fixed log containing mixed LF and CRLF
Fixed potentially duplicated uniforms after reloading an effect