Blender 2.8 UI | Hard-surface Modeling Update

blender in its latest 2.8 series has changed quite a bit so much so that it can be a bit daunting to get working in it even if already familiar with blenders previous version 2.79 the good news though is that all that 2.79 knowledge hasn't gone to waste since many many things have actually stayed the same so after you know what shortcut keys have changed or been removed where things have moved around in the interface and how to take advantage of the improvements you'll then be fully Unleashed into the new and improved world of blender 2.8 and see why epic Ubisoft and many others in the industry are happy to be on board helping to push it even further into 2.81 and beyond this video is a general overview of changes pretty much too hard not to notice or perhaps just too important or cool to leave out in our view these changes at the sort you'll probably come up against whatever you happen to use blender for still there may be more you want us to take a look at though so just let us know we can get blender 2.8 in the usual places for example you should be able to find it right on the blender.org homepage clicking on the current banner at the top shows the latest additions in this case 2.8 t1a on the download tab we'll find several download options the main release should be front and center but we can also scroll down to find the bleeding edge section basically this is where we'll find the latest daily build art the next version along and we can find that at the builded art blended org slash download page that's not official yet of course that's currently experimental and should be used at your own risk as the code is a working progress if you're interested in keeping up with the latest updates then check out this link for the release notes as they happen once we've downloaded installed and finally launch blender we should be greeted with this nice new bright splash screen from the spring open movie project finally replacing our dark space VFX black hole beater image which was a bit of a surprise that they used that actually but we have super made up about it and also it's quite poetic now because from the darkness of that black hole comes the light of spring the key thing to note here is that there should be a quick setup section on the lower-half now if you don't actually have that it probably just means you have some old prep and settings that blender is reading instead as you only gonna really gonna get this the first time you load a blender I'm running this on Windows so those settings are going to be stored just here in one of the subfolders this 2.80 folder but if we were to rename this or delete it entirely when we next start up blender this is what we're going to see on Blender will automatically recreate all this folder for us once we've finished with our session here and all the preference changes that we might like to make for creating tutorials though I'm just going to be using all the new defaults now if we click on the splash screen or outside of the splash screen basically somewhere within blender we can get that splash screen back by coming over to the blender icon there and just finding splash screen here I'm just going to click again no because all those options that were being asked for on that lower half of the splash screen we can actually find ourselves in the Edit menu on preferences we just drag that down and we find our key map section here we're going to find all the options for whether we want to select with the left or right mouse button what we want the spacebar to do the hotkey profile so for example we've got the blender 2.8 new defaults here we've got the old 2.7 series here and we've also got an industry compatible option for more on that industry compatible key map you can follow this link here and you'll see the general motivation and results of that so for example if all of these various applications happen to use the left mouse button then the winner of that is left mouse button and that's what got adopted into the industry key map another option on that splash screen was the theme whether we want it light or dark and for that we can just switch over to our themes and find our presets here something I don't think we're going to be able to get though if we come back to our splash screen is our ability to load our 2.79 settings so if we're looking to do that we're probably going to need to delete this folder as we mentioned before something else that I'd like to mention in our edit preferences menu is just these three lines down in the bottom left corner what's often referred to as the burger bun or something like that you can see if we click on this we've got the auto save preferences auto enabled meaning that any changes that we make in here are automatically being saved this is unlike 2.79 where you to manually make that save so let's close these preferences here and now that we're inside a blender we can get through with all these changes in the interface so the layout 42.8 is no longer windows-based so for example here in 2.79 the entire interface is simply a combination of various windows so even this stuff at the top with file render window is actually just ahead of our of another window as we can see up there if we pull it down that's the info window and we could switch that to a 3d view if we wanted to and now if we pull it down again we can see that and we can also see now there's nowhere in the interface where we'd get that file menu anymore over in 2.8 this is no longer the case now here we have a designated top bar if I hover the mouse for the double arrows here and try and pull down we're not gonna kind of reveal like hidden window at the top there also notice there's this bottom status bar as well which gives us information about our scene and some prompts for what we might want to do at this very moment so right now what we're looking at is actually for Windows where our 3d view the timeline the outliner and the properties window so the configuration of the windows that we have here is basically the same as 2.79 it's just we only have four windows now instead of the five because what was this fifth window at the top now is its own designated top bar something else that could cause confusion in 2.79 was the fact that our tool shelf that we have on the left here that we can toggle with the T key kind of looks like its own window whereas over in 2.80 these are our tools that were toggling on again with T key that hasn't changed what we can clearly see now that these tools belong to this 3d window perhaps for beginners it's probably better if this was actually sort of expanded a little bit just so you can read the names of what we've got there but we'll be coming back to this in a little bit more detail later the major thing that I want to drill in at this stage is that with these windows it's always been very very easy to get in a crazy mess so for example in 2.79 we can see these three diagonal lines just in the top right corner of each window and this is an area where we can split from basically so we can left-click and drag to the left we can also left-click and drag down and let's it vertically instead of horizontally in 2.18 the same risks are kind of there but the major change here is that instead of just using the top right we can now use any corner of a window to be able to split it I always encourage people to spend a little time getting the hang of splitting and joining windows in blender like this so you don't end up in doctor strangers multiverse window layout from before manually creating a kind of expert mode single window layout is always a pretty good task and by the way we can toggle I kind of super expert mode with ctrl alt and space if you get really stuck with the windows layout you can go to file new and then select the general workspace if you have something you want to save then save it but I'm going to discard these changes here though now you have a nice window layout again with this default workspace you can then go to file open and choose not to load any potential crazy UI that the blend file was saved with we have another way we can reset our blender to but this has a further reaching impact than just the interface so say if we change other preferences too such as enabled a bunch of add-ons and change the resolution size of the interface to something you could read from the moon then doing what we did before we just file new and in general isn't going to cut it to really reset we're gonna want to go to file defaults load factory settings but again note that this is a full reset so all the Preferences changes we've made I've got to be reset along with the layout although pretty noticeable interface changes are within the 3d view itself so for example like this infinite 3d view grid over in 2.79 it looked more like this and if we went down to the View menu and opened up the properties sidebar and came over to the display area you'd find the details for the grid they're over in 2.18 if we go up to that same menu the View menu it's not the properties sidebar anymore it's just a sidebar and it's the same key and to toggle it on and off but over here we won't find anything for this grid in any of these tabs for this sidebar instead if we close that again with the M key we'll actually find this in these new menus over here so if we click on here we can find the scale we'll find the subdivisions as well this tool shelf or tool bar as it's now named and can still be toggled on and off with the T key of course works differently than it does in 2.79 in 2.79 some of the fundamental tools sort of were broken or behaved in a very strange way at least say we wanted to engage the scale tool if we were to click that it launches us into the actual operation straightaway we're probably what we wanted to do is just sort of switch over to the scale tool like this over in 2.8 though it behaves a little bit more predictably in fact our default tool that were given now is this select tool in fact let's pull this out a little bit left click and drag here so we can see the words and when we switch through these various different tools you can see rather than engaging the tool we're kind of activating it ready for use instead so that's probably behaving a little bit more intuitively so you can see we're set to select box and you can see these little triangles in the bottom right corner of a couple of these tools what that means is we can left-click and hold there and you'll see different select options and select box it's the second one down so that behaves very much like the B key so we can just left-click and drag across the view here in my opinion this is really good because it means that the selection can be left is just a default tool without having always to press B to border select for example and also you're not going to move something accidentally so in 2.79 if we were to right-click on this and drag a little bit we're in danger of actually moving it when we might not have actually meant to do that I'm just gonna left click on this cube and then tap into edit mode will see that the tool bar expands to show extra tools and I just want to quickly note that say we choose our 3d cursor tool which now means that when we left click somewhere in the screen we're going to move the 3d cursor which is kind of similar to what 2.79 was doing by default if we tap back out of edit mode into object mode we'll switch back to the select box so we'll have different active tools depending on what state were in so in object mode right now we're in select and then tapping into edit mode jumps us back to the cursor I think things can still be a bit confusing though for example you can be in circle select mode so if I left click and drag on here and select select circle from there we get little circle where our mouse pointer was and then if I left click and drag you can see that we're adding the vertices to the selection there but if we were to middle click we're actually just rotating around the view whereas if we were to press C to enter the circles tool if I scroll the middle wheel now you can see we're actually changing the size of that and then if I left click you can see it's still making a difference if I middle click I'm now starting to subtract from the selection so I've kind of got to sort of circle selects happening with different key controls so I think that's a little bit confusing at the moment something that is an added advantage though is that if I just press escape to exit the circle select that we engage with the C key you can see that this particular mode here allows us to still rotate around the view which is something that you can't really do when you engage the tool with this so we're locked to this one position in the camera until we actually end the tool pressing W is going to toggle us through the different select modes as you can see there select circle select last so here's our select move so we can just let click and drag and it will automatically move it to W again just to bring us back to the Select box that's actually pretty useful to bear in mind because as W is a key you press that a lot in 2.79 for the specials menu you might find yourself accidentally changing that select mode interestingly something that's quite cool is that you can keep this toolbar closed with the T and actually just get that at the location of the cursor by using shift space and we can see all the hotkeys associated with these here so one way to get to the cursor for example it's just a hit spacebar so if we did that quickly we can go shift space to space again now we're setting the 3d cursor position and if I was to go shift space and then press B without moving the mouse we're now back into our select box something to worth noting as well is that we can actually just set the 3d cursor anyway with shift and right-click without actually swapping tools for those who like to see the move gizmo so let's press the T to open this up here so if we want to keep select box active or as our active tool but still be able to move easily enough by just pressing G but actually also see we've moved gizmo so for example something that we can easily see if we just switch to this here now of course we've switched away from the Select tool so let's click that back and what we can do instead is we can just come over to this viewport gizmos menu and just enable our move right there so now we've still got our box select but now we are have our move gizmo personally though I probably would rarely use that and again that could be seen as a little confusing because if we switch to say the rotate tool we now no longer see the move gizmo but of course here we still have move set so that's just another little something to bear in mind over in 2.79 we had mostly only two places to be able to find a lot of properties related things so if we pressed n to open up our properties sidebar we could find some properties here and some tool related things here potentially and also some tool related things over on the tool shelf in the properties window we could find some more properties related things and know we have different tabs aligned horizontally here or bring to point 8 we have our properties window here but the tabs are stacked vertically this time and as for the tools and where they may be there in quite a few places so we have our tool bar here we have our n key which also comes with these various tabs here now as our main sidebar we also have an additional tab in this properties window which is called the context and tools tab and in here we can find some tool related things as well so let's say switch to the bevel tool we'll see various different options here we can also come to the tool tab within our sidebar here and you might think why have it in two places and it's just potentially you might like to work in a particular way it's just duplicated in a few places just to facilitate different kinds of workflow something else we should probably look at if we right click somewhere up here you can go to header and show tool settings will then get tool related options across the top so with all of this in these different areas this could be seen as a little confusing but I think the real goal of it is to just be versatile for different kinds of workflow especially those that are trying to stay in a single window which we can toggle with control space as for the 3d cursor here we may be able to see that the 3d cursor is actually a 3d object now meaning as you can see in the tool settings up here that we have surface project enabled and it's orientation is view so if I left click and drag on here you can see it's aligned to the cameras view there while also stopping at the surface of the object if we set the orientation to actually the geometry and left-click again we can see it's aligned nicely to that cubes face that becomes more useful for perhaps at a slant so what I'm going to do is find our select box left click and drag across there pressing G and then Y and then just slide out to about here and then let's come back over to the cursor tool left click there let's switch to our move tool and then over here we can see where our transform orientations and I'm going to set to the 3d cursor and this gizmo we can see is aligned to the orientation of this face that we clicked on so then that's improved with the 3d cursor is that if we left click and drag it just places the 3d cursor where the position was at the point that you first clicked in 2.8 though should we be in the 3d cursor we can just left-click and drag and it will move position or if we were just in the select box and we shift and right clicked we can still do that up here we have our snapping which I've set to vertex or we can use control shift tap as our hotkey and place it at the position of the cursor and then if we shift and right click and drag we can hold ctrl and then it will so snap to different places on this cube or the different vertices in this case and if we tap into object mode we can do the same thing there shift right click drag around where we want it hold ctrl to maybe snap to this vertex and then right click and then set origin to the 3d cursor so we have better accuracy with this while still in object mode something that wasn't really possible in 2.79 in 2.79 if we dig in a little bit so on a tool shelf we come down to grease pencil we can find under our tools the ruler and protractor were left click and drag we can find the numerical value of a certain distance and then just escape to exit that in 2.80 this same kind of tool is a little bit more prominently positioned so if we left click on this to activate the tool and then left-click and drag in the view we get that same kind of measurement we can left-click in the middle somewhere to add an angle and then we can left-click and drag on the points to sort of reposition and as I've just clicked on this one I can just simply hit delete to remove those points where this becomes pretty useful is to left-click and then hold ctrl to snap to that vertex there I'm going to left-click on this or the end and then hold ctrl to snap to the other end and now we have the exact measurement of that edge or perhaps we want to hold ctrl to snap to their left lick in the middle of it and snap that to there now we know that angle is 91 degrees again just to get rid of it I'm gonna hit delete in 2.79 we had down at the bottom here these various different viewport shadings for example wireframe solid and rendered in 2.8 this stuff is no longer at the bottom it's now moved up here which is way more together actually so just to clean things up a little bit I'm going to close this active tool switch back over to the select box we could right click up here and change the header setting here or just go to the View menu and turn off the tool settings that way and here we have our wireframe mode and we also have the solid shading which we were in anyway and we've also got this new mode called look def and our rendered mode look def and rendered mode taking advantage of the new evie rendering engine and we'll be going over that in a lot more detail in another video be aware that the set key which used to toggle between wireframe and solid shading mode will now in 2.8 bring up our pipe menu and wireframe is on the left and solid shading is on the right now on this same hotkey we can also switch to rendered or look dead mode things are more nicely together now so rather than them being in the proxy sidebar a lot of the options for what we're going to see in the viewport can be found with this down arrow to the side here right now we're in lock def so these are the settings relating to that but over in solid shading we'll get a lot more settings things such as back face culling we also have these two menus something that we looked at briefly before for our viewport gizmos and this one for the general viewport overlays again as we briefly looked at before with the grid I think it's worth mentioning about the x-ray mode which is this button up here into 179 that's the same x-ray button that you can see in edit mode just at the bottom here and if we toggle that on and off you can see it enables us to be able to select through the object and over in 2.8 we can toggle that with alt set but I'll be going over some more hot key changes shortly something I wanted to quickly add to this section on the x-ray if we enable that is that we can use our pulldown menu here just to adjust how much of that x-ray we kind of see in 2.79 under the tab of the properties window we had this unit area and we were normally just set to none and if we wanted to set things to metric for example now you can see that's zero meters over in 2.8 I'll press M to open up our sidebar here and let's go up to the item and you see the meters are already there and if we go over to this scenes tab of this properties window you can see we're already set to metric and we still have some further options here for background images in 2.79 just to demonstrate this I'm going to switch from this default windows layout over to the UV editing and just squeeze that over a little bit and I'm just gonna drag in from a file browser externally to blender this concept our image from the robot just so you can see what that is and then in the 3d view if we press n to open up the properties sidebar here we can find we've got background images in its own little section and we can enable that add image and since we already dragged it in we can use our pulldown to find that robot concept image already as an option in our scene or I could actually just click and drag from a file browser straight into the window here and it would add it for us and so I can just press X on that previous one we almost added and you can see that axis that we're gonna be able to see this is set to all views so I press 0 to jump into the camera or one to take a look at for an orthographic view and we have all these various different options so let's move over to 2.80 and probably the first thing that springs to mind is that on our sidebar with the n key we don't actually have any area in which the background images can be seen here I'm going to close that again with the N key and instead what I'll do is jump over to the UV editing workspace and I'm going to left-click and drag in that image again into here and now for background images within the 3d view there's a couple of places where you can do it we can go shift a and add in an image here a reference or a background or we could add an empty with an image and these are all basically the same it's just the settings are slightly different there's another way we can add in an image as well and that's taking a look at our camera here so I have this selected and then I can come over to background images here just make sure this is enabled and then from this pulldown here I'm going to set that concept art that we had and now when we press 0 to look through we can see there's our image in the background there or we could set that to be actually in front the Alpha slider is here we've set it to fit instead of stretch and a load of the other settings that were used to from 2.79 if I rotate out of that camera though and take a look from one of the orthographic views like one three and seven on the numpad muzie we don't have any background in which is there so this is where we can go shift a and add in an image as a reference or a background well since I've already opened this image here I'm just gonna left click and drag from here and just drag it into the 3d view and now we have that image as a physical object in our scene which is basically just an empty displayed as an image and we can set our size here tell it whether we want to use transparency or not whether we want it as a background image in which case we want to put it as back and we have a similar set of useful tools that we had as we do in 2.79 in 2.79 if we wanted to shade something flat or smooth often we might come to the tool shelf here shading for smooth or flat we might also tap into edit mode and go control F find our faces menu and we've got shade smooth and flat there as well over in 2.18 I can rotate out of that top orthographic view and let's take a look at this cube but with this image here I'm just going to uncheck the display in a perspective mode so that we can't see that anymore here we can simply select the object and right-click it and we get shade smooth and flat right at the top of that menu there and if we tap into edit mode and go control F we can see we still have our shade smooth and shade flat there in 2.79 we had this option in the header of the 3d view which was to also merge vertices that would move to the same location so if I simply double tap G to slide that along towards the same location of this other vertex it does exactly what it says on the tin it has automatically merged those two vertices into just one over in 2.80 we don't have that option down there anymore and we don't have that option in the header here with the rest of the 3d view options there now we'll find it within the tools so we can press n to open up our sidebar we can pop down to the tools tab open up the options and we can find our auto merge there we should also be able to see it in the usual tools areas that we have now the multiple places we can find it so for example in our properties window we have some options there too and as I toggle this you'll see it's updated in both places Oh in 2.79 or ambient occlusion to help us to see the proximity between objects and general curvature of our mesh we'd come over to the property sidebar and enable ambient inclusion there and crank it up in this case just to make it more obvious or recessed areas of our mesh become more apparent and we see it's hovering just above this plane there I'm gonna shift select both of these objects go ctrl C to just copy them let's take it over to 2.8 D delete the cube with X ctrl V to paste those in and then what we can do is let's take a look at where we'll find our ambient occlusion so we're not going to see it in our property sidebar or the generic sidebar I should say instead where we'll find it is in this pull down menu under cavity so we select that we'll see we're on a type screen which is not what we were seeing in 2.79 by the way that is more of a world type and then I can increase the strength of that Valley there to 2.5 or we can type a value much higher if we like clicking in the field we also have this Ridge option which is going to highlight the more exposed areas as well so we have this other type screen but we can also combine them with that both option and bear in mind we also have this little cog icon which allows us to change some settings as well if we want it to render this masterpiece in 2.79 we might find ourselves coming over to the render buttons here in the render tab of the properties window over in 2.80 if we find that same area here you're not gonna find that render button in fact it's probably worth mentioning that we also have some extra settings in this output tab that we may have been used to seeing in our render tur instead we can use our shortcut keys f12 to render as we did in 2.79 or we can come over to the render menu and we have our options there and it's probably worth also mentioning that over in 2.79 we also have these buttons here which we could just take a screen grab essentially of what we were looking at over in 2.80 we don't really have that in the interface of search will instead find that in a menu in the View menu where we'll see a viewport render image and the animation there so we just click on that we can now save our masterpiece with ease many hotkeys have stayed the same however there are some crucial ones that have changed and some others that have been removed as it was felt like there was just too many hotkeys already assigned there was just barely any space for your left sign your own so for an official list of changes we can find this link here and we're gonna go over a bunch right now we can use control space to go fullscreen now on any given window so wherever your cursor happens to be its control space to toggle that to maximize it or minimize it we can find some camera settings with the accent grave key which is to the left of my number one key above the QWERTY keyboard we get these options here in this pie menu so left orthographic for example if we hit it again I can go to the top view these are conveniently placed of course so if we quickly want to take a look from the left orthographic view we can just hit it and go left so these pie menus are really good for gestures like that we can also go shift and accent grave to enter into this first-person camera type of view where we can control our camera with the W a s and D keys in fact if you take a look right down at the bottom on that status bar there you can see all the keys that we can use to help with controlling this so to confirm the new position I can just press the left mouse button we have the a key to select all and now as is common with a lot of operations alt a is the inverse of it so that's going to deselect all it's worth noting that we still have a and we can double tap a to deselect everything it was quite common in 2.79 that you'd probably be tapping a quite a lot anyway until you definitely got what you needed regarding the a toggling selection for all or deselecting all we can go to the edit preferences and find a setting under the key map which is select all toggles so instead of that double tap behavior it behaves basically like it did in 2.79 but I want to stick with the defaults on that so I'm going to deselect that option probably worth noting that the G key the R key and the S key still do the same things and also that tap is the same that's Kentucky laws between object and edit mode control tap now gives us this mode selection as mentioned earlier f12 will still render but the button in the render tab of the properties window is gone or in this new output window will not find those buttons there either but a few port render is in this view menu again as mentioned earlier the spacebar will now play our animation and the search that was on the space but we can find with f3 when there's play animation for right at the top of the list there when we perform an operation so G and then left click to confirm that position we used to have f6 to be able to bring this information to the location of the cursor now it's going to be on f9 the user preferences probably an easy way to get to that is by using the f4 menu as we can see it down there at the bottom preferences on the z key we have this shading pie menu instead of just a toggle between wireframe and solid we can also use shift Z to toggle the wireframe mode and shift said again just to toggle it back to whatever you had it on so if we were on rendered mode for example and then I went shift Zed he's gonna take us to wireframe and then shifts it again it'll knock us back to what we had before which was this rendered mode the pie menu is good as well because we could just Zed and gesture to the right to quickly put us into solid shading mode and if we want to take a look at x-ray we can go alt Z and that's basically like enabling this option up here so go press alt Z again you can see that's toggling at the top that's useful because if we tap into edit mode let's use alt a to deselect everything and then left-click and drag across everything we can see there and then if we take a look we can see that we've not actually selected everything on the cube which might have been something we wanted to do so that's where that x-ray might come in handy so alt Z and then let's do that again and we can see we're definitely getting all the vertices there if in doubt of course bottom right here we can see that we have all 8 of 8 vertices selected and then alt said to quickly toggle that back if we click on this button here that's going to disable some of these things in the viewport here and the same would happen with these viewport overlays which gives us a nice clean view if we hover the mouse over this option though you can see that the shortcut for that is control and that accent grave and if we hover over this one you can see it actually doesn't show us the shortcut key for that but what we can do is you can use shift alt + Z to toggle that back into and that's a quick way to toggle those overlays to switch between vertices edges and faces it used to be that ctrl tab menu which is now this mode menu these are pretty easy to remember it's just the 1 2 and 3 keys one for vertices to for edges 3 Phasis we can also use shift and those numbers to increase the ways that we can select there so now we could select the face but also I could simply just select that vertex and now if we just press one on its own it will just revert back to just selecting vertices again if I double tap G to slide this vertex on top of this other one we've now got two vertices in the same space so if I go shift Z to enter into our wireframe mode and left-click and drag across these two vertices is where in 2.79 we would use our remove doubles command but in 2.80 instead we can right click and find our merge vertices and we'll find by distance or we can use the hotkey alt M it's much more sensible considering these as a merge operation of course so o m and then by distance and then we can see in the states by we've removed one of those vertices now I'll go she observe to toggle back to the solar shading view if I was to press 3 to enter face select mode select this face and go control F I might like to try and flip that face you'll see that that option isn't there anymore what we now have is this normals menu so I can go alt N and we have flip at the top there you'll see that nothing really happened to the viewport there so we can check this in a couple of ways I can go up to this menu here and select a back face culling and hold a to deselect that face there's an additional way to do that now as well though which is to take a look at our viewport overlays and we can see under the geometry option there's face orientation and that's going to call everything that is facing outwards blue and everything that is facing away from the camera if we want check out back face culling it is red and very obvious to notice I'm going to come back to the overlays menu though and uncheck that face orientation re-enable the back face culling select everything with a and then to recalculate our normals which was control end which is now a new file what we can use now is shift m and that's our recalculate normals tool for animating I'm just going to left-click on this time slider here drag it back to the start or we can use Shift + right arrow or Shift + left arrow to quickly do that while here we can still use I to insert various different key frames so for example let's set the scaling there to move over to the data tab off the properties window and you can see there we've got our scale keyframe set but also you'll notice towards the right here we can see with these little dots which fields can be animated and of course the larger Diamonds here to show us that we have actually got some keyframes happening on these values as enlarged in the timeline a little bit and we can see we also have a keyframe in here which can also be left like and dragged around which we couldn't do in the old timeline as to left-click and drag in here would actually change to the current frame to do that now we can just shift and right click just to drag around in here to set that current frame or we can grab it from his head which is what I did just a moment ago the alt scroll wheel is still there so I'm just holding alt and scrolling on the mouse wheel but we don't have that Shift + up arrow to be able to change frames ten frames at a time and as you know we have space to now play the animation that is to say if we go f4 check out preferences that we have actually got play set in our spacebar action section which hasn't keeping everything at default that's what we got all right let's take a look at some additional handy features that 2.79 doesn't have so following on from hotkeys we have quick favourites which is accessed with the Q key right now there's nothing there and it actually helps us it just says right-click on buttons to add them to this menu so for example if we go object transform and then let's say randomize transform let's right-click on that and we have add to quick favourites which i've left click done and now if I pressed Q you can see we have random transform as an option so we can click on this and maybe indicate exactly what we want our random location to be or perhaps we might want to try different seeds something that's worth noting about this if we tap into edit mode this is now going to have a different quick favorites menu so if we hit Q now you can see that it's has some context sensitivity so again for this we might want to go mesh transform and then right-click on randomize and add that to our quick favorites so now when we go cue we have our randomize again which is operating on the vertex level right now tap out into object mode and we'll find that we still have that randomize transform in our object menu to demonstrate our back face culling I'm going to delete this cube and replace it with a plane so that we can look underneath and what we want is not to be able to see that face if we're calling that back face so let's find it in the solid shading menu here to the right we're using this arrow we can find a back face culling and that does exactly what we'd expect once we flip over to look there or rendered mode though and use the full bells and whistles of Eevee we'll see if we look underneath in fact it's not immediately obvious let me grab this lamp and bring that below you can see we can actually still see the back face so I'm going to select our plane here jump over to the materials tab in the properties window just make sure we have a material on this actually then I'll scroll down and we'll find the back face culling within the settings / material there so let's just place this lamp a little bit closer shift D to duplicate another one above and then we can clearly see that the back face is cold I'm going to left-click and drag from the top right here and split the view I'm gonna change this window into a shader editor select the plane and just note that on to the options here we have some of those settings that are being reflected in that material tab as well these sorts of things are really useful to try and keep you in as few a window is as possible therefore not cluttering up the general workspace if you are very new to blender or you're on a laptop without a numpad or you're using a pen and tablet then this little area in the top right might be abuse so for example we have this access wheel over here that we can just left-click and drag in and that kind of acts as the middle mouse button rotating around our view we'd also click on these individual points here the red X the green wire and the blue is there to align our view with the access there's also these buttons to the side this one is going to toggle our perspective and orthographic views this is going to jump into our camera or out again and this if we left click and drag on it that's going to pan around and this one finally a magnifying glass is going to zoom us in and out of the scene in 2.8 we have these better on-screen helpers and gizmos that we can use to help control the action that we're trying to make if I tap into edit mode on this cube and select for example extrude region and I'm gonna come over to face select select this face here and now obviously you can see that there's this yellow line protruding from the face that we have selected with this plus at the end I can just left-click and drag on that just to extrude out a face or we can select this face and left-click and drag on it and again extrude another face all the gizmos can be found on some of the other tools for example on the spin tool is a very good one very handy so for example we can now click on this plus icon to spin out some extra edges there but you'll notice it's pivot position is just placed at the origin so we can use these axis handles here to replace that and put that somewhere where it might be a little bit more sensible and then we can click on this circle that's appeared to kind of refine the angle that we have there this is way easier to handle than it was in 2.79 another one that might be worth taking a look at is the shear tool another gizmo appears with this space selected and here we can just begin to make that shear command depending on which handle we grab and want to use and manipulate it's not just for mesh stuff though we can tap into object mode and take a look at this lamp come over to the lamp settings in the properties window I'm gonna change this to a spot I noticed there some gizmo is here to help control in this case the size of the spot shape for a full look at all the changes within blender 2.80 you can check this link here we're gonna lean on the modeling options just for a moment and we can see all the cool stuff that we've got here in fact the major chapters just in this top right here but multi-object editing is definitely a big advantage so simply shift D to duplicate a few of these and then we can ship select them all and then tap into edit mode and switch between each objects really easily one of the benefits of this of course is we can go shift Z left click and drag across these and then go s X and then 0 just to flatten them all together so they're all nicely aligned without having to do that manually or bring in the 3d cursor where really we shouldn't have to going back to the documentation on here it is worth mentioning that there are a few limitations to this for example with the knife tool and it's select similar regions something that is very cool navigation wise is that while we're rotating around we can press the Alt key or press and hold the Alt key I should say and with that gesture you'll snap the view into the nearest axis so in this case we're on the Left perspective there I'm going to middle click and keep moving around to here and then reverse that so now we should be able to snap into the right perspective so I'm just going to middle click and rotate around a little bit hold alt and it very quickly snapped into that right perspective for us now something to mention on this is if we go to a preferences and then find our navigation settings here you'll notice that we have Auto perspective on by default here this means when we press save one on a numpad and we jump into front orthographic view and we middle clicking rotate out of that viewer automatically snaps us into perspective which for me personally that's what I want most of the time however in this I have noticed that if you want to use this old command so for example if I toggle the perspective view by pressing v on the numpad and then rotate into around here and then hold alt we've snapped into a nice right orthographic view and if we hold alt and then middle click and then snap to the top orthographic it's all gonna work fine but as soon as we middle click and rotate out with snap back to perspective and now if I hold alt we're still in perspective as it snaps into that front view so we might need to hit v again to toggle it auto graphic or of course hit f4 find your preferences and just disable that auto perspective if you don't like it I mean I guess it takes all sorts another huge handy feature that has been added is the new rendering engine Eevee now this is obviously a huge topic so we're gonna handle this more in another video but it felt amiss not to at least include it in this chapter very briefly we can come over to the rendering tab and here we'll find our rendering engine is set to Eevee by default that's not something we're looking at right now for Eevee to kick in we're going to be needing to look at look dev or rendered mode very simply put and look there we have this automatic world lighting in fact if we click on the down arrow there you can choose between which world you would like to light your objects with a couple of the extra options that we have here is to instead use the scene world or add our scene lights into the mix if we were to enable both of these it's basically gonna act like we're in just rendered mode anyway and we can see in our render tab there's a whole lot of post-processing options here that are really gonna help things shine in real time one of the more noticeable differences between two point seven nine and two point eight is the way that the outliner is working here and in particular the way it's working with these layers taking a look into point eight you can see we don't really have those layers anywhere here or at the top those little dots and in the outliner you'll notice everything's grouped under this collection we can double click on this collection and call it anything to let's maybe call a camera and lights and we have these three cubes selected so maybe what we could do is press em to move them into a different collection which is similar to 2.79 what we would have instead moved them to a different layer so here I'm just going to click new collection and let's call this cubes click OK and now we'll see that there's the three cubes now under that collection so we can kinda enable and disable layers by using this tick box so now we can see the cubes anymore or now we can see the camera and lights and also you'll notice we have this visibility icon at the bar right over in 2.79 you'll notice we have their select ability and render ability icons they are still there it's just by default we don't really see them if we come over to this little filter icon at the top we can choose exactly what we want to see there so there's our select ability option and there's our render ability option and now I'll just click on the filter again and now it's similar to how it was in 2.79 there is another option though so I'm going to enable this disabled in viewports icon also this little monitor screen and I'd also like to talk about the H for hiding key so if we were to press H that still works unless maybe hide this cube as well select it press H and now what we can do is use alt H to unhide everything and we'll have noticed is this little eye icon that is toggling on and off in these cases to hide those things now the usefulness of this option that's disabled in the viewports option is especially if you have things like helper objects or something that's just there as reference and we've hidden them as we have here and when we use alt H we don't really want to see them again we can use this it's kind of like a stronger way of hiding something as far as you could say so now when we go alt H it's not going to come back one other thing is that shift H still works as hiding everything else except what we have selected so if I got shift H now will hide the camera and light and if we just go all to H it again will unhide everything about from the ones that were essentially saying do not want hide these when we hit the old hey geun-hye adoption we were pretty much limited to just 20 layers before whereas in 2.18 we can press C to add in a new collection while our mouse is within the outliner there and we can just keep adding them well beyond 20 something else that it's worth noting which is going to have an effect on what we see in the viewport here is our view layers by default if we click on this icon you can see we've just got this first one called view layer I'm gonna call this instead QB delicious and let's now click on this icon here to the right which is going to duplicate that and this one will call also QB licious now something to note about that is that we can have different things visible so for example in this also Kiba licious I'm gonna just disable the visibility of the lamp and now if we go back to that other view layer you can see the lamp is now enabled again if we change the setting of our global visibility here this is going to transcend not just this view layer bought all view layers so let's say we want those two cubes on but just cube - OH - they're not be seen we'll see that that change has been reflected over in our also cube alysha's so cubed o2 is disabled finally tying into that what we see in the viewport here we have to come to this menu this object types visibility menu and as you might be able to guess we have easy access here enabling or disabling the visibility or the Select ability of the types of objects in our scene in one easy category so let's remove the visibility of all our mesh objects and enable them again or perhaps we want to get rid of our lamps and it's important to remember we have this here because as you can see in the outliner if we're wondering why this lamp isn't having much of an effect on our scene we're not going to get much of a clue here so we're gonna need to come over here and just make sure we have that enabled luckily these little icons will let us know if something's changed so you can see the little eye there and the select ability arrow for that matter so if we disable the select ability of meshes we do get a little clue that we've done that and similarly with the eye icon while in 2.79 we had these various different windows layouts that we could switch between in 2.18 instead we have these horizontally laid out at the top the workspaces now these aren't quite the same as just a window layout because we have this handy little tap in our properties window here with a workspace area and this is gonna allow us to specify what mode we want each workspace to enter into so for example if we have this object here this cube and we jump into the modeling workspace you'll notice quite a few things have changed the rendering mode has switched us over into solid shaded we're actually now in edit mode in this object and it switched what tab we were looking at in our properties window so if I switch back over to this context tab at the top and open up our workspace area you can see we have the mode in which we can specify right there if we jump into the sculpting workspace you'll notice we're now in scope mode let's jump over to the context again and come down to the workspace area you can see that set there and also of course you can see that we're set to use this matte cap and the background has changed a little bit so with these various different workspaces there's a few additional things in which we can change that we couldn't do before in 2.79 screen layouts a quick additional thing I wanted to add two modes there is if we just add in an armature with shift a just move that off to the side so it's really clear and easy to see and we went control tab to go into pose mode if we wanted to now select this cube we can't do it and that is because if we go over to our edit menu and find lock object modes you'll see this is enabled by default if we uncheck it we can select our cube now and then we can reselect our armature and see that it's still in pose mode switching to another workspace though and then toggling back it's going to switch us back to object mode anyway because of our workspace settings here in the mode another quick note to make about these is that we can actually filter add-ons as well so we can have only certain add-ons available for certain workspaces to demonstrate this a little bit better what I've done is enabled a lot of add-ons there so in particular coming over to the Preferences window filtered this by add mesh and I've enabled all of these and also in the UV category I've enabled the magic UVs so let's switch this back to a 3d viewport and you'll notice with the N key toggling our sidebar here this is where we'll find many of our settings relate - some of these AG mesh add-ons so while in our layout workspace we can enable the filter add-ons checkbox and then I've enabled them all except magic UV if we enable that you can see we get this little extra section here which potentially once you get you more add-ons maybe this is becoming a little bit more cluttered so anyway I've disabled that there jumping over to the UV editing workspace again filtered all the add-ons and disabled all of them except this magic UV even the cycles rendering engines been disabled another big improvement within a blend 2.80 is the grease pencil which I'm really just going to gloss over here but for more information we can take a look at this link and in particular the user manual here that's got a lot of very useful information in it in 2.79 we could hold down the D key and then left-click and drag in the view to create some grease pencil stroke you can see that in the outliner here and if we press the end to open up our properties sidebar a lot of the details that we would be working with are held here in 2.80 instead of them being in that sidebar will actually find them in the materials and in addition to that we can now find grease pencil objects in the add menu so with no shift a and find grease pencil there and we've got blank stroke and a monkey which has the most bells and whistles here so let's click on the monkey click the cube and let's delete it with X so in the same way that we have the susan mesh monkey we now have the susan crease pencil monkey let's select it as you can see over here in the materials tab we get these different types of materials you have these solid colors and also these black outlines for example in this case and we also have the various modes that we can enter into here so we have our draw there and the edit mode so if i left click and drag across the top there for example we can rest g and move that up a little bit something else to note here is that we don't really have an appropriate workspace up at the top there but if we click on file and new we do have the 2d animation or we can go plus here and then go 2d animation to set things up there instead where we're now automatically entered into draw mode and we're ready to just start creating strokes if we go from the file menu file new and then do 2d animation from here we'll even get set up where the this bright background that were completely ready to draw run to straightaway in addition to the materials tab in our properties window we can also see we have this object data tab for just a grease pencil where we'll find things like layers and some of the useful settings in addition to the hat as well we also have effects so for example we can blur we can pixelate we can add some wave distortion that we could animate the phase value for for example to create some cool effects and in addition to effects we've also got grease pencil dedicated modifiers very briefly for example like opacity which does exactly what you might think and all of these others and probably many more to be introduced in the future you'll notice we still have this annotate tool which we can get to if we hold down D and left-click into the view we still have those features where we can make various different notes about what we're looking at in the viewport here and we can hold D and right-click to enter our eraser but as you can see this little triangle there means that we can left-click and hold to get various different options and we can also press n to open up our sidebar here come down to the tool and find our various options here so we can just X to remove all that in 2.79 if we wanted to create a driver we might come over to the properties of this cube and right-click and manually create later just this single x-axis of value here I would then need to split the view jump into the graph editor switch this to drivers select the x-axis driver that we have now we can see it in the view here give this a little bit more space press + to open up this property sidebar switch to the drivers tab and then I'm going to use the expression var which is what's going on in this area and let's take the cameras Y location for example so whatever the Y value of our camera is that's going to inform the x-axis value of the cube over in 2.8 that's way easier now now I can just right click and go add driver and we get this little window that pops up alignment goes to edit that variable straightaway so I'm going to change that to ver and I switch the object to the camera I'll set that to the Y location and we're done we can now select our camera and the x-axis of our cube is being updated and it's also really easy to just right-click and then open that drivers editor and then we'll see a dedicated window where we can refine that further here I've opened up another version of blender that just has this simple arcade cabinet seen inside I have this little object down here called cube 204 one ingenious naming convention there now what we could actually do is just go ctrl C and then copy that and then ctrl V and that will paste that in as we can see there but if I delete that with X and instead we found this blend file in a file explorer which I have here I can actually left-click and drag that onto blender and then we get the option to open it or link or a pen from it I'm just going to click append and I'm going to go into object and I'm gonna find the very specific cube 204 one and then append that from the library and we have it again Europe jumps into blender 2.81 and inserted this section here the file browser looks a little different now but mostly it's self explanatory there's a little tip that I wanted to share that I thought was an important thing to add so especially for people opening up old blender files in 2.8 and beyond the interface layout is different enough that switching between 2.79 and 2.8 could be a bit disorientating once you get used to the new layout that is especially with the flipped headers between the versions there's an easy to miss feature here which is to open up the side by out the n key and then uncheck the load UI option that will keep the UI in its two-point-eight configuration and then you'll probably just need to reshuffle around the windows that also means you still have easy access to the new workspaces as it happens that load UI option has been there for 2.79 and many versions before that what the option was just a bit more noticeable now though just remember to check behind the curtain that is the side bar with the N key something else that's probably worth noting is that we can press f4 launch our preferences find our add-ons and have a look at all the available add-ons in here which may not have been available in the previous versions something that did catch my eye here which I wanted to mention and we can find it easily enough by just entering into the text filter the word kit is this blender kit asset library so I'm just going to enable that there and you'll find the login and sign up details which should launch just into this website here for more details I'm just going to show how simple this is in a very vanilla state though so we'll find blended kit in the properties of the 3d view so I'm going to exit that now and press n to bring open our sidebar and we'll find it down the side here on the blender kit up at the top we have the asset type and we're set to material here at the moment now the first time you launch this you might actually have the login details but you may just be able to press cancel and then you'll find all this show up the profile stuff but the logging in is actually found just there as well and then if we press animal for example blender kit is going to search and we can see a launches the asset bar as well which we can hide here or show and then if we mouse over them you can see the various different materials that we have let's say I like this black dragon skin I'm just going to click on it and we can see a little green bar which is loading it right in and it's done already so now I'm going to come over to look death and if we zoom right in on this we can see there's our material actually applied to this cube let's take a look at the shading workspace and take a look at the material that's just been created very very basic but with very very little fuss it's just downloaded all these textures for us and hook them up to the appropriate sockets of our principal shader so I'd say that is pretty user friendly now you may have noticed that it wasn't just materials that we had the option to bring in here we could also set this to assets I'm going to select free only let's take a look at space is an interesting one let's take a look at that and here we have what with this thing so let's just click on this and again we're greeted with the download bounding box and general uploading progress green bar or green volume I suppose it is and then just give it a moment to compile let's get rid of this cube X to delete control space to go fullscreen and now we have this object in our scene she's looking really really cool actually so that just about wraps it up for now but what of the future 2.81 and beyond well blender of course is an ever-evolving beast for example here's a discussion over at the dev talk blended org site about the tool bar sidebar interface issue which we briefly touched on earlier on essentially trying to formalize and unify and maybe simplify generally the location of where you might find all your tools and dependent on this discussion might inform a tweak in the layout in future also worth checking out is this release notes link and then here we can see blend a 2.81 now several things have already happened under the user interface the outliners gotten some updates Eevee is handling transparency even better now there's new nose within cycles and Eevee there's a new denoising algorithm included voxel rematching for the sculpting and on and on and on and it's always a good time when you features at the start of a new blender iteration so keep a lookout or just keep in contact with us on the socials will likely be sharing out a lot of the cool stuff that we see but that's gonna wrap us up in this chapter

Channel: Aidy Burrows 3D

Views: 45,972

Keywords: Blender, blender (software), free, tutorial, video course, hardsurface, modeling, Blender 2.8, b3d, course, how-to, gleb alexandrov, aidy burrows, creative shrimp, update, workflow, aidy, gleb

Id: DimAFAFGNRM

Length: 58min 24sec (3504 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 21 2019