Viewport: Past, present and future

It’s been too long. Do you remember Eevee? A lot of development happened in the past month, so listen up.

Big picture: What we did so far

HDRI, PBR, realistic light shadows, post process effects, probes … all of this in real-time, integrated with object mode, mesh editing, …

Do you want to see a glimpse of this while it evolves? Follow the Blender developers video channel:

We demo’ed Cycles integrated with the viewport. Eevee reflections and bloom. And a brand new hair drawing system – fast, smooth, and good looking.

Plans for Siggraph

At the Blender booth at Siggraph (1-3 August) we will show a demo of Blender 2.8. The focus will be on fast playback of realistic characters and environments in real-time.

By then we should also have: Indirect light, reflections, transparency, and tons of performances improvements.

Buildbot

Feeling the hype? Get hands-on with the latest builds. Fresh every day at builder.blender.org/download!

Community tests & call for help!

Thanks to the wonderful community, we already have early adopters and beta-testers spreading the love online.

Have any work from your own that you want to share? We really welcome and are looking forward to see more examples and use cases.

Bloom / Blender 2.8 (Test build) Eevee PBR Engine RealTime by Юрий Жестников

For developers willing to join the project, check Eevee’s roadmap and the more technical viewport optimization document.

After Siggraph

The fun doesn’t stop there. We expect more people to try Blender after all the demos. Which means the focus will be on usability, and polishing.

You should see Cycles fallback, Blender Internal conversion, and advanced features such as SSS and Volumetric.


Shiny creatures – early Blender 2.8/Eevee tests by Andy Goralczyk (@artificial3d)

38 comments
  1. Any news on blender video editor…?

  2. Please, add better support for 3D mouse:
    pivot+rotate+pan without holding shift key.

  3. i love this upgrade of Blender.

  4. Blender is good yet getting better!
    I would like cycles to come with presets so showcase to newcomers and intermediate blender user to see immediately how appealing cycles can be.

  5. I was wondering in the Blender developers had considered the use of Video Upscaling.

    As an example say you are working in 1080p you could have Eevee, Clay, Cycles render in the viewports at

    1) Proper 1080p or
    2) Fake 1080p (render at 720p and then upscale to 1080p).

  6. This is super cool. To me this already looks a lot more promising than what most of the commercial programs showed!

    What the viewport update really does need direly is a viewport dedicated to retopology that actually makes the mesh draw properly in front of the underlying geometry. Like Topogun does it for example, or any of the others like Modo and ZBrush.
    With topology being worked on only after the highRes models are created this is a crucial part of today’s workflow. Not only for game assets. I’d really love to see this being implemented early on. And I could imagine others feel the same way (chime in please, if you do).

  7. Some file to download and test for blender 2.8 ?.

  8. Hey, do you have any news about potential changes in API in 2.8? Currently there is no way to create custom windows for addons, which very limiting.

  9. Damn **** that is so ****** ******* amazing. **** **** damn really cool…
    Ma **** **** blender is the best damn **** open source project i have **** **** seen.
    Really cool, damn, great job!

  10. Hi.
    In current version of Blender 2.8 there is no option to switch between viewport modes like. rendered –
    material – texture – wireframe. It is really inconvenient. Are you going to fix it?

    • Without the views like,
      Rendering – material – texture – wireframe – solid, really will be inconvenient, unless the materials between eevee, blender render and cycles are compatible and the visualization modes are them, so would model in eevee or blender render and visualize in cycles the result, But it will be laborious, I hope they will maintain the preview modes and further refine the cycles for faster and cleaner rendering.
      I still congratulate the entire blender team for making software so complete and enjoyable to work with.

  11. Anyone know if the Viewport shading will be added?

  12. Looks very promising! Thx for an amazing work! Tried one of the snapshots some week ago and everything seemed to work fine even on my prehistoric hardware (i5-2500, 8GB RAM, GTX 560) … which brings up a question – does anybody know whether my graphics card is going to be supported also in the final release 2.8? Some time ago on the dev blog I read that support of 5xx cards (and older) would be dropped after 2.79. Does anyone know?

  13. Or on Christmas Eevee!!

  14. i tried a 2.8 test build and there the draw modes are at the top in the renderer menu. won’t it be possible to have different modes in different views anymore? like clay in one 3d-view and eevee in another?

  15. I’ve tried it out and it’s looking great!
    Shame modifiers don’t work yet though, can’t wait. :)

  16. <3 <3 <3 Blender is gonna be even better tool as I'm using it every day working on games :)

    Thank you a lot guys!

  17. Does this engine has HDR or better version of bloom, one can say HDR is bloom+ does it hae this effect

  18. Won’t there be a simple object mode in 2.8 ? Not every system will be able to handle real time shading.The viewport in Cycles engine seems to be always rendering real time and it makes modeling frustrating.

    • I think once you disable shadows, AO and all that fancy stuff, it should be even lighter than it is now. Just a guess though.

      • Cycles is a path tracer. It’s not meant to be used in real time. I don’t get why we can’t switch between rendered/material/object/wireframe modes in the testbuilds for Cycles. Is that on purpose? Why?

        • Yes i truly pray they will leave the normal solid shading in like it is not in the vieuwport.

    • Render engines are going to be set per render-layer in 2.8+, not per scene like right now. You’ll be able to display one render-layer in the viewport, while rendering another on F12. Their data can easily be linked.

      By default Blender 2.80 ships with two render layers as of now, “RenderLayer” for regular rendering and “Viewport” for (guess what) viewport display. Their collections are linked, so adding/removing an object from one render-layer will add/remove it from the other two.
      The drawing options for the viewport that used to be spread out everywhere in the UI will mostly become render-layer and render-engine options in the future.

      I’m not sure how exactly you’ll switch between e.g. solid and wireframe display in future, but I guess it’s going to be a per render-layer option by using passes. That way you’d be able to customize your own display modes (e.g. solid with wireframes and with grease pencil, but without lamps and manipulators, …).
      Switching to render preview would happen by changing the render-layer the viewport displays.

      • Sorry to say that, but it sounds like totally inconvenient and counter-intuitive. Looks as an attempt to pack to many different things in one single software.

        But all in all, I hope I’ll be “dissapointed” in positive way when 2.8 is released and I’ll have some time to test it.

      • what? and what happens for complex scenes on laptops??? PLEASE re-add at least the solid and textures viewpoint-shaders!!!!! i need them (i dont have a gpu…)

  19. We need shadow catcher material..

  20. I wish you guys had focused more on an ability to port to popular platforms like UE4 tbh

  21. *Heavy breathing Intesifys*

  22. EEVEE’s evolving! #Pokemon

    Nice progress, guys. Truly grateful for this direction with Cycles.

  23. Swarzędz devs Do not forget about animated textures! For vfx and motion graphic !

  24. Feeling like a little boy on christmas eve wanting to test this out.

    • Christmas eve? dont you mean, Christmas Evee? I feel the exact same way, cant wait to actually try out the full version of this!

    • You mean Christmas Eevee… Great job team! Now hurrry and get 2.79 together, I need the Cycles denoiser in my life… :)

  25. Any word on what GPU was used in that test?

    • Also, Great job Blender team, it looks really awesome! :)

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