Collections and Groups


In Blender 2.8 the layer system was revamped, so that objects are organized into a hierarchy of collections. No longer is there a limit of 20 fixed layers.

To make this system more powerful for animation pipelines, we are making a further design change: collections will be data-blocks that can linked and instanced across scenes and files.

Up to now groups have been used for this purpose, but this was somewhat error prone as users had to keep the scene and groups in sync manually. As a result it wasn’t always clear which objects would get linked across or would be visible. In Blender 2.8 we are now fully replacing groups with collections. Existing groups will be converted to collections that are not linked to a scene.

Let’s look at some example workflows.

Instancing

When creating a forest, we might create assets like trees and bushes in an Assets scene and then instance them many times in another Forest scene. The two scenes might then be organized like this:

Alternatively we can work within a single scene. If we don’t want the original trees and bushes to be visible alongside their instances, we can put them inside a hidden “Assets” collection:

It is also possible to unlink collections from the scene so that only the instances remain.

Character Linking

For linking, let’s consider a character that we want to animate in multiple shots. In the original file we create a few collections. “Hero” for the character mesh and rig , “Rig Helpers” for custom bone shapes that are used in the rig, and a few other collections and objects for doing render tests.

In the shot file, we can now instance the “Hero” collection. This will give us just the character mesh and rig, without the lights and helper objects that are only need for working in the original character file. Note that the helper objects will still be linked indirectly and used to draw the rig , but they will not be individually visible.

From here we can create a proxy as before and start animating the rig. In a following blog post we’ll look at how this will work with the new override system, which is still under development.

View Layers and Visibility

Besides the group related changes, we also made changes to collection visibility. Previously there was only a visibility toggle per view layer, now there is explicit viewport and render visibility again. These are properties of the collection itself, which means they get linked along to other scenes and files.

It’s still possible to exclude specific collections from a view layer:

This can be used for the same purpose as render layers were before, decomposing the render into multiple layers for extra control in compositing, or for rendering the same scene with different light setups. It is also possible to create a view layer for workflow reasons, working on a subset of the scene.

Current State

The initial implementation of unified collections and groups is now in the Blender 2.8 branch for testing. We are still working on the user interface and code, task T55099 lists the remaining work to be done.

Another important topic we plan to tackle is bringing back local view and making it easier to quickly show/hide collections in the 3D viewport.

 

The Future of Overrides
This Summer’s Sculpt Mode Refactor
Geometry Nodes Workshop: October 2024
New Brush Thumbnails

77 comments
  1. how i can export collection or group to OBJ format?

    • @gosh:
      to export everything in the scene as an obj, simply do FILE> Export> and select Wavefront OBJ. Be sure to UNCHECK “selection only” under “Limit to” within the foldout of the export options on the right of the screen. (I think by default, this check box isn’t ticked.)

      Personally, I prefer to uncheck “Apply Modifiers” within the geometry section too.

  2. I used layers in an older version of blender, I opened my file in blender 2.8.
    the layer(now collection) i had selected before the update is now only visible and the name of the other collections (collection 1 to 4) have turned light gray I can’t view the other layers or edit the models how do I fix this?

  3. Saw requests today for linking and unlinking lights to specific objects. Anybody have a way to do that?

  4. It was easy to select a group and transform (move, rotate or scale) the complete set, but with collections we now have to go through an extra step – right click and select all objects in the collection and then only apply transformations.

    Say I append a vehicle (earlier as a group) from blender 2.79 now as collection and wish to place a few copies around a scene… now for every copy I have to select objects inside and then transform. No I don’t want to use parenting. A real nightmare.

  5. The group change to collection so how about getting the LOD work in Unreal Engine 4.21?
    this collection doesn’t work with the LOD workflow. so how to get this thing work by add-on?

  6. how to link rig to blender 2.8

  7. How about accessing cross-scene linked nested collections? I can see only the top-tier collection, and when I try to proxy, it goes down to objects. How can I access child collection?

  8. Hope to see old Render layers functionality. Masking and excluding levels were crucial features in my render workflow…

    I would like to have
    The “Main” collection which excludes all other collections during render.
    The “Second” collection which excludes all except main and is masked by main.

    Usually, there are 6-8 “second” collections per project with many objects in each, so masking was a real time saver

  9. This looks great, ultimately I would be very happy if you implemented implicit instancing with the user not having to take care of the technicalities – just like Clarisse, for (nomen omen) instance.

  10. @brecht, previously ctrl+click on object icon and v/s/r icons was used to recursively select and toggle v/s/r. Now ctrl is used on visibility icon to isolate object. Will recursive selection/vsr toggle be back? It’s essential when working with parented objects.
    Reported this here:
    https://developer.blender.org/T55162

  11. But what about the possibilities in 2.7? in 2.7 you could use masks in render layer to have visibility at camera stopped only for object and reflexes and the shadow remains unaffected … there you have real control on the render layers in 2.7 … in 2.8 nor the groups have been solved completely and render layers have been completely destroyed (They no longer have the functions they had in the previous version 2.7) … where was this thing lost ???
    I can not wait for serious artists to see that they can not do what they did in 2.7 !!! and do not understand why there are so few people complaining about this? Please solve this .. Alpha came out and nothing!

  12. I want to have a shortcut to select next object by arrow key and expend by right arrow key. please.

  13. I like the changes because you can organise a lot more than 20 layers (and organise by topic without having to think to structure this to a layer). One observation though:
    In the old layer system, by selecting an object, you knew the layer it was on (as the layer was highlighted). In the collection system, the object/mesh marker gets a highlight, BUT in scenes with lots of meshes in one collection, this cannot be seen as they are all off screen on the right.
    This could be EASILY FIXED by simply highlighting the collection name in addition to the mesh marker.
    Hope this is clear, if not, I can provide a short video to explain what I mean.

  14. I would like to have a shortcut or function that selects only the objects in the collection as a whole.

  15. Hello,
    Merging groups and collection makes a lot of sense, I’ve got one concern tho…
    Let’s say that I want to make a big/complex set ( a house) , that I want to link into a shot.
    I may create many collections to organize the modeling phase :
    Wall, Roof, Furnitures, Small details, Garbage layer, Ect…

    Then , I make a “House” collection to be linked into shots. At the linking stage , instead of having only the house group (2.79) in the file explorer, will I also have all the other collections that are only made for organization ?

    This isn’t a big issue , but it can get confusing, if I want to have many variations of the house . We may not have a clear distinction between what’s supposed to be linked and what’s for organisation inside the .blend. If we work with several people this can lead to confusions . I admit that this can be solved with a clear naming convention, but that would be nice to have a simple “out of the box” solution.

    Is it plan to have a toggle to say that this collection is acting like a group and intended to be linked , and this one is only for geometry management inside the .blend ?

  16. This is a very exiting extension to Blender, thanks!

    A question about the outliner: how will collections work vs. parenting? Specifically: how can I see parent-child relations in the new outliner?

    In 2.79, a child object is moved ‘under’ its parent in the outliner, providing easy and handy visibility of the relationship. Also, parenting is cleared when you move the parented object away from its parent in the outliner. In 2.8, parent and child can be in different collections, and thus not visible as parent-child pair in the outliner.

    How can I ‘detect’/view/find parent-child relationships in the new collections view?

  17. A massive thank you to you and all of the people working on the new Blender 2.8 Brecht. I’m really looking forward to being able to use it in production when it’s ready.

    As others have mentioned, per object visibility toggling when working is a hugely important feature to retain. I’d certainly campaign to keep it, as if I’ve understood correctly… the process of having to create multiple collections in order to hide and un-hide arbitrary objects as you work seems very convoluted.

    When modelling for example, sometimes you just need to hide a certain object in order to see what you’re doing. That object might not necessarily fit into any concept of a well thought out hierarchy of collections, it might just be in the way at that particular moment.

    Perhaps the example in your post, of “assets” being instanced in collections could be explored further? It might make more sense say, for objects to remain their own thing distinct from a collection until the user is ready to add them to one (or many). Which I think is similar to what Gabriel is saying.

    When starting a new project a user could then work freely to model, rig, light etc in the same way as in 2.79, toggling visibility of objects and creating parenting relationships as they like. Then once they are ready to create some sort of order in their project, they could bunch their objects together and instance them in Collections. Collections could then be instanced in Scenes and users could configure Render Layers within each scene to render specific collections from those scenes for compositing.

    Changes at the object level could propagate through into collections (in the same way modifying externally linked .blend files does in 2.79), as could changes at the collections level through to the scene level. For example if animation etc. was added at the object level it would be applied to all instances of that object in every collection and scene. But if animation etc. was added to an object instance at the scene level, then it would only exist within that scene (similar to how an object instance can be toggled from data to object in the material properties panel of 2.79, allowing different materials per instance but sharing the same geometry data).

    So a project hierarchy might look something like the below

    Project

    -Objects
    –Object 01
    –Object 02
    –Object 03
    –Object 04

    -Collections
    –Collection A
    —Object 01
    —Object 02
    –Collection B
    —Object 02
    —Object 03
    –Collection C
    —Object 04

    -Scene 01
    –Collection A
    –Collection B

    -Scene 02
    –Collection B
    –Collection C

    I have no idea if this would work from a code perspective, but this approach could utilize the power of collections (which is definitely superior to the limitations of the old layer system) whilst still maintaining a good degree of flexibility when working. Just my two cents really.

    Also as Zsolt S mentioned, having a working box select (currently it just highlights rows!?) and the ability to shift select between two items in the outliner would be great additions. But that’s more to do with the functionality of the outliner.

  18. Do not you think that working with materials in Blender is rather complicated and confusing? Read at least the documentation section Assigning a Material. Will the work with materials in the new Blender be changed?
    Thank you!

  19. This is really fantastic, I can’t wait to put my dirty hands on blender 2.8, thank you very much for all of this hard work guys, you’re all amazing…

    I haven’t tried blender 2.8 very hard, just some testing here and there, still i found very unusual how collections work. To be honest, I didn’t understand quite well yet. In the old post from January “View Layers and Collections” it was shown the Master Collection, now it’s gone? What is the difference between Scene Collection and the Master Collection? If the Master Collection is composed by all the objects that weren’t added to any other collection yet, than it shouldn’t be shown as an collection at all, just the objects by themselves (even if that’s not what what is happening in the code structure). Things are a bit confuse to me.

    I think is pointless to remove the old layers system and even groups, maybe the code structure and how they work should be updated, actually they should work like collections, but they still should be usable.

    I was thinking about it and this crossed my mind.
    —– Scene (There’s no need to say this is an collection again, even if it really is)
    ———— Collection 1 (Possible to unactivate, freeze, hide to render, link and append)
    ————————-Group 1 (Should work just like collections, however this should be shown in the properties panel as a “group” for easy management – Collections can’t be inserted into groups, but collections should be inserted in other collections)
    ————————–Group 2
    ————–Collection 2
    ————————–Group 3
    ————————–Collection 3
    —————————————-Group 4
    —————————————-Group 5

    And the 20 views should still be accessible guys, to be honest I think is impossible to improve that workflow. Is unique in Blender just because is simple, efficient and quick to use. Maybe they shouldn’t be used in layer composition any more, Layer Views should be used for composition….

    Overall thank you very much for all your work guys

  20. First off, the new collection system is looking good! Seems like a much more flexible way to organise objects than the fixed 20 layers. I do however have a few observations:

    – Per object visibility. Please do not remove this feature! I use it extensively to temporarily hide objects (sometimes only in the biewport, sometimes only for rendering, sometimes both). Having to create a separate sub-collection and moving and then removing objects is an unnecessary complication.

    – Creating new layers, moving objects, etc. These commands are not discoverable. First even right-clicking didn’t bring up any menu, good to know this is fixed. I had to use the spacebar to search for the command “new collection”.

    – Selecting objects. It would be great to be able to directly select objects insetad of the weird 2.79 behaviour of only highlighting their rows. For example, selecting a large number of objects in the outliner with for example B (box select). Or there is AFAIK no way to select many objects by selecting the first and last element, like in other programs (select first element, shift-click select last element). This is often needed in very large scenes with many objects.

  21. Love the Collections !! ( Copy – Paste in the Outliner would just right )
    IMO Collections should be an addition not a replacement to the work-flow.

    In 2.7 groups are very basic, 2.8 gives us an opportunity to Upgrade Groups to a regular object. (Selectable .. Modifiable.. )
    Groups are VERY different from Collections. Mainly that they can be transformed and their origins can be changed.
    With the new multi-object feature probably add a modifier to a group !

    Groups are important for scene organization and animation.

    Also sad to see layers go.. Its fast AF .. Its no wonder Lightwave still has it !!

    • You’re thinking of group instances – as explained in this post, collections can be instanced too, and it’s way more powerful since those can be nested.

  22. That’s nice!
    But interesting, how can be achieved same fast scene visibility navigation as with legacy layers on 123… buttons.
    It is also hardly needed and important.

  23. This is so exciting!!! This is going to make so many things so much nicer, easier, cleaner… this is fantastic.

  24. Great! It seems like a great improvement to blender! I like how you guys are making things more uniform in 2.8

    I have a specific question:

    When i was recently working on an motion graphics project in version 2.79 i tried to make my animation more complex by grouping a bunch of animated object and instancing them around the scene but i found it impossible to easily offset the animation startpoint. Is this something you would consider implementing in the new system?

    • i got an answer on the youtube chanel:

      Pablo Vazquez:
      Yes! Because instances can now use different actions, so you just offset the action.

  25. Hi!
    I’m sorry if someone has asked this before but I wonder if you plan on doing something regarding the fact that when we create a new collection, it’s hidden by default.
    Actually, the only way I know that allows me to create a new collection is to select an object, press “M” and select “New Collection”. The problem is that the object disappears (I guess it’s because the new collection created is not visible) but I don’t know how to make it visible. I don’t even see it in the outliner. The only way I found to show it is to switch to “Viewport” from the dropdown menu that is in the top bar (outside of the outliner).
    Anyways I hope this becomes more intuitive pls.

    Otherwise I like the whole concept of merging Groups, layers, render-layers, outliner, etc…
    Keep up the good work!

    • Short answer: It’s fixed now. Objects won’t disappear.

      Long answer: That’s the old behavior. What happened is that the newly made collection wasn’t ‘linked’ to the view layer. It is now fixed and works as expected. You can also right click anywhere in the outliner to create a new collection, I still think we could afford to have an icon in the header for this though.

  26. Thanks for all the hard work!! I’m concerned about the modeling workflow because you remove the posibility of hide object, is the / key still working? To have to change objects in collections just to work only in one of them just give me nightmares.
    Anyhow keep up the hard work!

    • Bringing back local view (/ key) is planned, see my reply above for more details about that.

  27. When can we expect Blender to be stable enough to start using it for more than a progress preview?
    When can we start working on plugins?

    • The current plan is for there to be a beta version by SIGGRAPH, which is in early August.

      • So the beta is the version we should consider “stable enough”. OK. Thank you!
        And I assume before that any version is a subject to break.

        • Beta means: Full of bugs, not everything is working, but mostly feature complete. Still subject to changes.

  28. 2. The new collection should have been added to the view layer, which would have kept the object visible, but due to a bug that didn’t happen.

    3. To understand view layers you can look at tutorials for the existing Blender render layers, they’re a more powerful version of that. 3D viewport control for showing/hiding collections is something different indeed.

    • Got it, appreciate the helpful response. Keep up the great work!

  29. Thanks for the reply!

    Regarding #2, I don’t think it was a bug. Pablo added an object to a new collection and it disappeared. He commented that he doesn’t like the behavior but seemed unsure of how it should be resolved.

    This predicament made sense to me because the act of creating a new collection is more akin to creating a new layer in, say, Maya or Photoshop than simply moving to a preexisting layer slot like in 2.79. So I was curious if a solution has been found since the live stream.

    #3, Hopefully Pablo will create a more in-depth look at what this means in a typical workflow, as I’m still confused, haha. Also, I’m guessing it’s a different thing from the 3D View Collections Design? https://developer.blender.org/T54965

  30. Really looking forward to how this new collections system will ultimately shape up. This upgrade to the layers system is a much welcome change.

    Few questions:
    1. Will the new collections system allow individual objects to belong to multiple collections?
    2. Has the issue of jarring disappearance of objects when added to new collections been resolved? (As exemplified in Pablo’s live stream: https://youtu.be/gMLAw6dr3nM?t=1557)
    3. What exactly is View Layers and needing to link collections? A huge part of the usefulness of layers in any software in general is the immediacy and easy manipulability of created layers, but what we see in the live stream I mentioned doesn’t seem to be the case.
    4. And maybe kind of a side issue, but is the Outliner getting usability improvements as well? For instance, selecting highlighted objects by default, toggling options applying to all selected, etc. would make the Outliner a joy to use.

    • 1. Yes
      2. Probably, a lot of bugs have been fixed since then, though I’m not sure what this specific one was.
      3. View layers are basically different “views” of the same scene, where you render only a subset of collections or apply some overrides. For compositing you can think of them as image layers, but when you’re working in the 3D viewport not so much. The word “layer” means many different things in different 2D and 3D software..
      4. We have and will make some improvements, but probably not so much to the selection system. Viewport and outliner selection are different things, and making them the same thing would have deep consequences for how you select things in Blender in all editors, so we’re not tackling that now.

  31. The position of the Icon for the modes should be placed where people easily can see them and that’s in the bottom third. If you put it on the top you always have to look up. The bar as it is in 2.79 doesn’t need to be changed.

  32. I have been using Blender since 2.5, I always love to see exciting updates and Blender has greatly improved over the years especially with the introduction of Cycles. I have opened 2.8 last week and I was impressed with the EVEE viewport , it was the outliner that seemed to give me a headache. Groups, Collections ect, seemed so foreign to me. Like a previous comment I too hated Autodesk and just gave up on it. You guys are doing such great work I would like to see plenty of tutorials on the new interface . I’m hoping that 2.8 won’t make my hair even grayer!

  33. Will there be material overrides and mask layers for view layers?

  34. What happens if I just want to turn off the visibility of an object of a few objects temporarily for say either making a test render or to see another clearly while I work on it? Say I have an architectural scene and I have some props of people as a collection but I notice in this particular render view I would rather not have the dog showing because it blocks the view of the hallway but everything else is fine – it seems I can’t do that without making a new sub collection… which is pretty inefficient.
    Cant we have a ‘disable’ checkbox next to each object in a collection (and inversely an ‘isolate’ checkbox – like the keypad ‘/’ ) or some similar arrangement – why are we avoiding fine control in the outliner – too many check boxes ?
    As to making collections unique why not identify a collection with a consecutive number and a name so – 1.buildings 2. people. In the 3d view you could have a grid of boxes as a shortcut as before but showing the name as a tooltip.

    • Per object visibility controls are reasonable in my personal opinion, but I didn’t make any changes to that part of the 2.8 design since there was no clear agreement on it. We’ll have to see what the spring artists and other users feedback is once more of the collection UI is in place.

      However for temporarily hiding objects our idea is to make a more powerful local view instead. Basically you’d be able to hide objects with H, shift+H, alt+H in the viewport without affecting the visibility controls in the outliner. The replacement for the layer buttons in the 3D viewport would also put collections in and out of this local view.

      In 2.7 using the H key or changing layer visibility can break carefully set up visibility for instancing, rigging or rendering. Pressing alt+H in a complex production file is something you almost never want to do. We want to make it so you can safely isolate a collection or set of objects in the viewport without having to unbreak visibility for your final renders.

      As for keeping the compact layer visibility buttons in the viewport header, it was great to pack it in such a small amount of space, but we don’t think it’s practical with nested / named collections. There’s no way to show the nesting, the numbers would either change or become scrambled as you add and remove collections, the relation between what’s in the viewport and outliner would be unclear. Someone could create an add-on for this though.

      • Please don’t think animated film makers are the only users of Blender – and I don’t want to hear that ‘Blender is for artists’ self serving claptrap rolled out in defence of alienating/stiffing others :) What suits ‘Spring’ activities is probably not suited to everyone. I would like you to consider the needs of technical users too…its still rendering and animation – and that leads on to discussions of coloured wireframes but not in this post… In my opinion what you have come up with may be fine for ‘artistes’ but it has deficiencies/hassle where the undertaking is slightly different.

        • Named and nested layers, Eevee / PBR viewport, user interface improvements, asset manager and multi object editing are top requested improvements from the user community. And the design for these things starts with what the wider community needs.

          If the code quest and 2.8 was focused on improving Blender mainly for open movie artists, the priorities would be quite different. Of course the artists benefit from what’s happening too and we make sure it’s compatible with what they do. But they know all the workarounds and tricks so the features to make them more productive are different.

          • Good. Please consider making per object visibility a reality then. Thanks for your dedication..

      • I REALLY hope we can have per object visibility back.
        I suggest it be available for easy animation on the main object node.

      • I hope the per object hiding get’s added back. It would make sense as it seems to work similarly, if I understand correctly, in a lot of art programs. You have layers, like collections, that can be shown or hid but then each item within the layer can also be shown or hid on it’s own. Having the ability to hide things in the viewport and achieve the same result could be neat but that seems like it should be an addition and not a replacement.

  35. I believe this is good move but we still needed another object groups concept across the tree branches for lighting and others.

    How about adding Katana’s CEL-like pattern matching-based object groups in addition to current Collections?

    • oops, I was confused.
      objects are overlappable in current sub-collections so we just need auto-classifying system with pattern matching like e-mail software.

  36. I read alot about Blender 101 but I don’t see anything delivered by it. Will there be a blog post about what’s going on and when are we going to see these new features by the Blender 101 project?

    • The toolbar, tools and widgets started in the 101 project, and those are a big focus in the code quest along with other usability improvements.

      The other part of 101 is providing a stripped down Blender for specific tasks, and there is infrastructure for it (application templates and workspaces). Creating a set of default workspaces or templates to ship with Blender will happen later.

      • have blender team considered adding tool options to the right hand side (right region) of the 3D editor instead of putting them on the top bar? I feel like the top bar has not enough space for all tool options, and right region of the 3D editor has duplicated stuff, which could be removed (like transformation, which is already available through object properties inside of the properties editor) and some stuff, which could be put elsewhere (like 3D cursor position which could actually be considered as 3D cursor tool options and stay where they always have been when 3D cursor tool is selected). IMHO top bar could be used for staff which cannot be considered as a tool, like for example adding objects (I personally like keyboard shortcut for that matter, but many users unfamiliar with blender could see a familiar ui pattern and if I’m not mistaken, at least Autodesk Maya and Cinema 4D use it for the same purpose). Another advantage of right region for tool options is that vertical layout could harbor a lot more options and could have been tabbed to make it more clearer.

      • That’s great. Thank you for the answer.

        “The other part of 101 is providing a stripped down Blender for specific tasks, and there is infrastructure for it (application templates and workspaces). ”

        This is the part I am most curious about. When can we expect to see the initial results? Does “stripped down” mean that there will be different versions of Blender? I think not but the expression “stripped down” made me unsure. Will it be possible lets say working in a Game Development mode, then at some point switch to Movie Animation mode or just switch to full Blender seamlessly without restarting the application. That would be the most useful approach.

  37. Really good idea the new collection system and the new selection system is usefull, it was a lack in the older version of blender

  38. Years ago, when I commented that the old layer system needs to be improved, the friendly users from the friendly Blender community told me that I was an idiot and the layer system was perfect.

    • Yes – that is a problem in many communities, though. I’ve had the same experience with Modo as well. I’m using it as my main tool but still have problems with it where I am told I am an idiot for wanting it.

      Sometimes it’s true that as a user you first have to understand a certain way of thinking and adapting to how the program is designed instead of forcing the own way of thinking onto it.
      In other cases people are just jerks. Jerks should be ignored. The core developers of Blender usually are all very reasonably people, as you can see here.

      Also keep in mind that often people really DO request features just for the hell of it. Those users exist as well. And going after teir requests would stall actuall necessary development.

      A good idea is usually to propose an actuall better idea and how it should work so that people can discuss it. Saying something’s bad is easy – having a better idea is hard.

      In short – ignore jerks but make sure not to get so annoyed to fall in the category yourself, eventually. ^^

  39. How to add objekt to layer?
    How to replace object from layer?
    How to replace object frome one layer to another?
    Panels with buttons “New layer” “Add to layer” “Remove from layer” and etc. it will coming later?

    • Object can be moved to a collection with drag & drop in the outliner, and right clicking on a collection or object brings up a menu with various operations. Right clicking on a collection or in empty space lets you create a new collection.

      In the 3D viewport, you can press the M key to move objects to an existing or new collection. New objects are added in the active collection.

  40. To be honest, I don’t care about this at all. I just feel very disappointed not to have a layer icon. I’m more concerned about eevee, not the interface and other features. Blender 2.8 is very disappointing. If Eevee doesn’t have any major breakthrough, maybe I should Consider giving up Blender, Blender is no longer the previous Blender, is simply the next Autodesk, since there is no difference with Autodesk, I would rather directly return to 3DS Max or C4D, why continue to use blender. Don’t ask me why, because I hate Autodesk, and now Blender 2.8 is exactly the same as it is, so I hate Blender 2.8 too, except Eevee :(

    • That’s unfortunate you feel this way. If you feel you’d be in better position shelling out a lot of money for those other programs, you should.

      But I think you should at least give the coming Blender version a chance once it matures to beta. The changes the developers are making for Blender 2.8 are welcome changes for a slew of people.
      They’re adding so many exciting/useful features and tackling so many UX/UI issues, it’s hard to imagine 2.8 will be anything less than a welcome landmark version for Blender.

      • I agree. Judging blender 2.8 now is like judging an unborn baby saying they will fail at playing the flute.

    • That’s only a perspective. Probably you are just overwhelmed by changes, understandable. None of those changes were made for sake od copying Maya, Max or other programs. These changes are based on proven UI/UX standards present in all kinds of programs and apps, but carefully tailored to make workflow in blender easier, better and faster. For example you still can use E-Key to quickly extrude a face, now you will also get handy tool for it in Toolbar, both methods will offer better visualization via TopBar and new Viewport Widgets. What’s wrong with having more options and better feedback? Don’t like Toolbar icons? You will be able to turn them off. Right-Click-Select stays here! ;) Blender is still blender, developed by blender users (who can code) for other blender users. Try to think more positively. :)

    • Wants blender to be used more in the industry but doesn’t embrace the changes needed to be a more adaptable to industry workflow. Sad and completely unprofessional. You can always stay on 2.79 forever.

  41. does it mean that groups dropdown will be removed from properties editor? (I’d rather see it as a positive change to be honest, properties editor is really bloated IMHO)

    • Are you referring to the Groups panel in the Object tab? That’s still there at the moment (renamed to Collections), but we might find a better solution in the outliner.

      • that is exactly what I was referring to, thank you for your reply. I see you’ve done a lot of work in terms of removing duplicated stuff from the ui, I personally see it as a positive change and hope properties will lose “some weight” here and there too and become more usable. Thank you all for the work done so far, it really looks awesome!

  42. So this is great. And is similar to how groups works in other animation software and then some. However I am getting somewhat confused on the naming . Correct me if I have this wrong.

    2.79 “Groups” -> Converted to “collections”
    “Collections” – new functionality and can be easily instanced (assuming this will be easier than the current workflow of using empties to instance them.

    Unless I’m missing something why not just call the new collections “groups” as that is what 99% of the rest of the industry uses and current groups are going away? Great work all the same!

    • At least in Maya and 3ds Max, groups are different than collections in Blender. Those groups come with a parenting relation, you select them as one object in the viewport, modifiers can be applied to the group object, etc.

      Collections in Blender don’t work like that (and neither did the existing layers and groups). There is no parenting relation and objects are still individually selected and edited. Instancing still works with empties, and I agree that’s not ideal.

      Having support for more standard groups as well would be good I think, it’s convenient to edit and instance grouped objects like that. By eliminating the old groups that name is free again at least. But it’s not the problem we’re trying to solve now.

      • I really thought that with 2.8 Groups would get a much needed update. Especially after the Multi Edit work. Which is AWESOME by the way.
        I really hope we can have a better Groups back.

        Every 3d 2d program has it heck even Libre Office !

  43. good..
    please video tutorial for this :)

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