Blender 2.8 beta released with a revamped user interface, and a high-end viewport among others

The Blender team released beta version 2.8 of its Blender, a free and open-source 3D creation software, earlier this week. Blender 2.8 beta comes with new features and updates such as EEVEE, a high-end Viewport, Collections, Cycles, and 2D animation among others.

Blender is a 3D creation suite that offers the entirety of the 3D pipeline including modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing, and motion tracking. It allows video editing as well as game creation.

What’s new in Blender 2.8 Beta?

EEVEE

Blender 2.8 beta comes with EEVEE, a new physically based real-time renderer. EEVEE works as a renderer for final frames, and also as the engine driving Blender’s real-time viewport. It consists of advanced features like volumetrics, screen-space reflections and refractions, subsurface scattering, soft and contact shadows, depth of field, camera motion blur and bloom.

A new 3D Viewport

There's a new and modern 3D viewport that was completely rewritten. It can help optimize the modern graphics cards as well as add powerful new features. It consists of a workbench engine that helps visualize your scene in flexible ways. EEVEE also helps power the viewport to enable interactive modeling and painting with PBR materials.

2D Animation

There are a new and improved 2D drawing capabilities, which include a new Grease Pencil. Grease Pencil is a powerful and new 2D animation system that was added, with a native 2D grease pencil object type, modifier, and shader effects. In a nutshell, it helps to create a user-friendly interface for the 2D artist.

Collections

Blender 2.8 beta introduces ‘collections’, a new concept that lets you organize your scene with the help of Collections and View Layers.

Cycles

Blender 2.8 beta comes with a new feature called Cycles that includes new principled volume and hair shaders, bevel and ambient occlusion shaders, along with many other improvements and optimizations.

Other features

Dependency Graph: In blender 2.8 beta, the core object evaluation and computation system have been rewritten. Blender offers better performance for modern many-core CPUs as well as for new features in the future releases.