Blender 3.0 released

Apparently blender foundation released version 3.0 a day or two ago.

I learned about it because I was trying to see if it is possible to make Blender work in vr with ovrtoolkit there was an update screen and after that it turned out it is now possible to navigate in VR view with motion controllers.

There's a short video about it here:

 

Man Blender is getting to the point where it's hard imagine one person learning everything.

I really need to learn new Blender. I'm still using Blender 2.79. Every time I think about it though... I feel a little overwhelmed.

 

Given that it is a swiss army knife for modeling and animation, the idea is likely to learn the areas you need and ignore the rest.

But yeah, starts resembling C++. "Everything is included, including the kitchen sink, the spaceship, and ways to create both from scratch".

 

How do you feel in Unity? The same applied there.

There's little value in "learning everything" in advance. Learn the fundamentals of your craft and then just use your tools to do stuff. As you build up experience you'll find that you're more and more easily able to pick up new stuff without having to "learn" it first.

 

Suppose you have a good point. I've only ever used Blender to make assets for games myself, so yeah, there's a grand portion of the software that's more or less irrelevant to me (for now).

But stuff like Geometry nodes looks AMAZING for doing some funky modelling work. One day I'm gonna have to take some time off work and do a deep dive into some courses to catch myself up on the the relevant stuff that's changed over the last 5 or so years.

 

I thought this point was reached few years ago.

 

Yeah my statement is probably more accurate to the 2.80 version.

2.79 felt like I could learn a little bit about everything. I spent some time learning the compositor and the node based material system.

But now it's a fully-fledged 2d animation software, you've got geometry nodes, regularly new and improved rendering engines, buttloads of new tools for every discipline.

I'm at least glad they're doing an LTS version now to give some sense of stability. But even then, that's 2.93, and suddenly we're in 3.0.

I'm not complaining by the way. I love Blender; it was my entry into the 3d world and making assets for video games, and I wouldn't want things any other way.

 

That is why you update your tools as soon as you can, otherwise you are stuck behind and get overwhelmed.

For me, the transition to 2.8+ was painless and I can't imagine going back to the cluttered 2.79.
The real time engines and the new organizational features are too good!

Behind the new facade it is still the same old blender with the same keys and the same everything. Just better!

As for transitioning. JUST DO IT!

Edit: if you use blend files in unity go 2.93.6 for now as Unity can't use 3.0 yet for importing.

 

So far, the transition to 3.0 has been painless as well. Compatibility is strong. The biggest change from a workflow perspective is the use of Asset Libraries, basically an always-present list of .blend files you can manage, filled with materials or models you use often so importing/appending/linking those items becomes much easier. Think of it as almost a set of prefabs in Blender.

Things like geometry nodes or rendering engines probably won't mean a great deal to Unity users, though there's no reason the geometry made with geometry nodes couldn't be exported to FBX.

 

The danger with Blender is that it is so intuitive that you can end getting lost into doing things that have no relation whatsoever with what you were planing to do upon opening Blender. For exemple when I went into modeling a spaceship for my game I ended up with this...

 

I notice that Radeon Adrenalin 21.12.1 release notes says it adds support for Blender 3.0 on RX 6000 series GPU's. So I'm guessing that means if you have an RX 6000 series you may encounter some kind of issues with Blender 3 unless you update your driver.

 

What? Thats very specific to your use case I would say. We are using geometry nodes in a unity workflow right now (for prototyping as thats mostly what we use unity for now, but its still a real use case). The power of procedural modelling is not in exporting it to the engine, its in the power to iterate quickly and drastically.

Exported a house and realised you needed something that is the size of an entire block of flats? If you made that house with geometry nodes you can change that in 1 click and reexport


Ofcourse if you want to export this stuff with ability to edit in engine, you would want to go for houdini + houdini engine (not cheap).

But I can tell you as a user of both houdini and blender, blender is closing the gap quickly and unless you need specifically houdini ENGINE, you would be better off investing at this point in blender

 

You're absolutely right, I wasn't thinking of procedural buildings (adjustable rows, columns, floors), even though those have been demoed. I mostly use geometry nodes for surface details and rely on Unity prefabs for accumulative elements like city blocks.

 

Thats interesting I havent actually really used them for surface details yet much actually, haha we both have something to try out now Thanks!