 Friday, the 6th of July, yes, is the end of the first week after the Cold Quest. The Cold Quest has come to an end last week. Most of the developers, got a little announcement there, are back at home. We are back. The studio shrank to the artist team upstairs working on Spring and the developers working here. Okay, Sivran, Campbell, and Campbell sticking around for a bit, and Brecht is now working at the Blender Institute, like for good. So if you're on the development fund or the Blender Cloud, put yourself on the back. This is happening because of you. What also is happening because of you and the Cold Quest supporters is that now we have Blender 2.8 Alpha. What does it mean? Well, to celebrate the end of the Cold Quest, to have a product that you say, okay, we worked for three months, and okay, what's coming out of it? It's an alpha. So it's basically the same version as the day before, but with the alpha title on it. So it's like a way of calling it, like, okay, this is what came out of it. In order to have that a bit more than just the alpha word in the splash screen, we also changed the theme. Now it's using Flatty Dark, which is based on the Flatty Light theme that was around in 2.7. Some might be familiar with it. It's just a very bright theme. Now the default theme is a similar branch of that, but in Dark. It's easier on the eye. You can, of course, change it. You make your own. But the idea is that now, by default, Blender would be a bit darker. There has been so many things happening since last week. There is arrangements on the headers, the interface, new, as I said, new colors. Also a new way to interact with Blender is a new, the minimal key map has been implemented as well. So there are a few things that I could make whole videos about it, and I will. So I'm not going to go into that, but just, okay, what is this Blender 2.8 alpha thing? If you build or the Blender or Dark, the same place where you get all the previous builds, you will get Blender 2.8. And on the splash screen, it's going to say a little alpha word next to 2.80. That means that you have this new Blender version. The colors also should be there. If you don't have it, it's probably because it's taking them from your user preferences. So if you want to get the full-on 2.8 experience how it's supposed to be right now, it should go to File, Load Factory Settings. And you don't need to save it, but this is basically how it looks at the moment. Especially if you don't, you shouldn't have a guy talking next to the bottom left. So this is how it looks. And it's a spray, I think it's much more cleaner how it used to be. The top bar is still there. You can also collapse it. The top bar is showing the active tools, but by default when you start, you don't have any active tools. But yeah, it's showing the active tools and the settings for them. You can also collapse them. Remember now we also have those settings or most of the settings that appear on the top left. They're now here as the tool settings in the Properties Editor. The status bar is also there and can also, it can be collapsed right now. There is no, in the future there will be like a toggle, like show status bar. But for now, if you don't like it, you can just put it down, just like dragging and collapsing. And the same way you do it with the top bar. The only thing that for the time being, it's not being saved on the blend file. So when you save and reload, it's going to pop up again. You need to, it's working progress, of course. But just to know that you can do it right now. Also the icons now are using a more, it's more dimmed because it's using the same color as the text is following that. So overall there has been polishing all over the place. Now the popovers, now they have different width depending on the content they have. You can specify it there. It's in Python, so if you're making an add-on that is using popovers, you also see that some of them are more narrow, some of them are wider. So it has been polishing all over the place. It has been also splitting of more editors. The drivers are also split. These settings are also split. Also the icons in the properties editor are going to make the interface a bit bigger. So you can see it better. Kidding. It's just for me to see it better. And of course now we need more space. Now there's more scrolling. But remember the mock-up where these tabs are going to be vertical here. So we're going to make these a bit slightly wider. We're going to make them fit here. And then we have more room for activities and for more tabs or for add-ons to add their own tabs and it would be much more, it would use more when we add more tools. So this is the visual part. You will find changes all over the board. There has been changes on popovers. There has been fixes to themes. There has been changes all over the place. But you will also find a new way to interact or a simpler way to interact with Blender, which is a minimal key map. What does it mean? It means that the Blender 2.7 key map is not enabled by default. You can enable by default of course. You can, in the splash screen or in the user preferences, you can change your interaction from Blender to be 2.7x. And this will make it just behave like Blender 2.7. So you'll have all the tab for edit mode and control tab for wait paint mode, for example. In Blender 2.8 or in the alpha at the moment, I should always mention the alpha because this is working progress. It might change in the future. And someone is watching this video later. I should say in 2.8 alpha of today, you can still press tab for edit mode. And previously in the last video, I think you had to hold tab for the pie menu. Now this is assigned to control tab. So that way, there's a thing with the pie menus is that in 2.7, a key could only be a pie menu. So you click on it and it will be a pie. So it will feel really fast. In 2.8, in order to have a key behave both ways, like a tab for something and then hold or drag for a pie menu, then it that introduces a bit of a lag and if it a bit sluggish. So in order to avoid that, tab is just edit mode and then control tab brings the pie menu where you can choose which mode you want. So that way you can quickly change the same way it was when you will hold tab before. So this is what we're testing at the moment. It brings the speed of tab back which was a bit lost and especially when we're working with more scene, more characters, more geometry, it can tell that there is a slight improvement in speed also back to speed with 2.7. I think many of the performance reports were actually just key map changes that happened. So yeah, that's one of the changes that happened. There's also many of the tools that were redundant or were repeated where are being removed now. So for example, there was F1 for opening and then Ctrl O for opening as well to shortcuts. Well now it's only one of them, it's Ctrl O, but I will make a video about the minimal key map. I just wanted to warn you about it. So this is how Blender 2.8 Alpha is going to look, it's going to feel with the minimal key map and something that you will notice too is that some add-ons that you are used to are disabled. So 2.8 now checks in the add-ons version number. It checks for which version is it supported for. So if the add-on says 2.7.9 then the add-on is not going to load in 2.8. The add-on of course can be updated, it's just a matter of changing the number. If it's not it will show upgrade to 2.8 required. So just a matter of changing the add-on itself, the add-on developer and it will fix it. But some add-ons having migrated already, it's not recommended if you have an add-on to update it right now because otherwise the API is going to change. So just to avoid having to do the same work twice like updated now and updated later, it's better to just wait a little bit. You can also of course update it, but there are a few add-ons that the team here in Spring are using so some of them have it migrated. If you're a developer you can look at those commits for reference, but the SVG export is fixed, the OBJ is also fixed and something I'm really happy about is the null Wrangler add-on is also now updated for Blender 2.8. And it also works with Eevee. So if you have a, for example, you're in Eevee and you have, am I in Eevee? Yes. You control shift click, now that works. It doesn't add or anymore, so that's pretty nice. Another little thing that I know that I'm here I'm going to just show is that the material output node now can specify which target render engine is going to be used. So not only Blender will use the one that is active, but also will respect for which render engine is this output meant for. So that makes the node trees that are shared with across multiple render engines a bit more clear. So yeah, there has been many things all over the place. Since I'm here, I'm going to just show the image node now has a open. Now it's the new image. So it's in find code to search image. If you add an input image, texture image, then you will see that it has a new node that you can open or also create a new image directly from here, which is also pretty handy. Viewport stuff. There is a new shortcut for moving your scene around, your view around. It's more for advanced users, I guess, because it's a bit hidden, but it's just in the nature of Blender. All these speedups are there. For example, there is the new one that it would work better if I have a monkey. Is that if, and maybe I have a nice madcap, OK, there. So is that if you're in, for example, in the front view, you can hold Alt and Middle, Mouse, button to the left and it will start rotating. So it's basically a quick way of moving on your view. So down, up, up. And then it's just a quick way to switch views. It's relative to the position, so it just goes around your object. I quite like that approach. Hialti is using it a lot here, so I made her. And he proposed it and it's now there. So I think it should be enough for today. I have another little thing that it doesn't deserve like a whole video, but it's part of the new workflow, stuff in Blender and the workspaces as well. So it's one of the things about having global bars, like the top bar, for example, that is global and the status bar that is global. One of the things that some people were not happy about is that they were on every window. So every new window that you have, it had a top bar and a status bar because they're global. Well, that was that we knew that was going to happen. So Brecht implemented a new concept within Blender, which is main windows and child windows. So the main window is the window that has the global bars. So you have image, new main window, and it will make this window that has the global bars. But you can also create a new window, which is a child window. So it will only contain the editors that you have. You can just work as usual, but then this one won't have the global component to it. It's great if you're working with multiple setups and you don't want to have two different global top bars and on two different windows. So that is another great, great improvement. So I think I'm just making this too long. I'm going to spend another video for the minimum came up. And there are so many other things that I'm going to show in the upcoming days in this channel. So stay tuned. Just subscribe if you want to keep seeing some more development. Of course, it's not going to happen like every day like we used to have because the code quest is over. And even though there are things that are happening every day, there are changes that we're still testing. And it's just making a video about it. It's going to make it like a lot of fun when it's actually maybe just tested for one day or not. So yes, it's the polishing phase right now. We still have five, six weeks, five weeks until the beta is scheduled to come out. If you want to know more about that, you can always check the code at Blender.org blog where you can click on the beyond the code quest. And then you can read a little bit more about what are the plans, the upcoming plans. So in a nutshell, the beta in six weeks and the release candidate, hopefully before the Blender conference here in Amsterdam. So that would be awesome if we can have a release candidate by then. So there's a lot of time for polishing, but so many things left. You can make this happening by donating to the Blender Development Fund or joining the Blender Cloud. So you get all other kind of things. But we're working on making this better. We're working on an improvement for the Development Fund where it will look a lot nicer. And we have good news for this coming. So stay tuned for that. Subscribe if you want to see more. And give it a thumbs up if you think I need a haircut. I think I do. Ciao.