 Hey Blender, Pablo here. Over three years of development make this the greatest release ever with hundreds of features but it's impossible to go through all of them. So here are five of the greatest features you will find in Blender 2.80 beta. Number one, user interface and user experience because Blender not only now has a dark theme with flat icons and anti-aliasing and everything looks very nice and very polished but also the settings all over Blender now they're much more consistent. The shortcuts are working in one area, work the same in another area of Blender. The names of the tools are also as consistent as possible. The menus, the menus have been reorganized to have the most used features first and then it's also about the way you interact with Blender. Now the selection occurs by default with left click select. This is a big change for Blender. It's always been right click select by default. You can still do it. Everything is accessible, but by default it's left click select, box selection, click anywhere on the viewport to deselect your objects. We believe this change will help not only new users that come from other softwares, but also a lot of devices that are depending on the left click like a tablet or a trackpad or a touch screen. The new tool system now sits on the sidebar when you can pick a brush for example, change the settings on the new top bar and just cut right away on your model or paint for example, click in your UV editing. But where this new tool system really shines is when you are in edit mode. Because most of the tools that were there already in Blender now have their own active tool. You enable it and you will see gizmos around your meshes that will make things so much more easy to tweak, more visual, more feedback on what you're doing and how to do it, making this very nicely working, more accessible. But if you are into shortcuts, you can always do that and the speed of Blender 2.7 and before what Blender is known for it's still there. Pi menus were available in 2.7 but now are part of Blender itself. It's built in. Pi menus for the most use actions for like changing the shading type or the mode of your objects. So if you combine the new looks with the new interactions, you get workspaces. These are the new way of organizing your layouts depending on which kind of workflow you're in. So if you're modeling, you have your own workspace. If you're sculpting, you will see that you have everything arranged for you to start sculpting right away. Texture painting or editing your shaders. Everything has its own workspace by default, but you can also make your own and tweak it however you prefer. These workspaces can have their own different settings for each one of the editors and especially for the brand new number two viewport. The viewport in Blender 2.8 is powered by EV, a new PBR render engine focused on real time with every feature you can imagine. From surface scattering to ambient occlusion, depth of field, motion blur, reflections, refractions, light props for cube and planar reflections and irradiance volume. You can also preview your cycles render using EV to match as close as possible the lights, the shadows, everything so you can preview it in the new look dev shading type in the viewport because you can do pretty much anything with EV. You can model sculpt, you can use it all the time if you want to, but if you want to go simpler and focus on modeling and whatever you're working on at the moment, you can use the new engine workbench. The workbench engine can help you in any case. If you're modeling for example or doing layout, you may want to enable the new random colors that adds a random color to any object in your scene so you can spot them more easily. There are plenty of ways of visualizing your scene in the new workbench engine. You can see flat colors, maybe if you want to do some painting on textures, you can also have solid matte caps and on top of that you can add specific shading settings. For example, the cavity shader now also features not only a world cavity shader, but a screen space cavity shader which very nicely highlights all the details on your mesh. On top of the viewport are the overlays. So whatever even if you're on Cycles rendering or EV or the workbench engine, on top you can have your objects or the wireframes, the grid, the vertex paint, the weight paint, pretty much any information that is not part of the render itself, you can place it on top and combine the render with the new overlays. One of these overlays is the 3D Corsair which has been there in the past but now also features rotation and if you don't like it, you can hide it. Yes, you can hide it. Number three, 2D animation. In previous versions of Lenders you could do some basic drawings and coloring and animation but in 2.80 there is now a dedicated 2D animation pipeline. You can even open Blender and from the splash screen you can click to the animation and start right away. You will have an active brush selected and you can start drawing. These drawings are now part of a new kind of object called Grispensial Object where you are in drawing 2D in a 3D environment. These objects also have their own layer system within that object and there is their own materials as well. These objects, just like any regular object in Blender, have their own modifier stack and only exclusive for these objects are Shader Effects, a new way to modify how your objects look in the viewport itself. The layers in your Grispensial Objects resemble those in 2D painting softwares. You can even blend between them using overlay, multiply, addition or even subtract to have some really crazy effects. This full 2D animation pipeline has already been used in production in the short open movie project Hero. Number four, Collections and View Layers. Gone is that limit of 20 layers we had in Blender 2.7. Now you can have unlimited collections. So this is how you organize your scene. Now all your objects are put inside of collections that you can name and you can even nest them. You can have multiple ones inside each other and these ones you can either instance them within the same file or you can even link or reference them in other files. Collections live inside of view layers and this is how you control what you see in the viewport and also what you're going to render. Similar to what render layers were in 2.7. Number five, Cycles. Yes, the render engine, the ray tracing render engine because not everything is real-time nowadays. Cycles now is rendering up to 30% faster and you can even combine your CPU with your GPU when you are rendering. If you're doing GPU rendering and you run out of memory, you can even use your computer memory automatically without having to do anything. You're gonna need that power because there is a new hair shader that is based on a paper by Disney that just looks gorgeous. There is also a new node called principal volume that will make our life so much easier now to set up things like smoke or fire or basically anything that uses a volumetrics. There are also improvements in the surface scattering algorithm now using random walk. It just sounds weird, but it trust me. It looks great. Once you're done rendering and you want to move into compositing, make sure you enable the new CryptoMath pass. Yes, this industry standard CryptoMath is now supported by Cycles and the Blender Compositor. So you can render your passes, export them, put them in the metadata of your EXR files and even composite them later on the Blender's Compositor. And it's on workspace. And these are just five. Okay, and let me name a few more. Pixar's OpenSavvive now is used in the software modifier and the multi-res modifier for super smooth surfaces. GLTF exporter is now part of Blender. Built in. Major improvements in cloud simulation. Even the unit system got improved. Now you can fix a unit and you will see that all across Blender. Adding drivers now is so much simpler. You can just right-click, add a driver and edit the settings right there on the spot. And if you want more advanced settings, you can always open the drivers editor. And I could go on forever because there's not only those features with a name, but there's also the features that I can't name like improvements in performance, dependency graph, or even the new Python API, which is much more consistent. So much. What now? Go and test it. Go to Blender or Dark, download the latest Blender 2.80 beta. And if you find anything that doesn't work or is crashing, go to help menu within Blender. Report the bug and give us as much information as possible so we can make it super stable. But also, we want your feedback. What you think about it. And if you like what you just saw, everything, all the development that is going on, you can help to keep this going. You can join the Blender development fund. And for only five euros or six dollars a month, you can be part of this movement. You can help making sure that the Blender development continues to move forward. These are your own 3D software.