Which brings us to release candidate – around October 20 th. They will give add-on developers at least a month before RC is called.

It looks like this is to give them a little time to focus on API-breaking bugs that appear in the beta phase, fixing them first so add-on developers can get to work while the Blender Foundation focuses on bugs that do not affect the API. When this date occurs, Blender will communicate to add-on developers that it is safe to update their plug-ins to Blender 2.8. All features are expected to be finished by then, and development will work on fixing bugs.Īfter the beta will be a Python API finalized – around September 19 th (give or take). Instead, this will align with merging the 2.8 branch into master, updating the release notes, and opening up the bug tracker to non-crash-related reports.

You cannot report anything other than crashes.Īfter the alpha will be the beta – around August 12 th.īlender 2.8’s beta will still not be ready for add-on developers to update their plug-ins.

For the moment, Blender’s bug tracker is only interested in crash bugs. For instance, is OpenGL Render Image / Animation going to stick around? If so, what does it mean compared to clicking Render Image when Eevee is selected. After playing around with it for a few minutes, I’m admittedly confused with some parts. Here's Blender Today doing a live stream about Blender 2.8 AlphaĪnd now the Blender Foundation has published its expected release schedule.īlender 2.8’s alpha is still not useful for production content, and it’s even too early for add-on developers to update (because the Python API will change). In short, it’s a huge update, both visibly and behind-the-scenes. (Previously, Blender required OpenGL 2.1.) The method for storing objects in the scene will also change. First, the minimum OpenGL version of the viewport renderer has been bumped to 3.3, which targets DirectX 10 hardware.

It is focused on workflow patterns and interface changes, but this involves several secondary changes. The next dot-version of Blender, 2.8, is the most exciting update (in my opinion) since BMesh (n-gons) was added in 2.63.

Blender 2.8 release date