IMPORTANT NOTE

This lesson covers the main differences between Blender 2.79 and 2.80. If you're completely new to the software, I would still suggest watching these videos. You will get a general understanding of Blender's interface, materials, modes of 3D modeling, etc.

Blender 2.80 was released in mid-summer 2019 and it revolutionized the software by introducing multiple new features, a new rendering engine, and a completely new interface. In the next few videos, I want to cover the most important changes that are crucial to continue with the course. If you're a seasoned Blender user, you may jump to another paragraph where I'm describing the most important changes and shortcuts in a nutshell.

Interface Changes

Probably the biggest change aside from Eevee Rendering Engine that happened to Blender 2.80 was a complete interface change. It doesn't only look different, the keyboard and shortcuts layout you've probably memorized when working with Blender 2.79 is changed (almost) completely as well!

The most important shortcuts covered in the above video are listed in the next lesson of this chapter, together with the extra video covering the 10 most important shortcuts you should know as a seasoned Blender user!

Edit Mode Changes

One of the most often used Blender features - the Edit Mode, has also changed a lot. Not only did the toolbar on the left (T Key) change completely but some of the tools were moved to completely new places. A quite drastic change to Blender's 2.79 users but I personally think it makes Blender much easier to get around for new users. In the end, we've also made many improvements such as entering Edit Mode with multiple Objects selected!

Shading System Changes

The biggest Blender 2.80 change in the field of Shading is, of course, the Eevee Rendering Engine. The introduction of Eevee brought a lot of freshness to Blender's viewport shading and also fixed the unclear system we had in Blender 2.79. Apart from Eevee, there's also a Workbench Rendering Engine allowing us to create beautiful, clay-shaded viewport previews.

The Node Editor system for creating Shaders was also updated. We finally have Displacement input working as the actual displacement by default (the bump mapping has to be done by the separate Bump Node). Thanks to the Principled BSDF shader, we're also able to seamlessly use many Cycles and Eevee materials without the need to fine-tune them between the engines.

To learn a bit more about quickly setting up the shaders in Blender 2.80 and switching them between Eevee and Cycles, check out this free video tutorial linked below.

Scene Management

A bit more technical update to Blender 2.80 is the completely new Outliner and Layer management system. We're now able to create an unlimited number of scene layers or, as we should call these now, Collections! We can name them the way we want, nest Collections within the Collections, create instances, etc. The new system basically replaces Blender's 2.79 Groups as well.