2.8 Hurdles and Roadblocks

@waylow @theluthier I may have found a bug. 

I’m trying to understand Instancing and I’ve notice you can’t use a mesh to instance, so unlucky me,  since that is exactly what I’m trying to achieve, to have a mesh instance a collection.

The thing is, this Cube is in Collection 2 and when I select it, in the Instancing Menu Collection is not there.

How ever if I select an empty, Collection appears in the Instancing Menu…

Which freaking sucks because in the Heli file I had meshes as instances, not empties. No I can’t convert the meshes that are in places into their respective instances.

So anyways, since the Cube is in Collection 2, I select the Empty, select Collection and find Collection 2, and now the empty is instancing the cube.

If I tick off “Display Instancer” (which only is supposed to hide the empty) and try to select the instanced cube, blender goes crazy and for some reason starts selecting the camera and the instance cube gets lots in the ether. 

Captains Log #4

Saw a pigeon today, flying freely in the sky. Sometimes I wonder why I went into this line of work,with all its comings and goings… I could’ve had a Bakery, making delicious bread in a nice town. 

And the thoughts continue….

– There is something I don’t know if it’s a glitch or this is how it goes. Instanced objects selection feels wonky. Say you crate an Empty and Instance a Collection into it, when you select it, it behaves normally, the stroke of your selection is visible…

-But if you create more instances of the same thing, the selection highlight doesn’t appear.

– The stroke highlight doesn’t appear. It is hard to tell if you have anything selected this way. Why doesn’t it just behave normally and highlight my selection?  

Funny thing, if I’m in wireframe mode and select the original one, they all appear selected, even though only the original one is selected.

If I select the 3 copies and leave the original un-selected, I get nothing, no highlight of selection. That is very uncomfortable when you’re selection objects and you’re not even sure what you have selected.

– Where are the Collections that are not in use? As long as is even possible. The Heli file in 2.79 had several groups that when I opened it in 2.8, those Groups got interpreted as Collections. When I SHIFT + A and at the bottom in Collection Instance, when the list pops up, I can see the names of all the groups that were in 2.79 that are now Collections

 Yet they don’t appear in the Scene Collection Menu.

And when I go into the Blender File, it lists the Collections there with Geometry in them, yet they are nowhere to be seen, not even in the viewport.

– Is there transparency in the viewport for geometry? In 2.79 you could enable “Transparency” for an object and in the material lower the alpha to have transparency. I can’t find how to get transparency in 2.8

– Ok ready to render, ready to render, aaaaaaand…. no big render button? or render animation button? Perhaps I’m in the wrong engine? How can this be? F12 just turns up the volume in the computer. Do I really have to go to Render –> Render Image, every time? I refuse to believe there is no Render Button. What am I doing wrong?

– Overlays and all kind of stuffs are visible during Viewport Cycles rendering now? In 2.79 when you kicked off the viewport render, non render-able went away and only the clean render was left. How come this is not the case now, feels very weird. Do I have to turn on and off the overlays every time? Is there a setting somewhere to get the old behavior back so Blender does it automatically for viewport renders?  

– Why when I select and object and Numpad / to view it on local mode, if I kick off a viewport render all the other elements suddenly pop back up again, as if it got out of local view, but then if I cancel the viewport render, everything goes away again and it’s back to that sole object in local view. Must obviously be a glitch?

– This “Indirect Only” filter in Collection was making me loose my mind. 

Not all the icons in the Collections menu are visible at the same time unless you turn them On in the filters. Icons being hidden by default can be a big problem.

The squiggly arrow being “On” for the objects inside that collection “Hoover-Engine”  was making things non-render-able. When I rendered, objects inside the Collection were’t showing in the render and the little squiggly arrow icon in the filters was off, so I didn’t see the icon was enabled for that collection making me waste a lot of time trying to figure out what was going on.

– Still a bit confused on what the TV icon does. Globally disable in viewports? Does this mean in the workspaces areas?

– Don’t know if there is a way to re-order the workspaces tab, it seems as I can click and drag them to the order them as I want, but it doesn’t let me. Is the only option right click and “re-order to front”? That doesn’t help that much.

– I have no idea how I can now link the Heli with its rig in another file in 2.8 if Groups are no longer available. In 2.79 you selected which layers were visible when the linking happened, can we do that with collections? How about linking assets in another file and then CTRL + ALT + P to Make Proxy, will that still be the case now?

@smurfmier1985 Good point, if you start a new scene in 2.8 yourself things should flow better when it comes to icons in the Collections. Problem are bigger when you open stuff from 2.79 in 2.8

I guess I’ll just have to get used to the fact that overlays are in the viewport render now. 

Ah now I get that TV Icon thing. That sounds pretty useful. Thanks Miranda. 

Do you know what View Layers are for? that still eludes me. When I opened the Heli file in 2.8 it came with two View Layers but I don’t see the difference or its use. 

@smurfmier1985 Well that’s a mouthful. For now lets just say they are the new render layers in someway. Never had I in Blender used the Scene option, that was always kind of confusing, setting them with linked objects or not and this an that. Now add View Layers into the mix and it all feels quite daunting. 

In the scene I opened from 2.79 it says I have 2 View Layers. I wonder were 2.8 got that from. And it certainly feels like View Layers and Scenes go by the hand, they are set one next to the other. 

@frikkr Matt’s alive everyone, worry not, he’s ok. 

@silentheart00 Silent can probably tell you, I think that’s the issue he ran into when doing Project Portfolio C out of Google Drive. 

@dostovel Haha , yes Omar , worry not , for I am ok 🙂  Just had to take a long break from Blender , but I am back. 

As for 2.8 , I think I will take @smurfmier1985 ‘s advice and just wait it out until the official , bug free release ( which hopefully has an installer) I have very limited time at the moment for Blender , as we have two screaming babies that come first now , so I dont want to be wasting what time I do have , pulling my hair out with bugs and issues……

@waylow Oh that’s right! I had forgotten to ask, I saw your name when I enable the add-on and I was like, hum, could this be Wayne, Wayne? That’s awesome, I feel like this gives me street cred, like dude don’t mess with me, I know people. 

I’ve been using that add-on a lot lately, very handy. I’m amazed to see now that the timeline has up and down, not only left and right. You are correct, the keyframes were lost up there somewhere. Who would’ve thought. Only one axis way from full 3D timeline.

It seems that when you bound the camera to a marker, the marker inherits the name of the camera and it wont let you rename it. You have to change the name of the camera instead. Kinda pushy but ok. 

Thanks for the other tips, little by little 2.8 is making more and more sense and feels more and more buggy.