Okay…..the new release of 2.8 that just went out around four hours ago or so. There is awesomeness inside.
Firstly, there’s something I’ve actually been waiting a little while for, which is new default Workspaces. These were called Layouts back in 2.7x, and maybe I’m the only one who ever used them; but I did have a set of my own default layouts saved to my startup file – for modeling, texturing, shading, compositing, etc. Most of them were based on the kind of simplistic ones that Blender shipped with; but I really liked switching between layouts quickly to jump between shading and compositing for example, without having to try and do one kind of work when my screen space was really set up for a different kind.
So in 2.8, the layouts as I mentioned are called Workspaces, and they open as tabs in the top bar. So now switching between screen layouts is as easy as clicking between different tabs. The ones they’ve shipped as defaults need a little tweaking, but they are still very good as they are now and worth taking a look at. Plus of course, you can make and save your own workspaces. You can customize practically everything about a workspace – not just which panels are open but which TABS inside those panels are automatically expanded when you first open the workspace, what kind of shading mode the viewport (if any) is in, and suchlike. About the only thing you can’t do is have viewports in different workspaces set to different modes – if you’re in Sculpt Mode or Edit Mode all viewports in all workspaces will be in that mode until you change it, but that’s a minor inconvenience.
Right now the workspace tabs in the top bar are automatically sorted alphabetically, but they plan on making these sortable by dragging and dropping tabs.
And the second thing – this is great. In the Lookdev viewport shading mode – that’s the middle one, between Solid and Rendered modes – 2.8 now comes with HDRis for lighting built into this mode! They have five already – from HDRiHaven – but they’re asking the community to suggest more, like they recently did with matcaps a couple of weeks ago. These HDRi’s won’t appear in the background and they won’t render – but in lookdev shading mode they will provide scene lighting and reflections to objects.
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