Blender 2.8 Alpha 2 Just Released, but Full Release Pushed to Early 2019

The free and open-source Blender 3D modeling software, a popular alternative to more expensive suites like Maya LT and 3DS Max, is facing a bit of a delay in their release schedule for Blender 2.80 – however, the developers intend to release it by early next year 2019.

The devs had hoped to have a feature complete beta ready this August 2018, but that doesn’t look like a possibility either – the team spent most of their time “improving” the currently existing features, and eliminating current bugs within the software. However, a Blender 2.80 Alpha 2 was released just today.

Since Blender 2.80’s first alpha release last month July, the Grease Pencil tool was introduced, which also allows Blender to be a full 2D animation software as well as 3D.

The Blender team hopes to follow this planning and release schedule:

• Today: Blender 2.80 Alpha 2. Download from builder.blender.org.
• End of October: feature complete Blender 2.80 Beta at the Blender Conference.
• Early 2019: Blender 2.80 stable.
• 2019: Blender 2.81, 2.82, .. for features that didn’t make it in the first release.

And they will focus on the following over the next few weeks:

• Tool system and gizmos.
• Subvision surfaces and multi-resolution modifier using Pixar’s OpenSubdiv.
• Polishing the top-bar, status bar, tool settings and related UIs.
• EEVEE and viewport support for more GPUs, and minor new features.
• Production-ready static overrides to replace the proxy system.
• Modifiers in edit mode.
• Default Workspaces and environment maps.

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