New Blender 2.8 Design Document Published

For those 3D artists looking forward to next year's big Blender 2.8 update, a new design document has been published.

Blender 2.8 remains planned for 2018 brings many modern features including its "Eevee" physically based rendering engine, a grease pencil feature, a overhaul to the dependency graph feature, asset management, and much more. It also ups the requirement on Blender to OpenGL 3.3+ for rendering.

Coming out this weekend is a new Blender 2.8 design document covering more about this huge release. Among the Blender 2.8 targets:

End-user targets

View layers, collections and overrides
Workspaces
Top bar with global tool area, and headers
Blender 101 – optimize the interface for specific tasks
Tool system and manipulators
PBR viewport render engine (Eevee)
General purpose engine (Workbench)
Pipeline for complete 2d animation with grease pencil
Amber asset engine (basic, local asset management)
Everything proxyable (static overrides)

Technical targets

Replace legacy OpenGL with newer OpenGL (3.3 core for now)
Replace Derived Mesh (internal modifier storage) with new system (using new Dependency Graph)
Interleaved global/local undo stack (material changes in Edit Mode are currently not registered by Undo)
Static override system
Asset engine API
Improved dependency system
Draw manager
Interface templates
Separation of existing grease pencil annotation tools and grease pencil objects

There is also the Blender 2.8 landing page that continues to outline the work being done on Blender 2.8 and early development builds.