Hey Folks,
The development of Blender 2.8 has grown to a point where we can say if it makes sense to continue with the active development of the fork. The question to stop the fork was risen since the Blender developes finally fixes so much at the UI.
To make it short, it makes still sense to continue. As expected it’s the whole usability philosophy that still suffers. On the positive side, lots of things have changed to better. Kudos to the Blender developers, they did a great job at some ends. They have even finally made the 3D cursor hidable. Something that Bforartists had from the first moment on. They have now icon buttons in the tool shelf too. And will surely borrow a few more things from Bforartists.
But there is still lots of room for UI improvements. They made some things even worse. In the Properties editor everything is longer to scroll now. And they have still the RMB select as default. They will never let go this part i guess. Even worse, they made LMB select with the new icon buttons in the tool shelf mission impossible. At least for now. When you turn on Left Click select, then the buttons acts with right mouse. Not even sure if they have noticed this quirk yet. Maybe they will fix it at one point.
Either way, we are back at work now, the new development cycle is opened. Well, i personally was never completely away, and the development was never completely stopped. We merge the Blender master regularly into our repository. And there is always something in the background to do. Like work at the page ( the DSGVO was a very bad and time consuming surprise). Then there is the Manual. And i follow the development of Blender 2.8 very actively too.
There is also always some promotional work to do. We have a big two sided article now in the newest Issue of the german print magazine Digital Production for example. Issue July/ August. www.digitalproduction.com/ausgabe/digital-production-04-2018/
The first changes in this new development cycle goes into the Manual. We have four new chapters now. Which all goes into the old Bforartists 1 Manual for now. We still wait that Blender merges the 2.8 branch into the Master. Then we can refill the tracker, and continue at the code base. But don’t expect fast results. In some areas we might need to start from scratch.
We will do our best to create the best possible Bforartists for you 🙂
– Reiner