Since 1.0 a few weeks ago and the stopping of normal Friday Facts I thought it might be interesting to do a Factorio-focused AMA (more on the technical side - since it's what I do.)
So, feel free to ask your questions and I'll do my best to answer them. I don't have any real time frame and will probably be answering questions over the weekend.
External link →In one of your Friday Facts, you showed how you use Blender to create sprites. When the blender updated to 2.8 how did that affect the process for creating new sprites?
Hi, it simply didn’t as we haven’t adopted 2.8 yet even now.
This was for many reasons, but the main ones:
- the initial versions of 2.8 did not support all of the features we really need (mostly stuff related to how we render things, so incompleteness of the new view layer system in compare to renderlayers from 2.79). I believe this is feature complete in latest versions.
- we have a significant amount of scripts we use for quite a few things, from generating render compositor nodes with standardized output paths from a list of renderlayers, including parsing some keywords to identify for example AO, height and shadow passes, through rendering scripts that handle all kinds of things like disabling some renderlayers so only the animated parts render all frames of the animation, disabling lights, rendering from all scenes in a blend file and/or multiple blendfiles, swapping materials (blender does not have exclude/include list for material override in renderlayers), and so on. And many more scripts. They would likely all break with 2.8 and that’s a high price to pay when we were really busy before 1.0
- 2.8 changes so many things that all artists would have to spend time to re-learn things, and we could only hope we don’t find that something specific has changed in a way that makes some solution not possible anymore
- 2.8 changes so many things that there could be so many hidden problems we wouldn’t know about, and we would notice them only after some entities have been done in 2.8. Like cycles rendering a little differently in some specific cases or some render setting affecting stuff differently than before.
- 2.79 works well for us (though of course we cry when we see all the new shiny things 2.8 brings), we already have our standards and experience, and it’s fairly uncommon that really surprising issues come up with 2.79
Now finally I am working on migrating our workflow and scripts to 2.8, and in a few months time I would expect us to use 2.8... after that I could answer your question legit, seeing what actually changed.
Off the top of my head what I believe will change/just improve a lot:
- unlimited number of scene layers (we often hit this limit because we need to render many different passes and layers)
- unwrapping multiple objects at the same time (we use the texture atlas addon but having it natively is just so much better)
- UDIM support (almost all of our entities need multiple sets of 4K-8K texture painting layers. Being able to use an extendable UDIM sounds like a dream.)
- much quicker preview of materials and texture painting (though this I was also a bit uncomfortable about because it simply looks different than before, so trying to make coherent images can be more difficult)
- group instances can use modifiers now IIRC? (We use group instances quite a lot sometimes. Some tileable or complex entities go completely crazy with them, so making their usage even more flexible would be a.big deal too) EDIT I think you can’t :(
- and much more I’m forgetting (I’m not even on a pc so I can’t open blender here)
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