Hi everyone,

I am on an IMAC Radeon Pro 580 First part is I am finally going to learn Blender .. a lot has to do with the why in my Second Question. I started on the BlenderGuru basics of getting started series and there are others. But with 2.8 coming out should I get through those basics and then just jump into 2.8 and keep cutting my teeth there and continue to do tutorials and adapt them to using 2.8 or just stay in 2.79 until the official release and just learn the differences. I heard some comments that its UI might make more sense to someone coming from Carrara. I put my 3d on hold waiting for Carrara till it becomes obvious its never going to happen and I really never enjoyed DS, but could make it work. The rest of that is for question 2. So first is just learning and version?

Second is that of course no IRay unless I want to get a eGPU which can be done. I have a lot of content I went to Carrara because I liked the interface and all you could do. iRay without the video card is what it is.. I don't know if its just me but working around in DS the interface and working in it hasn't been pleasent for me. I do have Reality which is its own kettle of fish and may come down to it. Is there any good way to go from DS to Blender as I have content library that has been building since I am not sure when it started but 9-10 years. Is it feasible, or is it going to be a scene by scene, made to look how you want and dropped into blender as a large obj or fbx and retexturing everything and be happy I can do that :) I know with all the genesis stuff and might put even more kinks in the plan.

I hope this doesn't start any negative discussion but I ask because various inputs might help me get off the carousel in my mind I put myself on since they stopped on Carrara and beefed up DS.. and Blender seems the breakaway..

Milo

The differences between 2.79 and 2.8 to me at the moment are quite vast in 2.8 you have evvee openGL and cycles in 2.79 no Eevee but you have the internal and the game engine all this in both versions work easily without GPU I don't do any GPU rendering. 2.79b is the latest stable release I have 2.79.5 and 2.8 as zip files in their own folders mainly just to test new stuff out. Anything you create in 2.79 will load into 2.8 as long as any addons used to create are there as well. 2.8 and 2.79.5 are both prone to crashing (having said that I have only ever suffered once from a crash that I deliberately tried to create lol ) If you look at my hair shader thread below the last image is a G8 imported directly into into blender from daz in Dae format, she came across with all textures in a file you just need to assign them to their correct locations which are all listed havn't done this in 2.8 as yet though. Doesn't give you a definitive answer but does give a little info to help I hope.

Incantrix

Thank you for your reply and input I will go look at your post. I did try out a demo scene for Eevee on this GPU and still want to try cycles. Thats a good take on 2.8 I have purchased a few tutorials all for pre 2.8 I hadn't really just thought why not both.