I work in 2.81 and I noticed that compatibility with 2.8 broke.
If we are talking about new nodes, this is normal. They should not be compatible with the old version. But mapping? I think this is not cool. mapping node must be compatible.
In 2.80, the node info were stored as custom properties. In 2.81, they are stored as inputs. So forward compatibility isn’t maintained for the Mapping node. I don’t think there is anything we can do here. Sorry.
Should the breaking change have happened in 2.80 rather than 2.81? Perhaps, if blender followed semantic versioning. But it doesn’t. And this enhancement is one many of us have been wishing for a long time now.
The new functionality and flexibility offered by this change frankly outweighs any inconvenience here. It’s a huge improvement to procedural texturing.
a script that converts old custom properties into input shouldn’t be too complex …
people find their own scenes destroyed here, and they don’t understand easly why
Mine is just an opinion, at the moment I have no direct problem with it, I change manually what there is to change …
But I imagine more complex situations where this is not easy to do.
Blender is backward compatible here, but not forward compatible. That’s always been the case for new and improved features, sometimes with only minor differences, sometimes with major differences.
If you want a .blend file to work fully, you must open it in a Blender release that is the same or newer. Ideally it wouldn’t be needed, but requiring forward compatibility for cases like this means not having the new mapping node all.
2 Likes