As an anecdote, I installed GIMP for my son 6 years ago, who is now going to college to be a graphics designer. He did all of his digital artwork in GIMP and Krita, now Blender as well, for the whole length of that time.
He now has to use Photoshop for his classes. There are some tools in it he is impressed with but overall doesn’t care for Photoshop at all.
I want to use blender and I'm sure they would get a lot more acceptance if they fix the one thing people have been complaining about for YEARS! That's great for your son but no credible agency will use GIMP. Krita is awesome and I love it and comes the closest to an open source alternative to PS, it is much better than GIMP in everyway and is actually usable.
Unfortunately the industry doesn't care if he doesn't care about photoshop, it cares about it and if he wants to be a part of it he should start learning to care unless his work is beyond amazing and he will only be freelancing then ignore everything I said.
Photoshop is not impressive but it gets the job done quickly and smoothly with minimal friction and that's why it is number one.
Would you mind elaborating on what complaints you mean? Blender has had multiple major UI overhauls in the past few years, and changed a lot of basic command assignments in the process. They even moved selection from the right mouse button to the left button. That was the #1 complaint I used to hear all the time from everyone, and it was resolved a couple years ago. So I’m very curious what you’re referring to, and whether you’ve used it recently.
The industry complains plenty about Adobe cloud and the lock in of their products. They strongly need a competitor. Pipelining is a problem because designers rarely are experts for digital formats, but when more people switch, this is a temporary inconvenience.
Receiving a lot of funding from tech companies is not synonymous with being widely used within the M&E industry (can't speak for other industry verticals). That's on the studios and artists, not funders. Being an industry standard requires a certain level of entrenchment/integration/mindshare that Blender does not have yet.
it also mean having high end plugins and integrating well with other industry-standard tools. That doesn't matter for home/amateurs users because you can't afford these tools anyway, but it does for studios.
Blender has been showing up in more and more professional studios, particularly in the gaming and media segments - I think it's still pretty rare in the ArchViz space.
Blender isn't THE industry standard by any means, but I don't think it would be a stretch to call it an industry standard. EA uses it for a lot of their concept work, Ubisoft uses it for their animation studio, it's the modelling tool at Infinity Ward, etc.
From what I have read and people I've spoken with, the games industry definitely uses Blender the most out of Games, VFX/Anim, and ArchViz. But the latter two, not so much out of isolated pockets, and usually nothing past the modeling phase. I'm coming from the studio VFX/Anim side, so I'm biased in that regards to my viewpoint in adoption.
Being funded by tech companies doesn't make it industry standard. For one...the tech companies aren't the industry to begin with.
It definitely is a strong show of support for Blender, but there aren't a lot of studios in the industry using Blender, so it's quite far from being anything like a standard yet.
My sources are that I am very involved in the 3D industry groups.
Blender is gaining ground, yes, but most studios are very much Maya based still with Blender used sparingly.
The one major Blender studio (Tangent) has also shuttered and were mid moving away from Blender at the time. I think the next biggest users of Blender are a division within Ubisoft, but it's not the primary DCC for Ubisoft in it's entirety either.
Where Blender is gaining most traction is freelance artists and people who don't need to work with a pipeline. Blender is slowly getting better for Pipeline integration, but it really doesn't like to play well yet within a studio where you're dealing with many different artists working on a shot, in possibly multiple DCCs.
Yeah, it's been amazing to watch. I was one of the original funders back in 2002 to open source it. My career took another path and I never did more than mess around with Blender. But that, I think $100 (not small amount for me at the time), is the best, most proud/happy donation I've ever made.
I've only done a little bit with Blender as a hobbyist, but Andrew's tutorials are what really made it fun for me and helped things start to "click". If you've never used Blender but wanted to check it out, these are the tutorials you should use.
Blender Guru was my inspiration into Blender as well, but since I've seen the at-worst homophobic and at-best tone deaf comments he's made in tutorials and on Twitter, I can no longer recommend him. Go watch his rant about how he misses using the word "fag" like he used to in highschool.
I'm not saying cancel the guy, but I am saying consider seeking out an alternative source of tutorials.
Mel Gibson has said and done some unsavory things yet I still enjoy and recommend Braveheart. Calling for boycotts in order to force a behavior change of someone whose speech you disagree with is lose/lose in my opinion - you usually don't get the desired outcome and everyone is worse off. I say: recommend Blender Guru but don't recommend following the guy on Twitter. Why is that such a bad option?
I was expecting much worse but he repeatedly mentions in that clip that “of course you should never say it because its demeaning”, and that its stupid how he has nostalgia for it.
There _was_ a time when that word was used like that by kids, I think we can allow people to have nostalgia for their childhood as long as they acknowledge how bad it is according to 2021 sensibilities.
And what about how he wishes there was a day where white kids could say the "n word" just to get it out of their system?
And no, I'm not going to respect some sense of nostalgia for the word "fag", because when people were calling me that in middle and highschool, it sure wasn't a fun experience, and I don't look back on any of that fondly.
The joke is essentially "Ha-ha, look at how transgressive I am being, aren't I funny?", which is a particularly juvenile sort of humor (two-year-olds just love to show off the "new" word they learned by going around saying "shit" for example) and as a practical matter is indistinguishable from "Ha-ha, only serious".
The thread you linked to is definitely problematic. And I'm not referring to Andrew's tweets but to the person who decided to launch a passive aggressive smear campaign.
I just started using blender this month - this tutorial series is great! The donut tutorial is a fantastic foundation for getting into blender. Make a surprisingly good looking render of a donut in an evening or two (including your own pausing and fiddling)!
I'm interested it for making 3d printing models, so it wasn't all relevant to my goals, but it gave me enough familiarity to know where things are well enough that I can get by pretty well through googling the rest. Lots more tutorial videos to dig into, but already feel like I have superpowers.
(I've been applying sculpting and textures to objects I modeled in OpenSCAD, super cool to be able to leave the high-tolerance surfaces alone and add rounding and interesting detail to everything else!)
> (I've been applying sculpting and textures to objects I modeled in OpenSCAD, super cool to be able to leave the high-tolerance surfaces alone and add rounding and interesting detail to everything else!)
Oh, that's a cool approach I don't think I've heard much about people using.
Made this soda can holder mug with handle (that probably insulates decently with the infill airgaps) for my friend who likes memes and drinks way too much diet pepsi
Made a rough coffee mug with an internal diameter less than a millimeter greater than a soda can's circumference. Then smoothed and added the "Bepis" texture in blender.
In blender, started with some sculpting, then used the displacement modifier with a texture of a repeating image file and remapped the UV Map spherically with a tilt. It's easier than it sounds!
(Could have used blender for the whole thing, but I'm just more used to OpenSCAD, so used that for the base cup)
I've used this same UV mapping of textures for various christmas ornaments I'm making for this holiday season: can get some cool snowflake-ish patterns.
Have they improved the UI/UX since 2.8x? They said it would be much better and it was still driving me up a wall compared to 3DS Max. It still felt like going from Photoshop to GIMP. That's the only thing holding me back from really adopting blender.
What has changed since 2.8 in the UI? When I used 2.8 there were still a lot of pain points with the interface that kept me doing the heavy lifting in 3DS max. It was a cloth sim project and I was using blender to export the files into GLTF and even that was a bit frustrating.
It is subjective but 3D max interface is much more intuitive. Like when navigating the 3D view ports. UE4 also has a nice interface that is similar to blender but feels better.
I think it's a wasteful debate nowadays. Blender used to be too peculiar if not crippled but they reduced the gap a lot. It's bearable now.. and, they could probably get close to most 3D apps UX (i'm speculating but i'd bet a few dollars).
I've used many many different 3D programs from 3DS max, milkshape, XSI, Maya, Unreal 2, Unreal 3/UDK, Unreal 4, Hammer, Source, Three.js web editor, Zbrush, Houdini, etc and none of them have made me as frustrated as using blender. So I don't know?
It depends what you're using it for. I like Sketchup and Hammer; Blender doesn't remotely resemble those. But then, Blender can do things that those most certainly can't; they're for different jobs.
Hello again. Can you name ONE way 3D Studio Max's user interface has tangibly improved since Monica Lewinsky brought Bill Clinton a pizza and blew him in the White House? Not ONE?
If you can't, then I rest my case: Max has an ANCIENT outdated user interface, and it's been stagnating for decades. So what if you're used to it? I'm used to Windows 95 and Microsoft Visual Studio 6 too, but that doesn't mean they have good user interfaces.
>"Jim, let me tell you something: there's gonna to be a WHOLE BUNCH of things we don't tell Mrs. Clinton. Fast food is the least of our worries, ok buddy?"
What does intuitive in the context of a complex app like blender or 3d max even mean? You need to seriously learn the interface for either one before you can do anything. To me this is sort of like saying the interface of a boeing is more intuitive than the interface of an airbus, really quite meaningless for anyone.
Well has 3D Studio Max improved its UI/UX interface since 1998, when I asked Kinetix if they would support pie menus, and they replied that while their users had demanded pie menus (aka marking menus), they wouldn't implement them because of Alias's patent?
I even offered to help Kinetix implement pie menus for Max, since I was already writing Max and MaxScript plugins, and wanted their help integrating my open source ActiveX/OLE pie menus with Max. But Kinetix wasn't interested then, and Autodesk still isn't interested in listening to their users or improving Max's user interface decades later, apparently.
After 25 years since it was created, 3D Studio Max STILL doesn't have pie menus (while Blender has really great built-in pie menus).
Kinetix's 3D Studio Max and Alias's Maya used to be competitive and innovative when they were owned by different companies.
But now they are both owned by Autodesk, so they have both stagnated and failed to innovate, listen to the demands of their users, and improve their user interfaces, the way Blender rapidly and continuously does today, and always has.
Alias used to spread FUD about pie menus, and now Autodesk and their minions spread FUD about Blender, like falsely claiming Blender's GPL license means that you can't use it to make copyrighted artwork.
As if stagnating and ignoring the demands of your users while spreading FUD and innuendo about Blender wasn't bad enough, it's rumored that Autodesk even went as far as to mercilessly attack Ton Roosendaal with a ceiling tile ;) :
>There is a sad history of people using software patents to make misleading claims about obvious techniques that they didn’t originate, and constructing flawed straw man definitions of ersatz pie menus to contrast with their own inventions, to mislead the patent examiners into granting patents.
>There is a financial and institutional incentive to be lazy about researching and less than honest in reporting and describing prior art, in the hopes that it will slip by the patent examiners, which it very often does.
>Patent Abuse Example: US Patent US5689667A: Methods and system of controlling menus with radial and linear portions
>Unfortunately a bad patent that covered an obvious technique, and also made some incorrect misleading claims, was abused by Alias marketing in Bill Buxton’s name to baselessly threaten and discouraged others from using pie or marking menus, by exaggerating its scope and obfuscating its specificity. It’s my strong opinion that the particular technique that it covered (overflow items) was quit obvious.
A lot of them are expired, and a lot of them cover something really specific or not directly related, some of them are really terrible ideas you wouldn't want to copy anyway, and many of them make trivial but obvious changes in the hopes of abusing a patent system, which is an extremely common practice, and a whole lot of them are completely oblivious to prior art, and shouldn't have been issued in the first place, but they were.
This is what happens with long-awaited Linux distribution or web browser releases, as well: final binaries are uploaded, so they can propagate to the mirrors, and someone posts it “prematurely”.
(I don't mind, I like this kind of heads-up.)
Release notes will be there when the release is officially announced and linked from Blender's home page.
Yay, this is gonna be sweeeet. I have a render going now on 2.9 and it's so cool. I've been using blender for years and years now, just for fun and in the winters I use it to keep my room warm and my renders 4k baby.
Unity is mainly useful since if you're willing to drop a few thousand dollars on assets, plus about 200 hours of your own personal time, you can have a shipable game in a month or so.
Godot looks really neat, but at least with my skill level I need a starter kit to get going on most projects. Then again, I know Godot's gotten a ton of funding lately so we'll see what happens.
Eeeeh, maybe if you're extremely experienced in Unity you can have a shippable game in a month. There's a lot of jank in Unity that is non-obvious to inexperienced Unity users. I don't even mean inexperienced programmers. Between un-/under-documented features, surfing the wave of continuing to use "deprecated" features versus their incomplete replacements, and the general architectural problems baked deep into the core of Unity, it takes a lot of Unity-specific expertise to get a good game together.
It took longer than a month but I have shipped games for Unity before. Nothing groundbreaking, but if you want to make something simple, Unity is pretty easy. Now if you're pushing for a AAA title, are doing something really innovative, it might be a bit harder
There is a dev who specifically works in that area, can’t think of his name right now, but he works on terrains. There is already a free add on for Godot 3.
I too would love to have a Blender game engine. But removing it was the right (though painful) decision. It caused a code maintenance nightmare by duplicating and reimplementing a lot of other code, and removing it makes adding new things to Blender much easier (like Interactive Mode).
Back when I was using 3D Studio Max, I wished it had a fast sleek efficient minimal game engine runtime called "3D Studio Min", but that never panned out either.
>As for the reasons for removal we can conclude it was an old and aging component, it was largely unmaintained, suffered from several bugs and limitations, and the Blender Foundation probably lacked the energy, motivation and manpower to maintain it properly.
>"Adding new things to Blender gets much easier that way. The Blender Internal code started in early 90s. Over 25 years old! Functionally, EEVEE can (and will) completely replace it." -Ton Roosendaal
>It was also very architecturally outdated, lagged severely behind the current industry standards and modern technologies in many ways, it would be very hard to bring it up to date. Modernizing it or introducing new features would end up being more work than a full rewrite from scratch. [...]
>What About Forking It?
>UPBGE is a third party fork, whose objective is updating and modernizing the BGE with better technologies and features, with the end goal of eventually merging it back with main Blender development branch.
>I fear its future is uncertain at this point unfortunately. While I believe Blender developers won't actively do anything to purposefully break Blender trunk codebase compatibility, I speculate it will naturally become increasingly hard for UPBGE developers to maintain their code working, as features are removed and main Blender development deviates further from the current design. [...]
>There have been talks about replacing the old game engine with a newer better integrated "Interactive Mode". It would be a more integral part of Blender, as opposed to a separate component with a lot of duplicated code that re-implemented a very limited subset of supported features we currently have.
>This is not meant to be a direct replacement of the old BGE, nor a discrete game engine in the traditional sense with wide publishing capabilities, rather more of an integrated real-time "presentation tool" or interaction mode with a physics simulation sandbox environment, that runs directly inside Blender's viewport on currently supported platforms.
>On 28 May 2018 Ton Roosendaal announced in the Developers Mailing list that a portion of the 2.8 Code Quest funds were reserved for the development of a new and improved real time rendering system or "Interactive Mode" and Benoit Bolsee, a developer historically known for his involvement in real time side of Blender, accepted a grant to work part time on this for one year.
>I speculate this will probably feature a new node based workflow and logic system, real time physics, and integrate well with other upcoming features like "Object Nodes" also known as "Everything Nodes" in one way or another.
I'm a big confused, why can't interactive mode become a game engine?
Unfortunately blender is GPL, but otherwise I would wonder if the Godot team could just use blender's rendering engine instead of implementing their own.
I will say blender is exceptionally polished, probably the best open source content creation tool ever made. We'll see what Godot comes up with next year
The blender's internal datastructures are optimized for editing. Game engines use optimized data structures for rendering, the conversion is usually done offline. The interactive viewport could be bundled with "export as a game" option i guess, where the exported version would run faster.
Funny -- going on a decade ago, Blender had OpenCL support, but the AMD drivers were so bad that OpenCL support was only usable on NVidia cards. Still not as good as CUDA, though. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
AMD Blog: "Our AMD Radeon™ Software Adrenalin 21.12.1 or Radeon PRO Software for Enterprise 21.Q4 (or newer) drivers are required to use Cycles in Blender 3.0. Support is currently validated on AMD Radeon PRO W6800 and AMD Radeon RX 6000 series desktop GPUs and enabled on other AMD RDNA™ and AMD RDNA 2 architecture graphics cards."
https://community.amd.com/t5/radeon-pro-graphics/blender-3-0...
I always post this link when Blender is discussed because it's so impressive. It shows what a single person can achieve in Blender. The visual effects and compositing have been created by Blender expert Ian Hubert. The video shows a (grimy) futuristic city scene. Green screen footage and the final shots created are shown side-by-side:
Honestly I'm a bit disappointed with their geometry nodes project. I went into it expecting a generic visual scripting language aimed at generate geometry. That IS what it is to an extent, but the design decisions are strange and limiting to say the least.
The main issue is that data is only stored in the geometry itself, per-vertex. So if you just want a single variable you're out of luck. Math operations operate on vertices so you can't just multiply two numbers, you have to store a number in each vertex, then multiply all vertices by the same value. It's like every node is for-loop that loops over vertices.
This limited design is useful for certain things like scattering rocks over terrain but not much else.
Check out the Nodevember geometry nodes entries this year. You can accomplish quite a lot with it as it is. Also, the implementation in 3.0 is very different from the one in 2.93.
I think what you wrote here is just straightforwardly not correct, eg. you can absolutely set a variable and multiply arbitrary numbers in addition to working with vertex data. There are also a lot of other ways to store and interact with data, eg. textures (either procedural or painted). Maybe you should have another look.
I'm noticing a lot of interesting extensions coming out for Blender, especially in the Retogo and skinning area which was always a headache. I guess being able to code in Python instead of MaxScript or MEL (althought it looks like Maya does support python now?) gives you a healthier ecosystem.
Maya has been supporting Python for a long long time, it even supports Python 3 now. There is no more need to use MELscript to develop tools for it anymore, even though some commands are run using the MELscript wrapper in Python, but even then it's very rare.
Pretty much all the tools I've developed in the past couple of years for AAA games have been almost exclusively made with Python.
One of them we even developed tools to be DCC agnostic, which means that they could run both in Maya and 3ds Max flawlessly.
Surely licensing can't be the reason. Firstly, there is no distribution happening here - a plugin written against the Blender API and shipped separately is no different from NVIDIA's proprietary driver for Linux.
The usual GPL issue around plugins is whether program+plugin are a "mere aggregate" or a "derivative work". This doesn't really matter if they aren't distributed together, but even if it did, the question is no easier to answer in the case of interpreted vs compiled code. They are still running in the same process, exchanging internal data structures through direct procedure calls. It just so happens that one is running through a translation layer.
If that translation layer protects you, then you could just as easily enjoy that protection by running binary plugins through a no-op emulator.
And regardless of all of this, there's no reason Blender Python plugins can't use Python native extensions for performance. FLIP Fluids, for example, has a C++ fluid sim engine and uses Python just for the interface to Blender.
I didn't use 3DS MAX for 15 years so I can't tell you how it is now.
Maya is the videogame industry standard for modeling, just like ZBrush is the industry standard for sculpting. It is almost 100% non destructive-editing and integrate with studios asset pipelines perfectly in various ways. It's paid and closed source.
Blender is a jack of all trades, master of none. Aside from a game engine (removed since 2.8) it has basically all that you need to do modelling, sculpting, physics,3D painting, 2D and 3D animation, compositing and even some quirky video editor with audio. And it's free and open source and it has the largest community, by far, since version 2.8.
Depends at what level you're talking about. In the abstract? No, most 3D concepts are pretty much standard across all of them.
In the nitty gritty, they're all substantially different and have very different views of scenes, data representations and workflows.
It's easy enough to jump between all three, at least for me, but they each have their respective strengths and weaknesses, that lend themselves better to different kinds of work.
I haven't had much time for Blender lately and need to correct that. I also need to look more closely at the changes. I know something about an asset manager and a bunch of new nodes in the procedural geometry work, but beyond that I'm behind. And sadly Steam hasn't gotten the new binaries yet and I am lazy so like letting steam manage this one for me.
I find it amazing what open source and community can create! Here is a video of 20 interviews with people around the world on how they use Blender now:
https://youtu.be/rJ48-SYY1sQ
I would rather say it is amazing what €1.7mio of founding per year can do to a piece of software that has been lingering around for 26 years. https://fund.blender.org/
The support for the software is based on the hate of cloud-based subscription models of Autodesk et al.
Blender has all but lingered in the last 26 years. It gas been opensourced, The 2.3 - 2.5 transition (Sintel) was huge, the next versions have been super nice, with many important upgrades on editor, ui, a new cycles renderer...
I remember visiting Mexico from the US at the beginning of the current century and walking through a market and seeing bootleg DVDs for sale, nestled among the movies copies of AutoCad and Maya. Thinking, huh this software is really quite expensive and there must be demand for it world wide.
Being excellent, open source and free it pretty much changed the 3d software landscape globally.
I found it odd they didn't include that video on the homepage. Its pretty great showcase of the tool (I learned its python scriptable!)
If you want to see a different angle of what Blender is capable of, see Worthikids' channel, where almost every 2D cel-style and Rankin/Bass stop-motion style animation is made with Blender, and at least some (maybe all?) videos are also cut with Blender's video editing tools. https://youtube.com/c/Worthikids
Is there work in AI/ML that is working to try and do this? Watching one of FlyCat's timelapses, I have no idea how you would go about that but it's incredible to dream of the possibility.
I remember seeing their videos mimicking Rankin/Bass and (at least initially) did not believe that they were done in Blender. They looked so much like the actual stop motion that it just didn't seem right.
After a minute or two I would occasionally find something that looked "CG-ish", but I wouldn't have found anything if I weren't looking.
His Patreon sometimes includes behind the scenes posts or clips that make it even more fascinating. He really does hand-animate a lot of pieces as if they were real objects in order to get that effect. Fun state of mind to get into.
Actually I believe the Captain Yajima one is made in blender.
EDIT: Not sure why I'm being downvoted for this, I can't find any comment from the creator, but it's widely talked about in the CG community how impressive it is how they managed to mimic the stop motion style so closely.
Even little details like occasionally showing fake strings to make them seem like puppets.
Yep. My wife has been using Blender purely for video editing (no 3D modeling) for more than 10 years now. Apparently it's a bit weird to get used to, but very powerful.
264 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadMuch appreciated of course!
As an anecdote, I installed GIMP for my son 6 years ago, who is now going to college to be a graphics designer. He did all of his digital artwork in GIMP and Krita, now Blender as well, for the whole length of that time.
He now has to use Photoshop for his classes. There are some tools in it he is impressed with but overall doesn’t care for Photoshop at all.
Unfortunately the industry doesn't care if he doesn't care about photoshop, it cares about it and if he wants to be a part of it he should start learning to care unless his work is beyond amazing and he will only be freelancing then ignore everything I said.
Photoshop is not impressive but it gets the job done quickly and smoothly with minimal friction and that's why it is number one.
In concrete terms, it means convincing universities to train students on your tools. Autodesk has the dollars to spend on efforts like that.
Blender isn't THE industry standard by any means, but I don't think it would be a stretch to call it an industry standard. EA uses it for a lot of their concept work, Ubisoft uses it for their animation studio, it's the modelling tool at Infinity Ward, etc.
It definitely is a strong show of support for Blender, but there aren't a lot of studios in the industry using Blender, so it's quite far from being anything like a standard yet.
Blender is gaining ground, yes, but most studios are very much Maya based still with Blender used sparingly.
The one major Blender studio (Tangent) has also shuttered and were mid moving away from Blender at the time. I think the next biggest users of Blender are a division within Ubisoft, but it's not the primary DCC for Ubisoft in it's entirety either.
Where Blender is gaining most traction is freelance artists and people who don't need to work with a pipeline. Blender is slowly getting better for Pipeline integration, but it really doesn't like to play well yet within a studio where you're dealing with many different artists working on a shot, in possibly multiple DCCs.
The new asset browser is also another great addition for plugging into pipelines.
I highly recommend https://academy.cgboost.com/p/resources
Also free of charge, and a very good presenter (if you can excuse the German accent).
But most people like the Donut tutorial, that's true.
I'm not saying cancel the guy, but I am saying consider seeking out an alternative source of tutorials.
https://twunroll.com/article/1347630835235573761
There _was_ a time when that word was used like that by kids, I think we can allow people to have nostalgia for their childhood as long as they acknowledge how bad it is according to 2021 sensibilities.
And no, I'm not going to respect some sense of nostalgia for the word "fag", because when people were calling me that in middle and highschool, it sure wasn't a fun experience, and I don't look back on any of that fondly.
The joke is essentially "Ha-ha, look at how transgressive I am being, aren't I funny?", which is a particularly juvenile sort of humor (two-year-olds just love to show off the "new" word they learned by going around saying "shit" for example) and as a practical matter is indistinguishable from "Ha-ha, only serious".
And even if you don't, you also have control over what personal views you go talk about in a Youtube tutorial about Blender.
Now with your comment and the link they are again.
Congratulations, you have just reproduced homophobia. Sometimes it's better to let the past rest.
You realize it's absurd to say I'm the homophobe for pointing out Andrew's homophobic views, which he never walked back.
How many people saw that today? How many saw your comment today and digged into the Twitter thread?
And nobody called you a homophobe.
Andrew has never walked back these comments, and he's never said "Actually I was wrong in saying these things". Ball's in his court.
Anyone doing a deep dive into this channel would have come across these videos on their own.
I'm interested it for making 3d printing models, so it wasn't all relevant to my goals, but it gave me enough familiarity to know where things are well enough that I can get by pretty well through googling the rest. Lots more tutorial videos to dig into, but already feel like I have superpowers.
(I've been applying sculpting and textures to objects I modeled in OpenSCAD, super cool to be able to leave the high-tolerance surfaces alone and add rounding and interesting detail to everything else!)
Oh, that's a cool approach I don't think I've heard much about people using.
https://imgur.com/a/DEWjDCx
Made a rough coffee mug with an internal diameter less than a millimeter greater than a soda can's circumference. Then smoothed and added the "Bepis" texture in blender.
In blender, started with some sculpting, then used the displacement modifier with a texture of a repeating image file and remapped the UV Map spherically with a tilt. It's easier than it sounds!
(Could have used blender for the whole thing, but I'm just more used to OpenSCAD, so used that for the base cup)
I've used this same UV mapping of textures for various christmas ornaments I'm making for this holiday season: can get some cool snowflake-ish patterns.
https://code.blender.org/2021/04/cycles-x/
The realtime renderer is EEVEE, slated for big upgrades in 3.x:
https://code.blender.org/2021/06/eevees-future/
Crazy performance gains!
The most intuitive interface is the one you're used to.
If you can't, then I rest my case: Max has an ANCIENT outdated user interface, and it's been stagnating for decades. So what if you're used to it? I'm used to Windows 95 and Microsoft Visual Studio 6 too, but that doesn't mean they have good user interfaces.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYt0khR_ej0
>"Jim, let me tell you something: there's gonna to be a WHOLE BUNCH of things we don't tell Mrs. Clinton. Fast food is the least of our worries, ok buddy?"
People can't help but mistake familiarity for quality.
I even offered to help Kinetix implement pie menus for Max, since I was already writing Max and MaxScript plugins, and wanted their help integrating my open source ActiveX/OLE pie menus with Max. But Kinetix wasn't interested then, and Autodesk still isn't interested in listening to their users or improving Max's user interface decades later, apparently.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/automating-the-sims-character-...
After 25 years since it was created, 3D Studio Max STILL doesn't have pie menus (while Blender has really great built-in pie menus).
Kinetix's 3D Studio Max and Alias's Maya used to be competitive and innovative when they were owned by different companies.
But now they are both owned by Autodesk, so they have both stagnated and failed to innovate, listen to the demands of their users, and improve their user interfaces, the way Blender rapidly and continuously does today, and always has.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26917124
Alias used to spread FUD about pie menus, and now Autodesk and their minions spread FUD about Blender, like falsely claiming Blender's GPL license means that you can't use it to make copyrighted artwork.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26918150
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26923816
https://www.blender.org/about/license/
As if stagnating and ignoring the demands of your users while spreading FUD and innuendo about Blender wasn't bad enough, it's rumored that Autodesk even went as far as to mercilessly attack Ton Roosendaal with a ceiling tile ;) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk
Pie Menu FUD and Misconceptions: Dispelling the fear, uncertainty, doubt and misconceptions about pie menus.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menu-fud-and-misconception...
>Huge Problem: Software Patents and FUD
>There is a sad history of people using software patents to make misleading claims about obvious techniques that they didn’t originate, and constructing flawed straw man definitions of ersatz pie menus to contrast with their own inventions, to mislead the patent examiners into granting patents.
>There is a financial and institutional incentive to be lazy about researching and less than honest in reporting and describing prior art, in the hopes that it will slip by the patent examiners, which it very often does.
>Patent Abuse Example: US Patent US5689667A: Methods and system of controlling menus with radial and linear portions
>Unfortunately a bad patent that covered an obvious technique, and also made some incorrect misleading claims, was abused by Alias marketing in Bill Buxton’s name to baselessly threaten and discouraged others from using pie or marking menus, by exaggerating its scope and obfuscating its specificity. It’s my strong opinion that the particular technique that it covered (overflow items) was quit obvious.
>Gordon Kurtenbach and I discussed pie and m...
Are there any associated patents that haven't expired?
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22pie+menu%22&tbm=pts&sxsrf...
A lot of them are expired, and a lot of them cover something really specific or not directly related, some of them are really terrible ideas you wouldn't want to copy anyway, and many of them make trivial but obvious changes in the hopes of abusing a patent system, which is an extremely common practice, and a whole lot of them are completely oblivious to prior art, and shouldn't have been issued in the first place, but they were.
(I don't mind, I like this kind of heads-up.)
Release notes will be there when the release is officially announced and linked from Blender's home page.
I'd like them to bring back some more of the game engine components.
I use Unity, but seeing what Blender can do, via their demo movies, I'd love to see a Blender Game Engine!
There’s armory3d which is impressive but it’s still early days
A powerful mature engine with Python, one can dream.
Unity is mainly useful since if you're willing to drop a few thousand dollars on assets, plus about 200 hours of your own personal time, you can have a shipable game in a month or so.
Godot looks really neat, but at least with my skill level I need a starter kit to get going on most projects. Then again, I know Godot's gotten a ton of funding lately so we'll see what happens.
Back when I was using 3D Studio Max, I wished it had a fast sleek efficient minimal game engine runtime called "3D Studio Min", but that never panned out either.
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/106972/what-will...
>As for the reasons for removal we can conclude it was an old and aging component, it was largely unmaintained, suffered from several bugs and limitations, and the Blender Foundation probably lacked the energy, motivation and manpower to maintain it properly.
>"Adding new things to Blender gets much easier that way. The Blender Internal code started in early 90s. Over 25 years old! Functionally, EEVEE can (and will) completely replace it." -Ton Roosendaal
>It was also very architecturally outdated, lagged severely behind the current industry standards and modern technologies in many ways, it would be very hard to bring it up to date. Modernizing it or introducing new features would end up being more work than a full rewrite from scratch. [...]
>What About Forking It?
>UPBGE is a third party fork, whose objective is updating and modernizing the BGE with better technologies and features, with the end goal of eventually merging it back with main Blender development branch.
>I fear its future is uncertain at this point unfortunately. While I believe Blender developers won't actively do anything to purposefully break Blender trunk codebase compatibility, I speculate it will naturally become increasingly hard for UPBGE developers to maintain their code working, as features are removed and main Blender development deviates further from the current design. [...]
>There have been talks about replacing the old game engine with a newer better integrated "Interactive Mode". It would be a more integral part of Blender, as opposed to a separate component with a lot of duplicated code that re-implemented a very limited subset of supported features we currently have.
>This is not meant to be a direct replacement of the old BGE, nor a discrete game engine in the traditional sense with wide publishing capabilities, rather more of an integrated real-time "presentation tool" or interaction mode with a physics simulation sandbox environment, that runs directly inside Blender's viewport on currently supported platforms.
>On 28 May 2018 Ton Roosendaal announced in the Developers Mailing list that a portion of the 2.8 Code Quest funds were reserved for the development of a new and improved real time rendering system or "Interactive Mode" and Benoit Bolsee, a developer historically known for his involvement in real time side of Blender, accepted a grant to work part time on this for one year.
https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2018-May/0...
https://www.blender.org/2-8/quest/
https://code.blender.org/2013/06/blender-roadmap-2-7-2-8-and...
>I speculate this will probably feature a new node based workflow and logic system, real time physics, and integrate well with other upcoming features like "Object Nodes" also known as "Everything Nodes" in one way or another.
Unfortunately blender is GPL, but otherwise I would wonder if the Godot team could just use blender's rendering engine instead of implementing their own.
I will say blender is exceptionally polished, probably the best open source content creation tool ever made. We'll see what Godot comes up with next year
VFX Breakdown - Dynamo Dream Teaser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFJ_THGj72U
The full short Dynamo Dream was posted a few months ago by Hubert on his YouTube channel:
Episode 1 : Salad Mug - DYNAMO DREAM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsGZ_2RuJ2A
Make Nightmare Men in Blender - Lazy Tutorials
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgfJIZEDY44
Edit: Yes, I subscribe to his Paetron series to -- such awesome stuff!
https://www.patreon.com/IanHubert
I just dabble with blender but really enjoy his videos showing how he goes about various vfx with blender
The main issue is that data is only stored in the geometry itself, per-vertex. So if you just want a single variable you're out of luck. Math operations operate on vertices so you can't just multiply two numbers, you have to store a number in each vertex, then multiply all vertices by the same value. It's like every node is for-loop that loops over vertices.
This limited design is useful for certain things like scattering rocks over terrain but not much else.
https://twitter.com/search?q=%23nodevember2021%23geometrynod...
If anyone already has the files and cares to share the magnet, I'll gladly help with seeding.
Pretty much all the tools I've developed in the past couple of years for AAA games have been almost exclusively made with Python.
One of them we even developed tools to be DCC agnostic, which means that they could run both in Maya and 3ds Max flawlessly.
The usual GPL issue around plugins is whether program+plugin are a "mere aggregate" or a "derivative work". This doesn't really matter if they aren't distributed together, but even if it did, the question is no easier to answer in the case of interpreted vs compiled code. They are still running in the same process, exchanging internal data structures through direct procedure calls. It just so happens that one is running through a translation layer.
If that translation layer protects you, then you could just as easily enjoy that protection by running binary plugins through a no-op emulator.
And regardless of all of this, there's no reason Blender Python plugins can't use Python native extensions for performance. FLIP Fluids, for example, has a C++ fluid sim engine and uses Python just for the interface to Blender.
Maya is the videogame industry standard for modeling, just like ZBrush is the industry standard for sculpting. It is almost 100% non destructive-editing and integrate with studios asset pipelines perfectly in various ways. It's paid and closed source.
Blender is a jack of all trades, master of none. Aside from a game engine (removed since 2.8) it has basically all that you need to do modelling, sculpting, physics,3D painting, 2D and 3D animation, compositing and even some quirky video editor with audio. And it's free and open source and it has the largest community, by far, since version 2.8.
In the nitty gritty, they're all substantially different and have very different views of scenes, data representations and workflows.
It's easy enough to jump between all three, at least for me, but they each have their respective strengths and weaknesses, that lend themselves better to different kinds of work.
https://www.blender.org/download/releases/3-0/
Also here is a link to their download page as the Blender home page seems to be slammed today: https://www.blender.org/download/
Being excellent, open source and free it pretty much changed the 3d software landscape globally.
I found it odd they didn't include that video on the homepage. Its pretty great showcase of the tool (I learned its python scriptable!)
This is simply amazing.
If you want to learn digital sculpting and proper meshing (manually unfortunately, but still), this is a fantastic resource.
Thanks for the link.
After a minute or two I would occasionally find something that looked "CG-ish", but I wouldn't have found anything if I weren't looking.
It's amazing how good Blender has gotten.
EDIT: Not sure why I'm being downvoted for this, I can't find any comment from the creator, but it's widely talked about in the CG community how impressive it is how they managed to mimic the stop motion style so closely.
Even little details like occasionally showing fake strings to make them seem like puppets.
https://twitter.com/catsuka/status/1389289376031588352?lang=...