Krita is amazing, I switched to it from Gimp and it was a breath of a fresh air. Can't really say the same about the Gimp though, it is a bit redundant given how dated its UI is and how mature Krita is already.
I love those drawn looking animation videos for games like
The Burdens of Shaohao https://g.co/kgs/419Tq1 but are there any video game examples where those tools would be beneficial? My video game knowledge is not wide enough. Blender I can definitely see.
"Not only will Ubisoft help funding online support for Blender developers, Ubisoft Animation Studio – a department of Ubisoft Film and Television – will also use Blender for their productions and assign developers to contribute to Blender’s open source projects."
This seams like a really big deal. It's one thing to try to create a desert of profitability around yourself, which a lot of huge companies giving money to tangential FOSS projects could be construed as. It is quite another to have them commit to use the software internally.
Are there any other large multimedia companies that are known to primarily use FOSS media production programs?
Yes it's a big deal, developers that submit code is probably worth more than the membership which is (only) €30K/year (if my research is correct: https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/), so those 30k will allow them to hire a dev halftime, as blender fund says that 30k are equivalent to "half year developer time".
Well it depends how much those developers will actually contribute, but it's still very good news.
This happens just 7 days after Epic Games contributed with $1.2m[1]. The future looks bright for Blender. If more companies follow, it might finally have enough funding to give it the development resources that it deserves.
It seems the Ubisoft news website is a bit buggy, or theres an issue with its cached pages. If you go to the main news page[0], its not there. However, if you click "Latest", it brings to to the same URL, but with the Blender article on top. Clicking that still brings you to the notfound page you linked.
Edit: It's now there on the news home page without having to click "Latest", but it still 404's.
Kudos to blender's marketing team. They get a bit of free money from this. But the true motive for Epic and Unisoft is likely an attempt to strong-arm Autodesk into providing better support and maintainance. Dissatisfaction with Autodesk lack of care for their DCC tools has been growing for a very long time now, but studios also have a huge investment into these tools as parts of their proprietary pipelines. Expect Autodesk to kowtow soon and make sure that none of these companies will make the switch. If it means that Autodesk actually delivers bugfixes for the version the customer has instead of one or two releases down the road, it is a good outcome for the studios.
Blender is replacing an in-house tool, not software licensed from Autodesk. You might have missed the following section from the article
"We decided to transform a workflow centered on in-house software to a more agile development environment supported by open source and inner source solutions. This way, our research and development and pipeline teams could focus their energy on bringing innovative ideas to the table, while working closely with the creatives.
In that new workflow, Blender is replacing our in-house digital content creation tool."
Maybe this new UI change to Blender means it is high time I learn how to use it. Tried it before but couldn't get past left click not doing what I expect left clicking to do, but apparently things are more user friendly now.
The influx of money/talent from Epic and Ubisoft is great though. Blender was, from what I've seen from the outside, looked on affectionately as being a good tool, but maybe this leads to them being a consideration for primary tool (beyond just free) in the way the commercial tools have been.
Small survival kit for new 2.8 users (things you'll probably want to change/configure before use):
1. Set spacebar to "Search". A number of features either don't have keybinding anymore or it's hidden in an obscure menu. Search makes things easier like typing Spacebar > "Walk" > enter to WASD the scene (before it was just Shift-F).
2. Set "F" to focus (like any other 3D tool), in Blender it's still the Numpad . (dot)... never understood this decision. You probably want to change this.
3. Get used to the most used transform keybindings: Move (G), Rotate (R), Scale (S). You can type: `R, X, 45` if you want to Rotate in X 45 deg. This is one of the reasons I like to do basic modeling in Blender and not in Maya. If you need to bring the manipulator like in other 3D software tools, you can right click the manipulators on the left and add them to Quick Favorites (I prefer) or assign them new shortcuts.
Alternatively, you can just change your keyboard bindings to the "Industry compatible" preset in preferences, although I don't recommend this as you lose some of the good keybindings from blender.
I felt the same way and 2.8 has been a HUGE improvement for me. I have a commercial Maya subscription and I have to admit I almost like Blender better at this point. That's less a knock on Maya which is still great, just acknowledging that Blender has come a really long way.
My only small beef is I wish they'd use system dialog boxes for save/load, and texture painting still feels a little clunky.
The UI is definitely much nicer now, and the release candidates are very stable. If you'd like to learn, I'd definitely recommend sticking to 2.80 tutorials and not trying to understand 2.79 tutorials. This series [0] is a decent starting point.
What confuses a novice with Blender is that it has so called "areas" (something like a tiled window manager) and it is very counter-intuitive. For example, when you try to resize an "area" you accidentally create a new one and it is very difficult to remove.
Tried it before but couldn't get past left click not doing what I expect left clicking to do,
Same here, but while that turned out to be a hoop I could go through eventually, the seemingly random API changes from version to version and associated backwards incompatibility of user scripts were not.
It's the other way round for me. I knew my way around the old Blender haven't used it in a while though. Now I dread trying out the new version because it seems to have a completely changed and dumbed down interface.
If I'm reading correctly, this means they'll pay about €30k / year (see https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/ ), and "assign developers to contribute to Blender's open source projects". The latter is probably higher value, but I'd have preferred if they'd already started before making the announcement.
I'll go ahead and say the quiet part loud, if Blender can create a low cost alternative to Maya and the rest especially for entry and beginning level modelers and animators, this is a great thing.
Wow, that's so great. This announcement, the one from Epic Games, and the release of v2.8. So many great news for Blender! That makes me really motivated to try out to create a project using it.
Anyway, I wish more FOSS projects could copy blenders way of working. They start a very big and ambitious project then update the code to support it. For example Elephants Dream gave them character animation. Big Buck Bunny gave them hair rendering & animation.
I believe this is also the same approach Mozilla have taken with Rust & Servo (although Servo is not quite as production-ready as I was expecting this long down the line, although re-reading the description, perhaps it was always meant to be a cute project, not a browser for the masses)
I'm playing with 2.8 today and it's totally changed my opinion. In about 1 hour it's gone from, "Blenders that weird tool that I can never figure out" to "I'd prefer to use Blender over the Autodesk tools I'm more familiar with"
I'm really impressed by the quality of the UI design in the update
[+] [-] xvilka|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://krita.org/en/support-us/donations/
[2] https://www.gimp.org/donating/
[3] https://inkscape.org/support-us/donate/
[+] [-] anchpop|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wetpaws|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chronogram|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BeefySwain|6 years ago|reply
This seams like a really big deal. It's one thing to try to create a desert of profitability around yourself, which a lot of huge companies giving money to tangential FOSS projects could be construed as. It is quite another to have them commit to use the software internally.
Are there any other large multimedia companies that are known to primarily use FOSS media production programs?
[+] [-] chriswwweb|6 years ago|reply
Well it depends how much those developers will actually contribute, but it's still very good news.
But on the other hand they just got 1.2 million from Epic Games for 3 years ... to me this seems to be a much bigger contribution: https://www.blender.org/press/epic-games-supports-blender-fo...?
[+] [-] noname120|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20442131
[+] [-] MichaelHoste|6 years ago|reply
Here is the press release from Blender: https://www.blender.org/press/ubisoft-joins-blender-developm...
[+] [-] ihuman|6 years ago|reply
Edit: It's now there on the news home page without having to click "Latest", but it still 404's.
https://news.ubisoft.com/en-us/home
[+] [-] noname120|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gmueckl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sangnoir|6 years ago|reply
"We decided to transform a workflow centered on in-house software to a more agile development environment supported by open source and inner source solutions. This way, our research and development and pipeline teams could focus their energy on bringing innovative ideas to the table, while working closely with the creatives.
In that new workflow, Blender is replacing our in-house digital content creation tool."
[+] [-] jsgo|6 years ago|reply
The influx of money/talent from Epic and Ubisoft is great though. Blender was, from what I've seen from the outside, looked on affectionately as being a good tool, but maybe this leads to them being a consideration for primary tool (beyond just free) in the way the commercial tools have been.
[+] [-] binthere|6 years ago|reply
1. Set spacebar to "Search". A number of features either don't have keybinding anymore or it's hidden in an obscure menu. Search makes things easier like typing Spacebar > "Walk" > enter to WASD the scene (before it was just Shift-F).
2. Set "F" to focus (like any other 3D tool), in Blender it's still the Numpad . (dot)... never understood this decision. You probably want to change this.
3. Get used to the most used transform keybindings: Move (G), Rotate (R), Scale (S). You can type: `R, X, 45` if you want to Rotate in X 45 deg. This is one of the reasons I like to do basic modeling in Blender and not in Maya. If you need to bring the manipulator like in other 3D software tools, you can right click the manipulators on the left and add them to Quick Favorites (I prefer) or assign them new shortcuts.
Alternatively, you can just change your keyboard bindings to the "Industry compatible" preset in preferences, although I don't recommend this as you lose some of the good keybindings from blender.
[+] [-] overgard|6 years ago|reply
My only small beef is I wish they'd use system dialog boxes for save/load, and texture painting still feels a little clunky.
[+] [-] anchpop|6 years ago|reply
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF1qEhBSfq4&list=PLa1F2ddGya...
[+] [-] codedokode|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tade0|6 years ago|reply
Same here, but while that turned out to be a hoop I could go through eventually, the seemingly random API changes from version to version and associated backwards incompatibility of user scripts were not.
[+] [-] ginko|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slezyr|6 years ago|reply
Do not expect to master it by just clicking around. It's more like CAD you can do nothing without book/tutorials.
[+] [-] davnicwil|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aissen|6 years ago|reply
Otherwise this just feels like previous broken promises: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/125952/Ubisofts_Ancel_Pl...
[+] [-] noobermin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raphaelj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shmerl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dgellow|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bekwnn|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panpanna|6 years ago|reply
Anyway, I wish more FOSS projects could copy blenders way of working. They start a very big and ambitious project then update the code to support it. For example Elephants Dream gave them character animation. Big Buck Bunny gave them hair rendering & animation.
https://www.blender.org/about/projects/
[+] [-] laputan_machine|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tosh|6 years ago|reply
“Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement”
https://www.gwern.net/Complement
[+] [-] RenRav|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haxiomic|6 years ago|reply
I'm really impressed by the quality of the UI design in the update
[+] [-] kragniz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|6 years ago|reply
Community funded projects will never match the salaries that companies like AutoDesk pay their developers.
[+] [-] newsreview1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TylerE|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vernie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rambo5|6 years ago|reply
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