Blender is as far as I can tell one the best run and marketed Open Source projects out there. They seem to have a great way to pay for development. They are have a lot of industry invested in their success. They have a great focus on the end power user.
They got $1.2M from Epics megagrant last year, and has lots of people and companies donating. They are slightly above the goal of funding 20 full time employees. I'm happy that an open source software have been so successful. It's come very far since when I first used it, version 2.42 I think.
It's also one of the most impressive technically, up there IMO with the likes of gcc and linux.
The amount of non-trivial tech built into it is staggering, and - most impressive, at least to me - the feature bloat has been really well managed, first from a usability perspective, but more importantly, from a performance perspective: blender remains, for many things, the fastest thing there is out there.
If you want to convince yourself of that fact, try to load a rigged 1M poly scene stored in native blender format, and try to do the same thing with the Mayas and other 3DS maxes of this world.
This is great, but I have to say, I'm a bit concerned about multiple Intel tools (Embree, OpenImageDenoise) that are now integrated into Blender. The tools seem to depend on Intel MKL, which has famously been crippled on non Intel CPUs.
The big concern, for me, is the wide usage of Blender in common CPU benchmarks, which potentially could give Intel an unfair advantage in those.
Embree doesn't use MKL, and in fact, the code runs very well on AMD machines, as can be seen by any recent Cinebench version benchmark (of which AMD themselves often show the result) which utilises Embree for intersection.
What will be interesting is other architecture support entirely (ARM) possibly being added to it by contributors. I doubt it will happen, but Intel did accept patches for TBB for ARM and POWERPC, so it's technically possibly...
The new search will be great for people like me that only use Blender sporadically. I often know what I want to do but don't use it often enough to remember where to find it or the shortcut. And even for regular people it can be great, I use "find action" in IntelliJ all the time just because writing the name of a seldom used feature is faster than navigating to it.
Really happy with the direction Blender is going, more polish and better outreach. Just scrolling through and being able to see the before/after for new features is amazing, makes it really easy to share with friends who haven't checked Blender out before.
I've posted this before but it feels appropriate again...this Blender example of green screen VFX was created by a single person and demonstrates the amazing skill of the film-maker and how powerful Blender can be. It's really impressive work:
I used Blender extensively the last few weeks for a prototype project. It's really a great piece of software but when it came to baking/texturing/painting my models (game assets using the PBR workflow) I grew more and more impatient with the build-in tools it offers .
So I gave up at some point and following some suggestions I finally tried Substance Painter to do these things (Industry standard). Using both tools in tandem was a real game changer for me. Definitely would recommend it if you want to speed up your process. I am sure all this can be done in Blender but it will be a pain to do so.
Some things I was missing within Blender:
- Baking and baking groups (it's extremely annoying to select all the objects each time but I have seen a few extension who help with this process)
- Painting on multiple layers at the same time (e.g. paint a PBR material on a PBR material)
- A non-destructive workflow with support for the above
Nevertheless I love Blender and I would like to be able to use their UI-Framework for my own applications because it works just great.
There's nothing wrong with using multiple apps to get what you want. That's what the pro VFX houses do
A typical pipeline might be Maya for modeling, ZBrush for sculpting, Substance Painter for texturing, Houdini for procedural/dynamic effects, Nuke for compositing, and Renderman for generating the output.
Nothing at all wrong about picking the best tool for the task at hand.
You’re lucky enough to have started in the post 2.8 era :)
Things used to be a lot less user friendly interface-wise. It was a major weakness of the program until 2.8 launched and magically fixed everything. The Blender Foundation is REALLY good about interacting with and gauging the needs of the community!
I know this is a thread about Blender but FreeCAD has been making good progress in that area. Parametric sketching is still different from some of the commercial packages but reasonably functional.
Strongly agree, and I'd also wish they took a shot at the Architecture market (god knows Autodesk and Archicad sorely deserves the competition) but it's not easy to build a product that fits all possible uses cases, especially when the initial focus of the app was SFX and animation.
Specifically, for CAD, blender lacks IMO two fundamental things:
- a strong NURBS engine, complete with filleting, trimmed NURBS, CSG, full brep, etc.. (something at least on par with OpenCascade).
- a node-based (à la Houdini) modeling system to do full blown paramaterics. The current destructive + Undo/Redo model is simply not strong enough for serious CAD used.
For the latter, there are add-ons (e.g. sorcar, sverchok) that try to patch the gap, but they all feel like band-aids when you try to really put them to work.
Definitely. It's pretty much impossible to do parametric modelling at the moment, unless you're willing to resort to generating entire geometry from python.
We need more open source software modeled off of the blender system.
Imagine if customers of all the major closed-software players also put aside some small amount of funding to support full time developers of open source systems.
This benefits everyone, because it gives these customers some potential future leverage for lower prices, it gives the closed-software players some competition to keep them nimble, and it benefits the next generation of users who can’t afford the closed-software prices, but could get their fingers wet with less capable software.
In my experience, a lot of open-source systems are managed by terrible teams with their own priorities or ideas, regardless of what the actual community wants.
For example, The GIMP has been notorious for this for its entire history, and it still is[1]. I remember ages ago, the discussion basically went like this.
> "Thanks to The GIMP, people can ditch Photoshop and Windows and move to Linux and an open-source workflow!"
> "But The GIMP doesn't support a lot of features, like CMYK color."
> "Sure, but nobody actually uses CMYK color though."
> "Literally everyone who designs for print uses CMYK color, like print shops, magazine editors, etc., and that's a huge market."
> "Well it's open source, so if it's so important to you then fix it yourself!"
> "But I'm a photographer and magazine editor, not a programmer, so I'm just going to keep paying someone else for software I can use, instead of switching to a free version of something that literally refuses to add the features I need."
Cue tons of Slashdot comments talking about how non-technical people are so rigid-minded that they're not willing to learn anything new and just make excuses instead.
Blender is an exception, not just because it's an open-source success, but because it's managed by a team who are building it for the people who need it, and not just to stick it to closed-source companies by making a pale imitation of a production app, an all-too-common scenario in open-source development.
Back in the early 2000's, I did several workshops on Ardour (DAW) in the same context that Ton and others were doing workshops on Blender (sometimes in the room next door).
Without fail, the Blender workshops had 10x more people than the Ardour one.
Everybody knows that to do computer generated imagery you need only a computer, and skill. There's a LOT of need for computer generated imagery. The use cases extend far outside the obvious ones for Blender.
For a DAW, most people understand that you probably need significant musical skill (which may or may not be true, depending on the genre of music you want to create). And if you're not actually making music, you probably don't need a DAW.
The result is that an app like Blender has a user base at least as large as that of several DAWs put together (probably not all DAWs, but several of them).
This changes the nature of the type of ecosystem (development, funding, user community) you can build around the software.
I work in feature film and game cinematics, where Blender is still a toy.
An increasingly interesting toy since 2.80, but it'll take a killer-feature to tear a studio or artist away from their tool of choice. Houdini for FX is still unmatched, Maya for character animation is still unmatched, ZBrush for sculpting is still unmatched, and so forth. As of this writing, Blender does each of those increasingly well but not as well, and certainly not well enough to warrant a transition.
That said, ZBrush started as a really good hobbyist tool and grew from there. I wouldn't be surprised if Blender took a similar route.
It has significant professional following nowadays, including media studios - for example, Hideaki Anno's studio that was responsible for the Rebuild movies AFAIK switched 3D modelling fully to Blender for the last movie, including pledging non-trivial amounts of money to development of Blender itself.
The reasoning included the part where they can simply sponsor features earlier for specific needs.
I work exclusively using Blender doing professional product visualization. It’s really an incredible triumph of open-source software.
EDIT: I actually haven’t tried Max or Maya, but then again, I haven’t needed to. Blender’s feature set has been perfectly capable for my needs and use cases.
As a long-time Mac and Blender user, I used to be in the same camp. After looking into it though, I found out implementing Metal support would take thousands of developer hours, and knowing that I think I would rather just trust the Foundation to put those hours towards other development that would benefit more than just Max users.
Newest Blender on Raspberry Pi seems to be 2.7, which works surprisingly smoothly under a 64-bit OS. RPi4 has 96 Gflops of CPU FPU power, making it a reasonable option for 3D-rendering for kids.
I hope there are chances to get 2.9 to run on Raspberry Pi, especially once RPi Vulkan support matures.
How's Blender Vulkan rendering path doing? Is is possible to use it instead of OpenGL one day?
Having recently started trying to learn to make and setup game assets (I can do CAD but not rigging etc.), I was really shocked how much cleaner Blender is compared to Maya.
I'm aware Maya is more powerful for some tasks, but - considering that other Autodesk tools are not too bad - Maya genuinely nearly put me off doing it at all.
There is an "extension" to .obj where vertex colors are added to the v line, like
v x y z r g b
But this stores a color per-vertex. Vertex colors in Blender, like UVs, are per-corner-of-poly. The ideal way to store vertex color information in .obj would really be
vc r g b
p v1/vt1/vn1/vc1 ...
As it is, exporting per-vertex colors would require splitting a vertex into multiple vertices, one per distinct vertex color that it uses.
.obj files don't hold any material information. When you check "Write Materials" in the obj-exporter properties (should be enabled by default) it will also export the materials to a separate .mtl file and reference them in the .obj file.
There are a few spelling and grammatical mistakes on the page. But that's okay, you knew what they meant. "Built-in" was probably just auto-corrected anyway: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/built-in
[+] [-] zaphar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matsemann|5 years ago|reply
Shoutout to those donating (and how to contribute): https://fund.blender.org/
[+] [-] ur-whale|5 years ago|reply
The amount of non-trivial tech built into it is staggering, and - most impressive, at least to me - the feature bloat has been really well managed, first from a usability perspective, but more importantly, from a performance perspective: blender remains, for many things, the fastest thing there is out there.
If you want to convince yourself of that fact, try to load a rigged 1M poly scene stored in native blender format, and try to do the same thing with the Mayas and other 3DS maxes of this world.
[+] [-] hellking4u|5 years ago|reply
The big concern, for me, is the wide usage of Blender in common CPU benchmarks, which potentially could give Intel an unfair advantage in those.
[+] [-] berkut|5 years ago|reply
What will be interesting is other architecture support entirely (ARM) possibly being added to it by contributors. I doubt it will happen, but Intel did accept patches for TBB for ARM and POWERPC, so it's technically possibly...
[+] [-] archgoon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alok99|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matsemann|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikewhy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foxdev|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seccess|5 years ago|reply
THANK GOODNESS, man those shadows always looked so ugly. I primarily use EEVEE so this makes me happy.
[+] [-] 91edec|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkaic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] open-source-ux|5 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/DrewCoffman/status/1274743473732632576
[+] [-] bootloop|5 years ago|reply
So I gave up at some point and following some suggestions I finally tried Substance Painter to do these things (Industry standard). Using both tools in tandem was a real game changer for me. Definitely would recommend it if you want to speed up your process. I am sure all this can be done in Blender but it will be a pain to do so.
Some things I was missing within Blender:
- Baking and baking groups (it's extremely annoying to select all the objects each time but I have seen a few extension who help with this process)
- Painting on multiple layers at the same time (e.g. paint a PBR material on a PBR material)
- A non-destructive workflow with support for the above
Nevertheless I love Blender and I would like to be able to use their UI-Framework for my own applications because it works just great.
[+] [-] packetslave|5 years ago|reply
A typical pipeline might be Maya for modeling, ZBrush for sculpting, Substance Painter for texturing, Houdini for procedural/dynamic effects, Nuke for compositing, and Renderman for generating the output.
Nothing at all wrong about picking the best tool for the task at hand.
[+] [-] arduinomancer|5 years ago|reply
I'm used to open source programs usually having pretty janky/outdated interfaces.
[+] [-] mkaic|5 years ago|reply
Things used to be a lot less user friendly interface-wise. It was a major weakness of the program until 2.8 launched and magically fixed everything. The Blender Foundation is REALLY good about interacting with and gauging the needs of the community!
[+] [-] polskibus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] racnid|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ur-whale|5 years ago|reply
Specifically, for CAD, blender lacks IMO two fundamental things:
For the latter, there are add-ons (e.g. sorcar, sverchok) that try to patch the gap, but they all feel like band-aids when you try to really put them to work.[+] [-] hughes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkaic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|5 years ago|reply
Imagine if customers of all the major closed-software players also put aside some small amount of funding to support full time developers of open source systems.
This benefits everyone, because it gives these customers some potential future leverage for lower prices, it gives the closed-software players some competition to keep them nimble, and it benefits the next generation of users who can’t afford the closed-software prices, but could get their fingers wet with less capable software.
[+] [-] danudey|5 years ago|reply
For example, The GIMP has been notorious for this for its entire history, and it still is[1]. I remember ages ago, the discussion basically went like this.
> "Thanks to The GIMP, people can ditch Photoshop and Windows and move to Linux and an open-source workflow!"
> "But The GIMP doesn't support a lot of features, like CMYK color."
> "Sure, but nobody actually uses CMYK color though."
> "Literally everyone who designs for print uses CMYK color, like print shops, magazine editors, etc., and that's a huge market."
> "Well it's open source, so if it's so important to you then fix it yourself!"
> "But I'm a photographer and magazine editor, not a programmer, so I'm just going to keep paying someone else for software I can use, instead of switching to a free version of something that literally refuses to add the features I need."
Cue tons of Slashdot comments talking about how non-technical people are so rigid-minded that they're not willing to learn anything new and just make excuses instead.
Blender is an exception, not just because it's an open-source success, but because it's managed by a team who are building it for the people who need it, and not just to stick it to closed-source companies by making a pale imitation of a production app, an all-too-common scenario in open-source development.
[1] https://medium.com/linux-gossip/the-gimp-has-a-marketing-pro...
[+] [-] PaulDavisThe1st|5 years ago|reply
Back in the early 2000's, I did several workshops on Ardour (DAW) in the same context that Ton and others were doing workshops on Blender (sometimes in the room next door).
Without fail, the Blender workshops had 10x more people than the Ardour one.
Everybody knows that to do computer generated imagery you need only a computer, and skill. There's a LOT of need for computer generated imagery. The use cases extend far outside the obvious ones for Blender.
For a DAW, most people understand that you probably need significant musical skill (which may or may not be true, depending on the genre of music you want to create). And if you're not actually making music, you probably don't need a DAW.
The result is that an app like Blender has a user base at least as large as that of several DAWs put together (probably not all DAWs, but several of them).
This changes the nature of the type of ecosystem (development, funding, user community) you can build around the software.
[+] [-] mekster|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mottosso|5 years ago|reply
An increasingly interesting toy since 2.80, but it'll take a killer-feature to tear a studio or artist away from their tool of choice. Houdini for FX is still unmatched, Maya for character animation is still unmatched, ZBrush for sculpting is still unmatched, and so forth. As of this writing, Blender does each of those increasingly well but not as well, and certainly not well enough to warrant a transition.
That said, ZBrush started as a really good hobbyist tool and grew from there. I wouldn't be surprised if Blender took a similar route.
[+] [-] p_l|5 years ago|reply
The reasoning included the part where they can simply sponsor features earlier for specific needs.
[+] [-] mkaic|5 years ago|reply
EDIT: I actually haven’t tried Max or Maya, but then again, I haven’t needed to. Blender’s feature set has been perfectly capable for my needs and use cases.
[+] [-] nineteen999|5 years ago|reply
https://www.blender.org/user-stories/visual-effects-for-the-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5rvwo2/we_produced_th...
[+] [-] Stevvo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rguetzkow|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] checker659|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkaic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitbang|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whateveracct|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkaic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Stevvo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vardump|5 years ago|reply
I hope there are chances to get 2.9 to run on Raspberry Pi, especially once RPi Vulkan support matures.
How's Blender Vulkan rendering path doing? Is is possible to use it instead of OpenGL one day?
[+] [-] rguetzkow|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://developer.blender.org/T68990
[+] [-] mhh__|5 years ago|reply
I'm aware Maya is more powerful for some tasks, but - considering that other Autodesk tools are not too bad - Maya genuinely nearly put me off doing it at all.
[+] [-] ww520|5 years ago|reply
One thing I wish they would add is to export the color information along with the vertices in the Wavefront OBJ file when exporting an model.
[+] [-] edflsafoiewq|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bootloop|5 years ago|reply
Edit: see also here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavefront_.obj_file#Material_t...
[+] [-] nyanpasu64|5 years ago|reply
> Meet Nishita, a physically based texture built-in Cycles.
I think the hyphen shouldn't have been added. The sentence doesn't parse with it present.
[+] [-] hbosch|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buovjaga|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] travbrack|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brundolf|5 years ago|reply