[HN Gopher] Blender and the Rabbids
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Blender and the Rabbids
Author : Tomte
Score : 255 points
Date : 2021-07-04 13:04 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.blender.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.blender.org)
| noobermin wrote:
| Blender has gone from being a tool professionals scoffed at to
| one that professionals are stressing over themselves to learn by
| binging tutorials. It is quite the sight, I remember in 2008
| wanting to get into game development and being poopooed on forums
| from picking up blender and instead pirating maya instead. I
| obviously dropped the idea completely because of it.
|
| Idk, I think there might be a larger lesson somewhere in there
| but regardless it's amazing to see the shift that has occurred.
| a1371 wrote:
| The larger lesson might be that most people see a product's
| status and not its momentum?
| Popegaf wrote:
| I find it great that they're using Blender, but
|
| > This episode is named Rabbids Invasion: Mission to Mars and it
| will be released at the end of the summer on France Television
| and on Netflix worldwide in 2022
|
| 3-6 months between releases? I get that it's a licensing issue -
| France Television probably knows more people will watch it on
| Netflix than on their own network - but this is just asking for
| piracy.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > this is just asking for piracy
|
| If you're desperate enough for entertainment to pirate the...
| _checks notes_ Rabbids Invasion: Mission to Mars special, I
| think you deserve to watch it.
| opencl wrote:
| It's entirely possible that the slowness is on Netflix's end,
| especially if they're doing the English dub themselves. They
| frequently take 6+ months to release English versions of anime
| they license.
| [deleted]
| Zababa wrote:
| France Television is the French national public service for
| television, so it'll probably be free to watch.
| adammenges wrote:
| Blender is insanely great, and honestly one of the best fully
| open source software projects out there. The only thing I wish
| from it is Apple M1 support. Personally, I'm just not sure I'm
| going to own a big desktop computer with an Nvidia gpu ever
| again.
| smoldesu wrote:
| This would be a lot easier if MacOS supported a graphics API
| other than Metal. As it stands, I doubt many people are excited
| to reverse-engineer a nigh-undocumented iGPU to patch in
| support for features that it's overarching API doesn't support
| in the first place (eg. true RT, proper SIMD optimizations,
| etc.)
| robomartin wrote:
| It wasn't clear from the article whether or not the released
| their Shot Manger plugin as FOSS or kept it an internal tool. I
| found a plugin called "Shot Manager" but it seems to have been
| authored by an unrelated Australian company (although some of the
| features sound very similar).
|
| I am not saying they are obligated to release their custom tools.
| It would just be very interesting if they did. I am not in this
| space at all other than my kids are learning Blender and love it.
|
| Tangent: Completely unrelated to this, I am truly hoping that a
| large company takes interest in KiCAD and helps push development
| to the "production ready" stage that Blender seems to have
| achieved. The EDA market is in serious need of a solid FOSS tool
| that isn't driven by the latest shinny thing companies go after.
|
| To be clear, KiCAD is absolutely fantastic and I am looking
| forward to version 6.0. We are planning on migrating our work
| from Altium Designer to KiCAD, likely starting around the end of
| this year. I'm sick and tired of what has been happening with
| Altium and the other tools are just as bad or worse.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| And something suitable for (non-EDA) CAD would be great.
| KiCad's surface area is small enough that its rough edges can
| be worked around. FreeCad's isn't.
| marcodiego wrote:
| TLDR:
|
| Conclusion
|
| This production on Blender was a great experience for us. We were
| able to integrate the application into our in-house pipeline and
| connect it to the other applications quite easily thanks to the
| strength of the Python API. In spite of some features that would
| need some maturity we had the confirmation that Blender is
| production ready and comes with tools that can really push up our
| way of working in terms of creativity.
| Springtime wrote:
| Their comment just prior about what they saw as a lack of
| guides for workflows in a studio environment is worth noting,
| too, as they felt that could be expanded upon for helping
| Blender reach more. Though frankly the article isn't that long
| a read anyway.
| aliasEli wrote:
| Blender is a very good piece of software. The main problem I
| usually have with it is finding documentation. Although the
| official documentation is fairly good, Blender is a huge program,
| and it can be hard to find the info you need. Also the
| documentation is not always up-to-date.
| valine wrote:
| Between the official documentation, blender stack exchange, and
| YouTube I've never had a problem finding what I need.
| mkl95 wrote:
| This is a common issue in large free software projects. For
| instance Godot has hired some contractors specifically to write
| documentation.
|
| Personally I usually end up using Youtube when I need to do
| something with Blender.
| blooalien wrote:
| Blender documentation is more useful once you know Blender well
| enough to even know what to look for, but in all honesty I've
| found that it's far more effective to just search your Blender
| question on YouTube and watch a video from BlenderGuru or CG
| Cookie or one of the many other fantastic tutorial creators out
| there. :)
| stoicjumbotron wrote:
| If you're talking about the actual documentation as opposed to
| the API documentation, then I beg to differ. The Blender
| documentation is fairly up-to date with each release (stable)
| and in some cases even the alpha ones.
|
| On the other hand, I found the API documentation to be lacking
| and I had to visit the Blender stack exchange multiple times to
| see any examples or the usage of most of the APIs.
| aidos wrote:
| While I think the documentation is pretty good, something
| like Blender is really hard to find your way around initially
| as a layman.
|
| I've found YouTube tutorials to be the best way so far but,
| My God, they're _slow_ going. Don't get me wrong BlenderGuru
| has done incredible work. I just really struggle with video
| as a long form learning medium.
|
| Does anyone have a good (non video) resource for getting into
| Blender? I know my way around a bit, but would love to get
| deeper into it. I recall an article on HN in the past that
| walked through the controls from a coders perspective (vim
| like control). Something along those lines.
| dantondwa wrote:
| Apart from the Blender manual itself, I don't think there
| are. In general, I also find the repetition of basic things
| in every Blender video to be exhausting, even if by
| sticking to it I do learn a lot more stuff. Ian Hubert and
| his 1 minute tutorial are fun exceptions to this.
|
| Perhaps you could study Blenders' nodes systems? I've found
| that channels dedicated to shader and geometry nodes are a
| lot more precise in their terminology and succinct in their
| explanations. Probably that is because their target
| audiences are slightly more advanced and, also, the
| positive influence of math on their method.
|
| Here are a few Youtube channels I recommend: - Erindale.
| He's probably the most known Blender node wizard. His
| videos are pleasant, thorough and accurate. - Just 3d
| things. Another channel about nodes, also very thorough and
| precise. - Sam Bowman. A channel that methodically goes
| through the creation of different materials. A very useful
| resource. - Entagma. They're mainly Houdini people, but in
| the last months they've also started doing geometry nodes
| videos. Great and informative stuff.
|
| There are many others, but I can't remember them right now.
| bogwog wrote:
| The API is the worst part of Blender.
|
| * Almost every release introduces some breaking changes
|
| * The documentation that you find online is almost always out
| of date
|
| * Most error messages give you very little feedback to figure
| out the problem
|
| * Most of the existing operators/scripts are implemented in
| C/C++ and are built into blender. So when you encounter a
| useless error message (extremely common), your only option is
| to clone the full Blender source tree and start searching for
| that particular operator
|
| * Many functions/operators are dependent on the editor state.
| For example: the only way to pass an input to an operator is
| to change the currently selected object, _and_ you have to
| make sure the editor is in the correct mode (object
| /edit/pose/etc). All of these things are visible to the user,
| so you better revert any changes you made once your script
| completes to avoid interrupting their workflow/annoying them.
|
| But the built-in Python console with tab completion is
| _excellent_. Even though the API has all those problems,
| having an interactive REPL to figure things out is great. If
| the API were more stable, documented, and less clunky with
| the editor state stuff, creating extensions for Blender would
| be an awesome experience.
| prox wrote:
| Youtube is best I found. Just find tutorial for your area of
| interest and do the basic tutorial a couple of times till you
| get fluent in it.
| fullstop wrote:
| My daughter likes to play around in Blender and is getting
| decent at it. Her issue with YouTube tutorials is that a lot
| of them are for older versions of Blender and they are
| different enough that the workflow has changed.
| knolan wrote:
| There are some really good YouTubers that do great
| tutorials that are fully up to date. A lot of them might
| not be entirely child friendly (sweary language) depending
| on your daughter's age.
| prox wrote:
| Making a good point there, add "2.9" as a search parameter!
| Also try to follow recently updated channels.
| sowbug wrote:
| I stumbled across Ian Hubert's Blender-focused channel
| (https://youtube.com/c/mrdodobird) even though I have no
| interest in CGI production. His one-minute lazy tutorials are
| fun to watch and funny. My favorite:
| https://youtu.be/imkSdlbXB_U
| prox wrote:
| That was way too fast for me but funny (but a great example
| how to make something quick)
| knolan wrote:
| That's the funny thing about Blender. Beginner tutorials
| are painfully slow for anyone who's anyway familiar with
| the software. These videos and those by CG matter adopt
| this really fast style be use that how the work flow
| goes.
| jcims wrote:
| Ian's tutorials sort of illuminate the path quickly. If
| you need more details on any specific part there's
| typically a standard tutorial floating out there about
| it.
| Jare wrote:
| That is fantastic, thank you.
| whatever_dude wrote:
| Ditto. I use Blender at an amateur level from time to time and
| I feel that every time I want to do something that i know is
| possible and I look it up, the official documentation mentions
| menus or UI items that don't exist anymore so I have to figure
| it out myself.
| comfyinnernet wrote:
| It's great to see a story about people not getting sexually
| assaulted at Ubisoft.
| smoldesu wrote:
| One of the biggest problems I have with professional software
| (eg. Bitwig, Ableton Live, Sony Vegas) is that I lose interest in
| learning how they work after the initial learning curve. All of
| those programs have a featureset that can be fully explored and
| understood in a few weeks, or perhaps months for the more
| complicated stuff.
|
| I have been using Blender for 6 years, and still have seen less
| than half of the features. It's not for lack of searching, but
| Blender's density is hugely under-appreciated in the industry. If
| you're a creative or artist in any capacity, Blender has features
| that you can take advantage of right away.
|
| Familiar with NLEs? Hop into the video splicer and play around!
|
| Comfortable mesh editing? Stay in the modelling view!
|
| Wanna get your hands dirty? Sculpting is just a tab away!
|
| Perhaps the most impressive part of Blender is that it's provided
| for free, in a tiny download, with a deeply caring userbase that
| maintains it. Here's to another decade of Blender releases!
| chacha2 wrote:
| The industry doesn't appreciated that blender can mesh edit and
| sculpt? What can it do that their existing software can't?
| justinclift wrote:
| Maybe 2D vector animation?
| avhon1 wrote:
| Blender can do that, too, with the "Grease Pencil".
|
| https://www.blender.org/features/grease-pencil/
|
| Here's a short film produced as a grease pencil showcase.
| At the end, it shows what working with it looks like.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKmSdY56VtY
| knolan wrote:
| It's a real jack of all trades, instead of moving media from
| package to package, such as animating something in Maya and
| combining with a camera track in After Effects, you can do it
| all in Blender.
|
| With the recent Eevee real time renderer you get a common
| material pipeline with Cycles.
|
| Add the exceptional 2D animation tools, and rapid
| improvements in sculpting and the speed increases of CyclesX
| to the mix and you've got one of the most capable pieces of
| software going.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| I can see the others, but Ableton Live has M4L. You can do
| pretty much anything in it. Get a license for the full Max and
| you _can_ do anything in it.
| open-source-ux wrote:
| An example of what a single person can achieve in Blender - the
| work of Ian Hubert. This is a split-screen comparison of a green
| screen shoot and the final video rendered using Blender.
| Seriously impressive:
|
| _VFX Breakdown - Dynamo Dream Teaser_ :
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFJ_THGj72U
|
| If you prefer watching the teaser in full screen, it's here:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG31WSioSxk
| hashhar wrote:
| Nice to see more professional commercial projects picking up
| Blender. It helps to see what are the things missing or
| suboptimal for "expert" users of the system.
|
| Blender and OBS Studio are very good examples of FOSS software
| that are the best at what they do and can easily offer
| competition to even the commercial alternatives.
|
| Most of all their design and UI language is consistent -
| something very rarely seen in FOSS software.
|
| And they have incredible depth of features 90% of which are
| overkill for the casual user but the experts sure do appreciate
| them.
|
| And the best part is the well-thought of extensibility and API
| story. Both of them have a very good community of plugins and
| extensions which add very useful features without feeling out of
| place.
| blooalien wrote:
| I first learned 3D graphics on Lightwave 3D on Commodore Amiga
| _ages_ ago, and since then have tried many other 3D
| applications, many of which (like Lightwave) cost hundreds or
| even thousands of dollars.
|
| True Fact: Blender beats _every single one_ of them hands down
| in every way that I can think of. :)
| jtxt wrote:
| There are ways it's not better over other tools, but many of
| those are being addressed, because it's a strong open source
| project with increasing resources.
|
| Maya has a one up on the character animation tools, with
| addons like Studio Library for a pose library, though now
| Blender 3.0 in October(ish) will have a very similar feature.
| And there's others like lattice in the graph editor that
| Blender does not have yet.
|
| Houdini is awesome for node based procedural animation and
| simulation, now Blender has Geometry Nodes, as a step in that
| direction...
| blooalien wrote:
| Geometry nodes are fun as hell. You played with them yet? I
| wasn't a fan of all the node based stuff at first, but it's
| really grown on me...
| regularfry wrote:
| Funny, there are UI affordances I remember from Lightwave 8
| and 9 that I still miss when I'm using Blender. Capability-
| wise the set of functionality is streets ahead (although if I
| could find a reasonable approximation to LWCad I'd be
| deliriously happy), but the UI just doesn't click as nicely
| for me.
| blooalien wrote:
| Don't get me wrong; I did really love Lightwave. It was
| prolly my favorite by far before I got my brain wrapped
| around the Blender workflow. You can thank YouTube (and
| some amazing tutorial creators there) for me bein' able to
| finally grok Blender enough for it to replace all my other
| 3D tools properly.
|
| I think one of my favorite things still to this day about
| Blender is how heavily customizable the UI is. How easily
| you can recreate your favorite workspace layout from
| whatever software you're most comfortable with. I still
| tend to set me up a tab with a Lightwave-like 4 pane 3D
| view just because it's sometimes still useful to me. :)
| rjzzleep wrote:
| Isn't the reason why 3DSMax is so popular(or at least was
| haven't followed this in decades) because of the abundance of
| plugins?
|
| I never used any of these enough to understand what the
| advanced differences were, but 3DSMax definitely seems easier
| to use than Softimage and Maya. I'd assume one of the reasons
| why softimage died was precisely for that reason.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| The thing I miss from 3ds Max is that you could have a non-
| destructive workflow for basic primitives because the
| geometry of simple objects like a cylinder just lived at
| the bottom of the modifier stack and you could change them
| later.
|
| Once you need to edit the mesh you have to "apply" that
| geometry and lock it in, but it's handy to be able to go
| back and say "When I merge these objects the topology flows
| better with 24 faces around the cylinder instead of 16."
|
| Haven't used it too recently, but in blender I think that
| still means deleting the object and making a new one to
| replace it.
| jtxt wrote:
| Blender also has modifiers and can do many things non
| destructively. (Been a while since I've used Max heavily
| though.)
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Yes, but the geometry is not a modifier. The "how many
| rings/segments" configuration shows up during primitive
| creation, the geometry is generated, and that's your
| geometry unless you want to delete it and make a new one.
|
| You can see what I'm talking about in 3ds here:
| https://youtu.be/Dp9Ozs3HjzY?t=120
| jtxt wrote:
| Yes, I know what you mean now. (Perhaps they could add
| primitives to the modifiers for a similar workflow.)
|
| You can setup parametric primitives other ways though,
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaHL7jRo6mM Or putting a
| screw modifier on a curve... ( torus, sphere, any lathed
| object...)
|
| Or there's likely a number of different ways using
| geometry nodes. Granted it's not currently simple and
| intuitive though.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| I need to try out blender's node systems. I've done a bit
| of texturing with Substance Designer and really liked the
| approach, just not been doing this kind of 3D work
| lately. Flipping through some image search results,
| geometry nodes look pretty cool!
| blooalien wrote:
| The shiny new geometry nodes feature in Blender is a
| modifier and can be used to perform some pretty nifty
| non-destructive trickery on basic primitives too. Not
| _exactly_ like what that video shows, but still some
| really neat stuff can be done with it. Well worth playin
| ' around with a bit. :)
| wlesieutre wrote:
| 2.93 has a Mesh Primitive node! Seems like what I wanted
| from 3ds should be directly doable with this, if not
| quite as simply! https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/lates
| t/modeling/geometry_...
| wondenderboy wrote:
| no you haven't - coz if you did - you know that there were no
| yt or pdf/html tuts around + the manuals were rly terrible.
| so you had to tinker with each and every program and ui from
| scratch yourself to see how it works.
|
| my basic test with every 3d package since then was to create
| a plain scene, add simple objects, textures, lights and
| camera to see how it behaves - and the only program that
| failed this test since 1988 is blender. I simply was not able
| to create a simple scene and render it with this program
| without hours spend on stupid tuts and learing keyboard
| shortcuts. and yes, the basic 3d principles are the same
| since then.
|
| So if u were around back then u would knew that even with the
| original lw & cinema 4d in 1989 on amiga or maya 1.0 on pc
| you could get results easier than with blender...
|
| ...and yes I refuse to use this crap ui for this reason.
| where blender shines tho is as a converter for some rare
| object formats, using the free plugins.
| fsloth wrote:
| Have you used the latest iteration of Blender? The UI is
| about two orders of magnitude less user hostile now. It's
| like three clicks to create a scene such as you described.
| I hated the previous UI:s but now the whole system in
| Blender is really coming together.
| pksebben wrote:
| this is simply not a universal experience. For myself,
| having no background in using other 3d software, I found
| blender 2.8 to be incredibly intuitive. I'm aware that the
| previous versions ui had a bad rap, but if a total newbie
| like myself can get the hang of it, it can't be all that
| bad
| ChrisClark wrote:
| >no you haven't
| plufz wrote:
| But does it really beat every single one? I'm a blender user
| myself and really like it but I was under the impression that
| most professionals use Maya. And I guessed for some reason?
| failrate wrote:
| It is what they are frequently trained on in school. That
| is one reason for it to be an industry standard.
| MathYouF wrote:
| I'm also a sort of amateur at 3D modeling (though my
| background is in VR programming so I have a lot of exposure
| to it) so take my knowledge with a grain of salt, but afaiu
| there's a few different steps:
|
| Modeling: Maya is best, Blender is a good substitute
|
| Sculpting/topology: Zbrush is best, Maya is runner up,
| Blender is a good substitute
|
| UV Unwrapping: All the above are good at this
|
| Texturing: Substance Painter is best, Blender is a good
| substitute
|
| Animation: Maya and Blender are comparable
|
| So as far as I understand the cool thing is, aside Blender
| is essentially a nearly as good replacement for Maya, and
| can do everything to an adequite degree for high quality
| production.
|
| The only things Blender is decidedly not an equal
| substitute for is Sculpting compared to Zbrush and
| Texturing compared to Substance Painter.
|
| Again, I'm not an expert, but I think the above is roughly
| accurate.
| blooalien wrote:
| I keep hearing really good things about Substance Painter
| from a ton of folk. I'ma really have to prolly have a
| proper look at it sometime soon-ish.
| Tomte wrote:
| It's now Adobe's, though, so no more lifeteime licenses,
| only subscriptions. 50 dollars a month (with introductory
| price of 25 dollars).
| Pearse wrote:
| I'm not sure if it is still the case but you used to be
| able to get a perpetual license on steam for ~100
| blooalien wrote:
| Just checked. Looks like both Substance Designer _and_
| Substance Painter are available on Steam.
| jtxt wrote:
| IMO, no, it's not better than every other 3d tool for every
| problem. (I've used it for 20 years.) You can get by with
| Blender for many of them. But for example, Maya's character
| animation tools and available addons are more mature.
| Blender is working on a pose and asset library, that is
| being used now in their open movie project and should be
| ready by Blender 3.0 in October... I learned Maya in
| character animation school, and that's how it happens,
| that's what's used in studios, so that's what people learn.
| I think that will change as Blender developers remove more
| reasons for not switching.
| blooalien wrote:
| > "I've used it for 20 years."
|
| Wow. So you remember back when the Blender UI was a total
| nightmare then... Total night and day difference between
| then and now, that's for sure. :)
| jtxt wrote:
| Yeah, I used 3ds r4 and max 2 before then. In 2001, I
| didn't want to pirate, and saw blender in a magazine, so
| I dug in. I brute forced learning hotkeys, took apart
| example files... I really liked the UI once I learned it,
| it was designed for efficiency not discoverability or
| following existing conventions.
|
| Now, everything is much more discoverable (f3 search
| access to most commands, things can be set to hotkeys...)
| and there's tons of great content on Youtube.
| blooalien wrote:
| > "Now, everything is much more discoverable" ...
|
| And yet despite all the _massive_ improvements over the
| years, Blender managed to successfully _keep_ all the
| stuff about it that made it great back in the beginning
| and simply improved everything around and over the top
| (and under the hood). Things like the utterly
| customizable interface, and the hotkeys available for
| everything (which are now also super configurable), just
| to name a couple of examples. And now we also have this
| nifty Eevee engine, too. Am _really_ enjoying that one a
| whole lot.
| blooalien wrote:
| Beats every one of the tools _I 've_ used in the past
| (though they've all probably matured significantly since I
| last used them, but then again, so has Blender in the time
| I've been using it). :)
|
| As to Maya, I've personally shown Maya users around Blender
| and gotten quite a few "OOooh"s and "Aaah"s out of them, so
| I dunno... Maybe they might be easily coaxed away from
| Maya. I certainly intend to sing the praises of Blender to
| any of 'em that'll listen. ;)
| DoctorShenan wrote:
| Blender has been getting better and better with time. Many
| studios started with Maya or other commercial software have
| written tons of custom scripts to integrate better with
| their own workflows. Additionally, Maya/max/etc all are
| taught in schools, I haven't seen a school that teaches
| blender, at least. That means that there might be less
| onboarding time.
|
| I am also believe that blender is the best all-around 3d
| software out there, but that doesn't mean it's best for the
| studio or cost effective to switch.
| lvl100 wrote:
| Blender is a great tool beyond typical 3D applications largely
| due to its Python scripting and ability to run it headless.
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(page generated 2021-07-04 23:00 UTC)