[HN Gopher] Blender 3.0
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Blender 3.0
        
       Author : marcodiego
       Score  : 452 points
       Date   : 2021-12-03 14:40 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.blender.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.blender.org)
        
       | jokoon wrote:
       | Please check freemocap, I guess it exports blender files but I'm
       | not sure. I really hope it would enable people to make better
       | animation.
        
       | pfist wrote:
       | I'm a solo game developer working in Unreal Engine. I typically
       | buy environments and props from the Unreal Marketplace and modify
       | them to meet my needs. Unreal's built-in modeling tools are
       | usually enough for my purposes so I rarely open Blender, but when
       | I do, I am so appreciative that this software exists and is free
       | to use.
       | 
       | It's incredible how far Blender has come. I remember the days
       | when time between significant releases was measured in years, not
       | months. The progress they've made in recent years -- particularly
       | since Epic Games gave them a $1.2 million Epic MegaGrant -- has
       | been impressive, and encouraging to watch.
       | 
       | Thank you to all who fund Blender, and thank you especially to
       | the people who make it. You're making a difference in the lives
       | of many indie developers.
        
         | moffkalast wrote:
         | While there are so many things to dislike about Epic, I guess
         | even a broken clock is right twice a day.
        
           | m00x wrote:
           | You can't really call them a broken clock for your own
           | subjective view. Epic games makes good games and a phenomenal
           | game engine that's allowed countless devs to make great games
           | with great graphics.
           | 
           | A big plus for me is that they used their massive force to
           | sue, and eventually budge Apple of their 30% revenue cut on
           | their walled garden, but that's subjective.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | raxxorrax wrote:
       | What is wrong with Blender lately? Everyone in a workaholic
       | phase?
       | 
       | Much appreciated of course!
        
         | bottled_poe wrote:
         | I guess that's what happens when personal interest is aligned
         | with organisational objectives. Rare.
        
         | Kelteseth wrote:
         | They are now funded by all major tech companies. So much for
         | not being "industry standard" (by so many Maya or 3ds Max
         | artists I talked to).
        
           | mroche wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | bogwog wrote:
             | > Being an industry standard requires a certain level of
             | entrenchment/integration/mindshare that Blender does not
             | have yet.
             | 
             | In concrete terms, it means convincing universities to
             | train students on your tools. Autodesk has the dollars to
             | spend on efforts like that.
        
               | max48 wrote:
               | 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.
        
           | dagmx wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | prox wrote:
             | What are your sources? From what I hear, few friends in CG,
             | Blender is gaining ground. Don't know if there is an
             | official statistic anywhere.
        
               | dagmx wrote:
               | 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.
        
           | dagmx wrote:
           | This release adds import of USD files which should make
           | Blender fit in more nicely in pipelines.
           | 
           | The new asset browser is also another great addition for
           | plugging into pipelines.
        
           | archerx wrote:
           | I still would rather us 3DS max over blender, it still feels
           | like using GIMP after using Photoshop productively for years.
        
             | simianpirate wrote:
             | Then use that software if you prefer the UX.
             | 
             | 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.
        
               | archerx wrote:
               | 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.
        
               | Hemospectrum wrote:
               | 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.
        
             | mejutoco wrote:
             | I agree with GIMP vs Photoshop ui-wise, but in the case of
             | Blender IMHO it is the total opposite. Even if it were free
             | I find 3DS ui unsufferable.
        
       | markdog12 wrote:
       | Check out the improvements that can be done by simply doing the
       | sensible thing and using zstd:
       | https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/3.0/Co...
        
       | 999900000999 wrote:
       | Thank you Blender!
       | 
       | 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!
        
         | haxiomic wrote:
         | Definitely, I'm very interested in blender as a better Unity
         | 
         | There's armory3d which is impressive but it's still early days
        
         | TT-392 wrote:
         | There is a project called UPBGE, it is a fork of the old game
         | engine and being actively maintained. https://upbge.org/
        
           | 999900000999 wrote:
           | Thank you, however as far as I know it's only one dev.
           | Blender would probably need to pull this back into the core
           | product for it to be useful.
           | 
           | A powerful mature engine with Python, one can dream.
        
         | prox wrote:
         | There is a lot of effort to get Godot in that spot. 4.0 is
         | going to be really good, especially for 3d.
        
           | 999900000999 wrote:
           | How does Godot handle terrain ?
           | 
           | 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.
        
             | prox wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | follower wrote:
               | Perhaps https://github.com/Zylann/godot_heightmap_plugin
               | ?
        
             | moron4hire wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | 999900000999 wrote:
               | 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
        
         | DonHopkins wrote:
         | 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.
         | 
         | 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.
        
           | 999900000999 wrote:
           | 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
        
             | Cloudef wrote:
             | 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.
        
       | runevault wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | greggman3 wrote:
       | Blender is one of the open source projects I'm super happy to
       | sponsor. Please consider sponsoring it too (and/or any other open
       | source projects you really like)
       | 
       | https://fund.blender.org/
        
       | esistgut wrote:
       | AMD HIP/ROCm support is there but AMD still hasn't released
       | drivers supporting it.
        
         | jjoonathan wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | slavik81 wrote:
         | There are beta drivers available for testing.
         | https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/rn-rad-win-2...
        
       | danboarder wrote:
       | 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
       | 
       | Also here is a link to their download page as the Blender home
       | page seems to be slammed today: https://www.blender.org/download/
        
         | acomjean wrote:
         | 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!)
        
         | happyweasel wrote:
         | I would rather say it is amazing what EUR1.7mio 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.
        
           | makapuf wrote:
           | 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...
        
       | hrnnnnnn wrote:
       | The release notes and features highlight reel page is now live!
       | 
       | https://www.blender.org/download/releases/3-0/
        
         | dang wrote:
         | Ok, we'll change the URL to that from
         | https://download.blender.org/release/Blender3.0/. Thanks!
        
       | tracerbulletx wrote:
       | Blender is an inspiring open source project. Absolutely killing
       | it.
        
       | Lwepz wrote:
       | Can seasoned Blender users can visualize and compose Geometry
       | Node graphs in their minds? It seems to me that it would be
       | pretty hard, simply because of their clunky design. In my
       | opinion, the only thing missing from Blender's amazing Geo Node
       | system is icons, i.e. something compact and symbolic that one can
       | store in their mental space as they would a word when composing a
       | sentence.
       | 
       | I do also feel like a top down flow is more conductive to
       | "process-oriented" or procedural design. I've done my fair share
       | of procedural visual scripting with nodal systems such as UE4's
       | Blueprints, PopcornFX or Blender's Geometry Nodes and none of
       | them feel as "natural" as Houdini's.
       | 
       | It almost feels as though vertical lines occupy less space in my
       | mind than horizontal lines do. Perhaps it's because our brains
       | are hardwire to deal with lots of top down structured
       | environments (plants, tree-trunks, other Sapiens).
        
         | dagmx wrote:
         | Vertical node graphs like Houdini, Nuke or Katana tend to work
         | for "pass the world" , whereas horizontal ones allow for more
         | data specific passing instead.
         | 
         | It's just a difference of approach in what's going from one to
         | the other. Houdini for example switches to horizontal data
         | passing for VOPs.
         | 
         | I find horizontal data graphs easier to reason about at a
         | glance, whereas vertical ones are easier to quickly prototype
         | things.
         | 
         | Horizontal is just more explicit about data flow.
        
         | creativenolo wrote:
         | Vertical nodes don't easily allow for the port names to be
         | displayed.
        
         | dkersten wrote:
         | > I do also feel like a top down flow is more conductive to
         | "process-oriented" or procedural design. I've done my fair
         | share of procedural visual scripting with nodal systems such as
         | UE4's Blueprints, PopcornFX or Blender's Geometry Nodes and
         | none of them feel as "natural" as Houdini's.
         | 
         | I agree with this. I've never used Houdini, but I have used
         | Max/MSP and after using that, always found the horizontal
         | visual programming systems very clunky and, as you say, they
         | just feel like they take up a lot lot more space. Of course,
         | Max's nodes _are_ quite compact in comparison to something like
         | Blueprints, but horizontal ones always are because each
         | additional input /output makes the node one connection taller,
         | while with a vertical layout you tend to fit many connections
         | in the available width (of course, connection labels aren't
         | clearly visible in that case, but I find that's something you
         | get accustomed to).
         | 
         | Personally, I greatly prefer a vertical layout for visual
         | programming systems.
        
       | authed wrote:
       | Blender is great... I just tried a bunch of free/open apps to do
       | boolean operations on complex STL files, and it was the best
       | performing one... most completely failed.
        
       | TheDesolate0 wrote:
       | sweet sweet 3d modeling!
        
       | open-source-ux wrote:
       | 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:
       | 
       |  _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
        
         | DonHopkins wrote:
         | His series of one-minute "Lazy" tutorials are fantastic!
         | 
         | 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!
        
           | anotherjesse wrote:
           | He has a great Patreon series too
           | 
           | https://www.patreon.com/IanHubert
           | 
           | I just dabble with blender but really enjoy his videos
           | showing how he goes about various vfx with blender
        
       | nsxwolf wrote:
       | How many years of study and practice would it take to do
       | _anything_ shown in that demo reel? I have downloaded Blender
       | several times over the last decades, thinking I would watch some
       | tutorials and learn something, but always gave up having failed
       | to model so much as a solid cube.
        
         | Taywee wrote:
         | Do some tutorials, or even a paid course. Just like no DAW will
         | replace the need to understand and practice music theory,
         | Blender will never replace the need to understand and be able
         | to work properly with 3D space.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | themodelplumber wrote:
         | You have to find your path, that's where the subjective energy
         | comes from. The thing about a demo reel is that you're
         | automatically focusing in on someone else's deep and subjective
         | set of interests (or a group of users' various sets). So it's
         | often way too objective (in terms of psychological distance) a
         | lens through which to be able to see a good starting point for
         | one's humble own self.
         | 
         | Personally I eventually found my way in by focusing on lighting
         | and procedural textures. I got really good at making decked-out
         | spheres. :-) It's still a favorite doodling activity. In the
         | process of learning I ended up contributing to Wikipedia
         | articles on things like global illumination, and some of my
         | texturing images are still up there.
         | 
         | (And to this day I don't find the modeling part that
         | interesting. One of my projects was in the 2005 Blender
         | showreel I think, it was just a simple project that seemed fun
         | and I couldn't wait to have the modeling part complete)
        
       | robertbmenke wrote:
       | It is truly amazing that I can download and use a tool with this
       | much capability for free. What a time to be alive.
        
       | a1371 wrote:
       | I LOVE Blender, like, a kind of love that's embarrassingly too
       | much for a software. No to mention that my work or hobbies don't
       | often interface with 3D modeling.
       | 
       | So I have been thinking about what makes this project so special.
       | I think it's the fact that the community owns it. So you don't
       | have to ask for permission to do anything. Mix that with
       | inherently creative people who approach the tool and you get:
       | 
       | AI-generated Kanye West rap teaching you how the modifiers work -
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7Nn5Uilso0
        
         | nnvvhh wrote:
         | The video is Biggie, not Kanye!
        
       | dnadler wrote:
       | I've been using blender to prototype an addition to my house. It
       | was surprisingly easy to pick up and I'm frankly astounded by the
       | polish and capabilities of this tool. It's possibly the most
       | complete and professional open source project that I have ever
       | used.
       | 
       | Not only did I have fun using learning how to use Blender, but
       | the model of my home that I built has actually turned out to be
       | very useful. The VR support is especially neat, as I can take out
       | a wall in my living room and then stand in the new space and see
       | if it the changes I made work in (virtual) reality.
       | 
       | Highly recommended for anyone else thinking about doing work on
       | your house.
       | 
       | I'm also thinking about using it to design some simple furniture
       | that I could build, though haven't looked much into that yet.
        
       | doctoboggan wrote:
       | Blender is such an incredible piece of software. It's a great
       | example to show people what open source can be.
       | 
       | I have a company where I design custom jewelry with my customers
       | fingerprints (https://lulimjewelry.com) and I use blender on the
       | backend to automate it.
       | 
       | NYTimes maintains a blender docker container and I run it on
       | google cloud run to take displacement maps and use them to
       | "engrave" my jewelry and output an STL file. The displacement
       | maps are generated client side using fabric.js
       | 
       | It's awesome that blender can be run headless in a docker
       | container. I've also been looking forward to these new blender
       | apps. It seems like you can specify a paired down interface for
       | blender so you could have it purpose built for a single task.
        
         | hnaccount141 wrote:
         | > NYTimes maintains a blender docker container
         | 
         | Interesting, anybody know what NYTimes uses it for? Can't find
         | much information about it.
        
           | dagmx wrote:
           | The New York times does various 3D graphics for some of their
           | pieces, and has some very cool use of three.js etc..
           | 
           | They have an R&D page that goes into some of their 3D
           | endeavours too
           | https://rd.nytimes.com/projects/reconstructing-
           | journalistic-...
        
             | hnaccount141 wrote:
             | Wow, had no idea they had an R&D page. There's some pretty
             | cool stuff in there, thanks!
        
       | rytcio wrote:
       | Blender is the best open source project around. Major kudos to
       | everyone who works on it for making such an excellent tool
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | njharman wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | TT-392 wrote:
       | Oh shit oh shit, so I don't have to use prerelease versions to
       | use my new nodes setups anymore soon.
        
       | Tomte wrote:
       | The first three parts of the Donut tutorial, updated for Blender
       | 3, are here, as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIoXOplUvAw
        
         | cwkoss wrote:
         | 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!)
        
           | follower wrote:
           | > (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.
        
             | cwkoss wrote:
             | 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
             | 
             | 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!
        
         | dymk wrote:
         | 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.
         | 
         | https://twunroll.com/article/1347630835235573761
        
           | umvi wrote:
           | 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?
        
           | marcellus23 wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | stormking wrote:
             | Sorry, but no, "nostalgia for your childhood bad behaviour"
             | is just dumb.
        
               | marcellus23 wrote:
               | People can't exactly control what they have nostalgia
               | for.
        
               | dymk wrote:
               | That's just not true at all. You feel shame over things
               | you did as a child that you now know was wrong.
               | 
               | And even if you don't, you also have control over what
               | personal views you go talk about in a Youtube tutorial
               | about Blender.
        
               | [deleted]
        
             | dymk wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | marcellus23 wrote:
               | It was pretty clear that was a joke tweet, and also he
               | was referring to using the word among his friends, not
               | bullying.
        
               | dymk wrote:
               | What's the joke?
        
           | unmole wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | Tomte wrote:
           | Apart from the question whether he still acts this way; those
           | homophobic comments were not in the public view anymore.
           | 
           | 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.
        
             | gamblor956 wrote:
             | These videos were always in the public view. After all, (as
             | of this comment) are still publicly available for anyone to
             | view.
             | 
             | Anyone doing a deep dive into this channel would have come
             | across these videos on their own.
        
             | dymk wrote:
             | Of course they were public to view. He says it in a video
             | on his YouTube page, in a tutorial.
             | 
             | You realize it's absurd to say I'm the homophobe for
             | pointing out Andrew's homophobic views, which he never
             | walked back.
        
               | Tomte wrote:
               | You misunderstand "in the view of the public".
               | 
               | How many people saw that today? How many saw your comment
               | today and digged into the Twitter thread?
               | 
               | And nobody called you a homophobe.
        
               | dymk wrote:
               | Oh, I hope more people see it, so people can have a more
               | wholistic idea of who they're supporting when they view
               | Andrew's videos.
               | 
               | 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.
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | nikodunk wrote:
         | Wow this guy is FUNNY. Thanks for sharing!
        
         | dgritsko wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | Tomte wrote:
           | They never clicked for me, unfortunately, although I should
           | give them another try.
           | 
           | 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.
        
             | wingmanjd wrote:
             | A friend of mine just finished his Introduction to Blender
             | series on Youtube:
             | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjcpPOioHUk
        
             | a1371 wrote:
             | Have you tried it after 2.8? The interface is a lot more
             | intuitive now.
        
       | gtsop wrote:
       | Side note: It is very interesting to see how pro-blender everyone
       | is. You know how there is almost always a group of people who
       | will say something bad about an open source project (disclaimer:
       | not judging the people or their potentially legitimate
       | complaints, also I may be part of such groups). With blender,
       | it's hard to see such a group. Maybe I am missing it? Maybe
       | blender is actually doing incredibly well compared to othee
       | projects? Not sure
        
         | jolmg wrote:
         | I think I remember seeing people complain about its interface,
         | but it's changed so much since then, I don't know if there are
         | still people complaining.
        
           | moffkalast wrote:
           | Yeah they've done a remarkable job with the 2.80 update, the
           | UI is pretty decent now.
           | 
           | Also its competitors are buggy-ass insanely overpriced
           | monthly subscription proprietary editors, so no surprise
           | there.
           | 
           | There are still things to complain about, like the undo
           | speed, CSG modifier unreliability, lack of certain features,
           | but none of them are strict deal breakers.
        
           | badsectoracula wrote:
           | Well, i do have complains about Blender's new interface: the
           | new one feels "off" compared to 2.7x (something i never felt
           | with the 2.4x -> 2.5x transition).
           | 
           | But it is minor... and i can still use 2.79 anyway :-P
        
         | franciscop wrote:
         | To be fair, Blender is better than 99% of the projects I've
         | ever seen, commercial or not. AND they are open source, AND
         | they have a great community behind, AND they are also great at
         | promotional bits like this page itself, AND they are being
         | backed by large companies.
         | 
         | So IMHO it's one of the best executed desktop programs while
         | also being in a massively difficult field, and they deserve the
         | praise. In many places there are outliers like this; Stripe for
         | Documentation, Wikipedia for encyclopedic knowledge, Google for
         | search, etc.
         | 
         | The two main criticisms that I've found is that first the
         | interface is very confusing (but this has been improved
         | constantly in the last 5-10 years!). As a personal opinion, I
         | believe this video was a big inflection point (Blender seemed
         | stubborn before the video, but this video at the very least
         | softened the opinion of Blender):
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWacQrEcMHk
         | 
         | The second one is that it's not "industry standard", but as
         | more and more people are using it for hobbies and indie
         | projects, this will def change eventually, so I'm not too
         | worried about that as well.
        
         | themodelplumber wrote:
         | IMO the Blender project psychology gets this reception in part
         | because it works very similar to general "doin' business"
         | service psychology. Features requested are built; money
         | requested is donated; resources are used for additional
         | upgrades; industry-cooperative movements are made; progress is
         | tracked, open, and accountable.
         | 
         | If you want a critical take on Blender therefore, for one you
         | ought to look outside a community of business-minded devs. Look
         | where artists hang out and you'll find a less rational take
         | that is based on individual likes and dislikes. Where logic
         | doesn't matter so much--it's how you feel. That's where you'll
         | get into it. And if you look at other FOSS graphics software
         | communities where the project lead is someone who just does
         | whatever they want, even better, you'll find a group of users
         | who either adapt or leave, and that's quite different from
         | Blender's psychological development ecosystem in a lot of ways.
         | 
         | Alternately you could go more-business and go ask a SolidWorks
         | user group to tell you how great Blender is. They will probably
         | tell you how business is done properly and why the Blender way
         | is clueless in various ways.
         | 
         | It so happens I ran an online community for another FOSS 3D
         | package for over a decade. We got some people who were anti-
         | Blender, and some who were pro-Blender. Often the anti-position
         | was based in prefers-underdog reasons, which I understand. Even
         | in FOSS there are some clear underdogs and people get upset
         | when they like the underdog and continually see another project
         | winning attention instead.
         | 
         | We also got some people who were pro-Blender, who thought that
         | our community must be anti-Blender, because we were obviously
         | "competitors in the space." In fact there was never a
         | competitive mindset, it's more that people who lean into that
         | business psychology of "here's how you win" think more often in
         | terms of competition.
         | 
         | BTW Blender is definitely an awesome project, I've used it
         | since 2002 and on various commercial projects in addition to
         | hobby stuff.
        
           | marcodiego wrote:
           | > it works very similar to general "doin' business" service
           | psychology. Features requested are built; money requested is
           | donated; resources are used for additional upgrades;
           | industry-cooperative movements are made; progress is tracked,
           | open, and accountable.
           | 
           | That sounds more like FLOSS done right than most "doin'
           | business" available these days. If most "doin' business"
           | worked as you describe, FLOSS wouldn't have eat so much
           | market from them.
        
         | symlinkk wrote:
         | It's because they see Blender as "fighting for open source"
         | against 3DS Max and the others. People do the same thing with
         | Godot. You used to see it with Firefox before some of the
         | recent bad press.
        
           | marcodiego wrote:
           | I assign Blender success to first passing the "good enough"
           | bar and then focusing on being attractive to beginners. Once
           | enough beginners became addicted, there was no turning back
           | and Blender slowly started to eat other communities.
           | Development then was financed and a virtuous cycle started
           | that made Blender the 3d modelling tool with the largest
           | community of users ever.
        
         | IshKebab wrote:
         | There are definitely still some issues with it (e.g. the VSE is
         | still not very good) but they're just so damn good at improving
         | it how can you complain? That release video is insanely
         | professional. It's probably the best run non-developer open
         | source project that there is.
        
           | follower wrote:
           | One important aspect of Blender as a project is that the
           | technology is developed alongside a specific creative project
           | with a specific goal (e.g. "Big Buck Bunny", "Sprite
           | Fright").
           | 
           | The technology & the creative development are part of an
           | intertwined process.
        
         | badsectoracula wrote:
         | My main complaint about Blender that doesn't have to do with
         | subjective things like the UI or whatever (which i mentioned
         | elsewhere) is how the script APIs break all the time. I used to
         | write scripts for it at the past but pretty much everything i
         | wrote is now long broken and after the second time that
         | happened i just gave up. Now if i want anything i just export
         | to one of the formats that come bundled with Blender (most
         | often OBJ) since these are the most likely to remain around
         | across breakages (3rd party exporter plugins also break often)
         | and use adhoc tools to do the processing. It does limit what i
         | can do though.
         | 
         | It'd be nice if they made some sort of "stable" API that
         | plugins can rely on in the long term, even if they had another
         | one that is "better" (whatever their current definition of
         | "better" might be).
        
         | danbolt wrote:
         | I've noticed that if someones impression of Blender is pre-2.8,
         | they see it more akin to GIMP compared to Photoshop. Post 2.8,
         | especially with a lot of digital artists I know, are very
         | enthusiastic about the tool.
        
       | serverholic wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | pmichaud wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | hrnnnnnn wrote:
         | 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.
         | 
         | https://twitter.com/search?q=%23nodevember2021%23geometrynod...
        
       | dljsjr wrote:
       | This is the release that rolls out their new rendering engine
       | that they've been working on for a while:
       | https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Blender-...
        
         | fulafel wrote:
         | Yep, specifically the offline rendering engine (they have a
         | real time one too)
        
           | wlesieutre wrote:
           | For anyone not familiar, "Cycles X" is the new offline (not
           | realtime) renderer, replacing Cycles:
           | 
           | 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/
        
             | greenknight wrote:
             | Cycles X, is essentially a rewrite of Cycles. Cycles-X no
             | longer exists as it has been merged back into cycles.
             | 
             | Crazy performance gains!
        
             | HideousKojima wrote:
             | Also Cycles is raytraced (or is it pathtraced?) while Eevee
             | is rasterized.
        
       | selecsosi wrote:
       | I have used Blender running headless to generate automated
       | slideshow service for a custom gifting song startup I was a part
       | of. After some initial hiccups getting it packaged (running a
       | 2.78 version while cycles was being rewritten). I can't not speak
       | highly enough about the tools and ecosystem that the community
       | has assembled. There is no other tool that was suitable for the
       | type of dynamic video editing via script control that is also
       | open source. Congratulations on the new release team!
        
       | dsign wrote:
       | Is it just me or they added antialising/Lanczos resampling to the
       | render window?
        
       | beckman466 wrote:
       | How different is Blender to 3DS Max and Maya? Anyone have
       | experience with both?
        
         | dagmx wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | throw_m239339 wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | beckman466 wrote:
           | awesome, thank you
        
       | archerx wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | valine wrote:
         | I disagree. The 2.8+ UI is well designed and way snappier than
         | 3DS Max.
        
           | archerx wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | cycomanic wrote:
             | 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.
        
               | whateveracct wrote:
               | Hah this feels like the same arguments people have about
               | Haskell and PLs in general.
               | 
               | People can't help but mistake familiarity for quality.
        
             | agumonkey wrote:
             | 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).
        
             | wizzwizz4 wrote:
             | > _It is subjective but 3D max interface is much more
             | intuitive._
             | 
             | The most intuitive interface is the one you're used to.
        
               | archerx wrote:
               | 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?
        
               | wizzwizz4 wrote:
               | 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.
        
         | DonHopkins wrote:
         | 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.
         | 
         | 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 marking menus in
         | 1990 before he wrote his paper and filed the patent, and at
         | that time he made it clear that he understood pie menus
         | supported mouse ahead display suppression, and that pie menus
         | enjoyed the same benefits as marking menus have in easing the
         | transition from novice to expert user:
         | 
         | >"The the cool thing is that expert can mouse ahead like you've
         | talked about but they get an ink trail so they have a better
         | idea what they've selected without even bothering to wait for
         | the menu to come up."
         | 
         | >However that contradicts what the paper and the patent
         | implies, and it's misled other people into incorrectly
         | believing that pie menus don't support what I call "mouse ahead
         | display preemption" (or "suppression", a harsher word), and
         | that the patent covers much more than it actually does.
         | 
         | >When Gordon applied for the patent on in 1995, which his
         | employment contract with SGI required him to do, the patent had
         | at least two misleading statements, and the "overflow"
         | technique claim was obvious, which should have prevented it
         | from being granted or invalidated it.
         | 
         | >Another piece of mistaken but published misinformation about
         | the differences of "typical pie menus" and marking menus is
         | that "typical pie menus" pop up submenus after the cursor has
         | moved a certain distance from the menu center, without clicking
         | the mouse button. However, I have never seen nor implemented
         | such badly designed pie menus in the real world.
         | 
         | >"Typical pie menus" (such as those in The Sims, played by
         | hundreds of millions of people) have always selected leaf and
         | submenu items by triggering on a button press or release (or
         | pen or finger tap or release). They also typically support
         | mouse-ahead. Pie menus can seamlessly support both quick press-
         | drag-release gestures, as well as the more leisurely click-
         | move-click gestures.
         | 
         | >The patent US5689667A "Methods and system of controlling menus
         | with radial and linear portions" also makes the mistake of
         | claiming that that pie menu selection is based on pointing at
         | the items like linear menus (or PIXIE), instead of the
         | direction of cursor motion, which Kurtenbach and Buxton know
         | very well is simply not the case with "typical pie menus".
         | 
         | Flight of the PIXIE: This video is derived from a film that
         | demonstrates an early graphical user interface in use. The film
         | was made in 1969 to accompany a paper entitled "PIXIE: a new
         | approach to graphical man-machine communication" presented at
         | the 1969 CAD Conference held in Southampton:
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI
         | 
         | >"Radial menus include two types: pie menus and marking menus.
         | Pie menus are typically used in item selection using the
         | location principles of linear menus as discussed above. Marking
         | menus operate on the principle of the direction of cursor or
         | pointer motion as being the basis for item selection." -US
         | Patent US5689667A
         | 
         | >Unfortunately they were able to successfully deceive the
         | patent reviewers, even though the patent references the Dr.
         | Dobb's Journal article which clearly describes how pie menu
         | selection and mouse ahead work, contradicting the incorrect
         | claims in the patent. It's sad that this kind of deception and
         | patent trolling is all too common in the industry, and it
         | causes so many problems.
         | 
         | >Even today, long after the patent has expired, Autodesk
         | marketing brochures continue to spread FUD to scare other
         | people away from using marking menus, by bragging that
         | "Patented marking menus let you use context-sensitive gestures
         | to select commands."
         | 
         | >The Long Tail Consequences of Bad Patents and FUD
         | 
         | >I attended the computer game developer's conference in the
         | late 90's, while I was working at Maxis on The Sims. Since we
         | were using 3D Studio Max, I stopped by the Kinetix booth on the
         | trade show floor, and asked them for some advice integrating my
         | existing ActiveX pie menus into their 3D editing tool.
         | 
         | ActiveX Pie Menus: Demo of the free ActiveX Pie Menu Control,
         | developed and demonstrated by Don Hopkins:
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnC8x9x3Xag
         | 
         | >They told me that Alias had "marking menus" which were like
         | pie menus, and that Kinetix's customers had been requesting
         | that feature, but since Alias had patented marking menus, they
         | were afraid to use pie menus or anything resembling them for
         | fear of being sued for patent infringement.
         | 
         | >I told them that sounded like bullshit since there was plenty
         | of prior art, so Alias couldn't get a legitimate patent on
         | "marking menus".
         | 
         | >The guy from Kinetix told me that if I didn't believe him, I
         | should walk across the aisle and ask the people at the Alias
         | booth. So I did.
         | 
         | >When I asked one of the Alias sales people if their "marking
         | menus" were patented, he immediately blurted out "of course
         | they are!" So I showed him the ActiveX pie menus on my laptop,
         | and told him that I needed to get in touch with their legal
         | department because they had patented something that I had been
         | working on for many years, and had used in several published
         | products, including The Sims, and I didn't want them to sue me
         | or EA for patent infringement.
         | 
         | The Sims, Pie Menus, Edith Editing, and SimAntics Visual
         | Programming Demo. This is a demonstration of the pie menus,
         | architectural editing tools, and Edith visual programming tools
         | that I developed for The Sims with Will Wright at Maxis and
         | Electronic Arts:
         | 
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs
         | 
         | >When I tried to pin down the Alias marketing representative
         | about what exactly it was that Alias had patented, he started
         | weaseling and changing his story several times. He finally told
         | me that Bill Buxton was the one who invented marking menus,
         | that he was the one behind the patent, that he was the senior
         | user interface researcher at SGI/Alias, and that I should talk
         | to him. He never mentioned Gordon Kurtenbach, only Bill Buxton.
         | 
         | >So I called Bill Buxton at Alias, who stonewalled and claimed
         | that there was no patent on marking menus (which turned out to
         | be false, because he was just being coy for legal reasons). He
         | said he felt insulted that I would think he would patent
         | something that we both knew very well was covered by prior art.
         | 
         | >I told him that companies try to get bad patents all the time,
         | and that I did not mean to insult him by simply repeating to
         | him the misinformation that his marketing people were spreading
         | around the computer industry, in his name. I told him that
         | should not shoot the messenger, and he should reel in his
         | marketing department and tell them to stop spreading FUD in his
         | name, which he refused.
         | 
         | >I tried to explain how Alias's FUD had adversely affected the
         | user interface design of 3D Studio Max, who refused to
         | implement pie menus in spite of user requests for them. But he
         | did not care about 3D Studio Max, since Kinetix was his
         | competition. I asked him whose side he was on, the user's or
         | the patent lawyer's?
         | 
         | >He claimed to be on the side of the users, since he is such a
         | well known user interface researcher, but I believe he has sold
         | out to big corporations like Alias, SGI, Microsoft and Autodesk
         | by abusing the patent system for profit, and is in the thrall
         | of corporate lawyers, so he wasn't being honest. Users beware!
        
         | marcodiego wrote:
         | Not an user, but judging from comments, you're part of a small
         | set that still repeats comments like this after 2.8.
        
           | archerx wrote:
           | 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.
        
             | bogwog wrote:
             | It sounds like you need to spend some more time reading the
             | manuals and less time complaining online.
        
       | ldehaan wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | bibelo wrote:
         | Show me what you got
        
       | dang wrote:
       | Recent and related:
       | 
       |  _Blender 3.x roadmap_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024572 - Oct 2021 (114
       | comments)
        
       | webwielder2 wrote:
       | Is Blender substantially different/better than, say, Cinema 4D?
       | Or are people more excited about it because it's free/open
       | source?
        
         | dagmx wrote:
         | A mix of both. It does do somethings much better (like the 2D
         | drawing etc) and viewport quality, but lags in others (like
         | pipelinability, renderer integrations, materials etc...). The
         | free part is a big draw of course.
        
       | Mizza wrote:
       | Are there release notes? Blender usually does a really nice
       | release notes page showing off the new features.
        
         | Tomte wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | KennyBlanken wrote:
         | The link is literally to a release notes page with two demo
         | reels and a description of the new features
        
         | marcodiego wrote:
         | https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/3.0
        
           | Mizza wrote:
           | Cheers, thanks. Really looking forward to using the Asset
           | Browser and Geometry Nodes.
        
       | boppo1 wrote:
       | I'm new to programming and always hear that it's a good idea to
       | contribute to active open source projects you care about to show
       | what you know.
       | 
       | I think Blender is a project I'd be really excited to contribute
       | to. Are there any tasks that might be worthwhile for a beginner?
       | Or am I aiming out of my league?
        
         | follower wrote:
         | FWIW I would encourage you to start by seeing if you can find
         | an answer to your first question.
         | 
         | As a general tip over recent years there has been a growth in
         | "standard" ways that a project can communicate
         | tasks/bugs/issues that are particularly well suited for people
         | to start their involvement with a Free/Open Source project by
         | highlighting ways someone can get involved as new contributor.
        
       | trynewideas wrote:
       | 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
        
         | dimgl wrote:
         | In addition, there's an incredible 3D character creator named
         | FlyCat who makes some absolutely insane timelapses.
         | https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnXU0MjnApXHZkf3uGYbLSA
        
           | uptownfunk wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | ur-whale wrote:
           | Wow, just wow.
           | 
           | 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.
        
         | ghostly_s wrote:
         | I just scrolled through several pages of these videos and I'm
         | only seeing one animation style?
        
           | whateveracct wrote:
           | "Captain Yajima" and "Dried Up Old Bones" are the claymation
           | ones.
        
             | TOMDM wrote:
             | 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.
             | 
             | https://twitter.com/catsuka/status/1389289376031588352?lang
             | =...
        
               | whateveracct wrote:
               | I meant that they're both faux-claymation-in-Blender :)
        
         | krlx wrote:
         | In the same vein, there is also dedouze
         | https://youtube.com/c/Dedouze who is doing amazing things with
         | Blender.
        
         | isabelk wrote:
         | https://www.youtube.com/c/GrantAbbitt has been another
         | incredible resource for my recent dive into learning Blender.
        
         | tombert wrote:
         | 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.
         | 
         | It's amazing how good Blender has gotten.
        
           | trynewideas wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | moyix wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
       | Why are there no torrents offered? The server is clearly under
       | load.
       | 
       | If anyone already has the files and cares to share the magnet,
       | I'll gladly help with seeding.
        
         | redrobein wrote:
         | Steam is another way to get it if you have it installed.
        
           | razster wrote:
           | Thank you, I completely forgot it was on Steam.
        
       | Thoreandan wrote:
       | Related: Shout out to Blender's Open Movie Project
       | https://www.blender.org/about/studio/
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_Foundation
        
       | vadansky wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | Marcan wrote:
         | 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.
        
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