[HN Gopher] Blender 4.0 release notes
___________________________________________________________________
Blender 4.0 release notes
Author : TangerineDream
Score : 629 points
Date : 2023-11-14 12:11 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wiki.blender.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (wiki.blender.org)
| Tomte wrote:
| Not yet released. Will we have that for every major project now?
| misnome wrote:
| It's been tagged, so I assume this page is just lagging a
| little. That said, it could have waited....
| wewxjfq wrote:
| Yeah, especially since Blender puts a lot of effort into
| their release websites.
| Tomte wrote:
| Here it is: https://www.blender.org/download/releases/4-0/
| KolmogorovComp wrote:
| @dang please update the top-link to the release link
| above ^
| tokai wrote:
| Have what? Release candidates?
| Tomte wrote:
| A race to prematurely submit not-yet-released software.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Will we have that for every major project now?
|
| Don't we already? Pretty sure it happened for recent freebsd
| and Debian releases, at least
| guitarlimeo wrote:
| I recently started doing basic modeling work for my small hobby
| projects. I'm amazed at how professional and finished Blender is
| for being an open source project. It feels like I'm using an
| Adobe product or similar. Big props to the team behind it, you're
| awesome.
| seritools wrote:
| > It feels like I'm using an Adobe product or similar.
|
| So it's slow, bloated, and crashes regularly?
| nkozyra wrote:
| > So it's slow, bloated, and crashes regularly?
|
| I think Adobe has really improved the last decade or so in
| this regard.
|
| Blender is really amazing and just seems to get more powerful
| every year.
| timeon wrote:
| > improved the last decade
|
| I was experiencing less bloat and crashes in versions
| before Creative Cloud.
| virtualritz wrote:
| > I think Adobe has really improved the last decade or so
| in this regard
|
| Nope. Been using Photoshop since version 1, AfterEffects
| since its inception (by a company called Cosa AFAIR) and
| InDesign since version 1. 30+ years give or take.
|
| There all indeed so slow and bloated that they feel mostly
| unusable to me today.
|
| And it's the opposite. It got to this over the last 10-15
| years. Except Are. That was always slow but for motion
| graphics it's hard to get around it.
|
| All the freelance VFX artists I know use old versions of PS
| and Ae.
|
| InDesign is so buggy that I switched to Affinity three
| years ago.
|
| Only younger people, who never experienced the snappy
| desktop systems & software of the 90's or early 2000's,
| think the state of things today is somehow normal.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| The solution is to just to avoid adobe stuff as much as
| possible. A lot of what would be done in photoshop can be
| done in nuke and after effects can just be thrown in the
| trash when using nuke.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| I spend a good amount of time in Photoshop and I disagree
| that it's slow and bloated, in general.
|
| I know after a new version a year or two ago some actions
| were noticeably slower, but I complained to the project
| manager on Reddit on the specifics and it got tightened
| back up pretty quickly.
|
| Also, anyone using old versions of Photoshop are missing
| out. Both the new Remove tool along with the generative
| AI fill are absolute gamechangers.
| nkozyra wrote:
| Not version 1 but I've been on it since Photoshop 3 and
| have had the exact opposite experience. It was rough
| early on, crashed frequently and often. Got better around
| Photoshop 4/5 then had another rough period.
|
| I've found the latest Creative Cloud versions to be the
| most stable. I cannot recall a single Photoshop crash.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Yep. In my experience CS1 and CS2 are somehow more
| responsive feeling running on now-ancient and comparably
| resource-bare hardware like PPC G5 or Core 2 Duo Macs
| than PS CC is on a modern armed-to-the-teeth workstation,
| which is ridiculous.
|
| The bloat was ramping up pretty aggressively through CS3,
| CS4, and CS5 but the shift to subscription model really
| gave Adobe a license to not care about efficiency or UI
| snappiness.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| _> I think Adobe has really improved the last decade or so
| in this regard._
|
| They _massively_ increased the complexity of their products
| after introducing the Creative Cloud. It 's an absolute
| mess that can cause delays in Microsoft (!) just to make
| the new Windows release work with it. And Photoshop in
| particular has the byzantine PSD format that requires them
| to keep old versions of the code to read old versions of
| the format.
|
| Adobe software in general resembles Windows nowadays - they
| are trying to modernize it but legacy decisions keep them
| from doing too much, as they can't break backward
| compatibility, their entire business model depends on
| keeping the users locked in. As a result, their old
| software is a terrible mishmash of UIs from different eras.
| Maken wrote:
| Also, it won't shut up about it's couple AI utilities.
| cptskippy wrote:
| Have you tried the AI Feedback Utility?
| i_am_a_peasant wrote:
| And the user interface is all OpenGL... man I can't imagine how
| much time it would take to write a decent user interface
| starting with nothing but OpenGL. Like just rendering text to
| the screen is a pain. And it's so snappy and responsive and it
| looks sooooo good. Definitely not a one man project, there's
| just no way.
| themerone wrote:
| If your choices are Motif or the Athena toolkit, rolling your
| own UI is an understandable choice.
| mr_sturd wrote:
| They should roll it out in to a separate library. Call it
| the Blender Toolkit, or BTK.
| i_am_a_peasant wrote:
| I think there have been attempts.. but it's too deeply
| married to the rest of Blender for it to be worth
| extracting I think.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| BTK has a nice ring to it -- and it's an even more
| brilliant public relations disaster than the name "GIMP"!
|
| What kinds of widgets would Dennis Rader have in his
| "Bind, Torture, Kill" tookit? ;)
|
| It couldn't be any worse than Motif.
|
| BTK would also imply the existence of:
|
| BLIMP: Blender Image Manipulation Program
|
| Oh the humanity!
|
| BLOME Desktop: Blender Object Model Environment
|
| I would totally be down for that.
| panzi wrote:
| Well, they basically wrote their own GUI toolkit. And IMO a
| very good one, with tiling windows and everything is nicely
| scaleable. I especially like the command search with space
| and little things like dragging over a column of checkboxes
| to toggle them all.
| rabf wrote:
| Rolling your own UI in openGL is very doable and can make a
| lot of sense for any application that will require non
| standard custom widgets. Use your preferred truetype
| rendering library to generate your text textures, blender
| uses freetype I think. Widgets can all be done with vectors
| and gradients, start with functions that create primitives
| such as rounded boxes or different line types and build from
| there.
| i_am_a_peasant wrote:
| Yeah, it's doable in a few months of doing nothing but
| that. ;D
|
| But then again you may be a much more productive programmer
| than I.
|
| For a side project? I could never do it, not with
| everything else I got going on.
| arriu wrote:
| Having done both web and gl ux for a living, I think you
| might be overestimating the complexity of a gl
| implementation and underestimating the complexity of
| meeting the same specs using a web implementation.
|
| While not quite the same thing, if you have the time, dip
| your toes into some immediate mode UI, for example imgui.
| It is enjoyable not a grind.
| i_am_a_peasant wrote:
| Do you think wasm has any chance of replacing the whole
| html/css stuff with just webgpu in a canvas? I have been
| playing a bit around with wgpu in rust and I can compile
| the same project either as a native binary or a .js that
| just renders to the browser. It seems to work pretty
| cool. Photoshop seems to be runable in the browser now,
| and I've seen a lot of other cool stuff, but things like
| fluid simulations seem to still be very laggy.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| > webgpu in a canvas
|
| Internally that's what Chrome/Firefox are, they render
| much of html/css on the GPU using
| OpenGL/DirectX/Vulkan/Metal.
|
| > Do you think wasm has any chance of replacing the whole
| html/css stuff with just
|
| No, you also need the DOM to enable frameworks like React
| which are used by a large number of sites.
| panzi wrote:
| Rendering everything into a canvas will realistically
| mean total lack of accessibility features. Also you won't
| be able to use the DOM inspector. I don't think that
| would be an improvement at all. If one could work with
| the DOM via Wasm (plus source maps so you can still use
| the debugger) it might be something.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Oh yeah, sure my friend. You're going to implement
| * text entry (right to left as well as left to right)
| * file browser * treeviews that scale to 50k nodes
| or 10x that * menus
|
| in GL in a month. Not believable.
| robin_reala wrote:
| There's so much more than that though. You need to build
| your own accessibility tree and hooks into the OS's
| assistive tech infrastructure just for a start.
| doubled112 wrote:
| Is Blender accessible this way? Or is it, as they said,
| just an OpenGL surface with some widgets painted on?
|
| My apologies for the word "just" doing a lot of work in
| that sentence.
|
| https://devtalk.blender.org/t/blender-and-accessibility-
| for-...
|
| > As a multi platform OpenGL app everything we draw is
| quite hidden from screen readers. Without cross-platform
| open source libraries available I can't think of a
| feasible way of interacting with existing screen readers.
|
| https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/301899/blende
| r-a...
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| Or you can just not do that, which is what Blender does.
|
| To be fair, there's not all that much use in Blender for
| folks who cannot see a screen clearly.
| robin_reala wrote:
| Assistive tech isn't just screen readers. But yeah,
| Blender specifically is a visual design tool, I'll give
| you that.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I know it's not just screen readers, but what a11y
| concerns would make sense for blender? It barely uses
| audio and what it does probably _can_ be covered by
| external tooling. For visuals... the only things that
| occur are probably covered by Blender 's UI scaling/zoom.
| But I could easily be forgetting something or ignorant.
|
| Edit: Oops, somehow forgot input - but there again, I
| would natively expect most things to work via
| keyboard/mouse emulation, and beyond that you'd probably
| need custom integration, but it's got the Python hooks to
| facilitate that.
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| What comes to mind is someone with a tremor that is
| unable to use classic pointing devices and might have
| better luck using tab/arrow-key navigation to move
| through the buttons/menus/etc. From my cursory
| examination of the product I don't see much support for
| keyboard _navigation_ , though as a professional tool I'm
| sure there's a plethora of keyboard _shortcuts_ that one
| could learn.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Good point, I'd never noticed that before - menus seem
| fine once you get them open, but I can't find a way to
| _open_ any menu without clicking, and ex. the preferences
| pane does seem completely impossible to navigate via
| keyboard. So yes, I agree that that appears a downside to
| their own toolkit.
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| FWIW you need to implement that yourself with basically
| any advanced enough toolkit. Even in HTML-land, any list
| widget worth it's salt is handling keystrokes itself.
| panzi wrote:
| Though I think all/pretty much all menu items can be
| accessed by pressing space and then typing the name of
| it. (If you use the setting space for command search.)
| There will be an auto completion list and it remembers
| the last action. So that is even better than what many
| other GUI applications do, where you have to search for
| ages in deeply nested menus for the action that you know
| how it is named, but don't know where the hell it is
| hidden. Quite frankly every program should have that
| feature.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I have an OpenGL personal project that I'm struggling with
| the UI on (using QT5 currently with GLCanvas with buttons
| around it). If I wanted to switch to a GL-only UI (and
| discard QT altogether), how would I add event listeners? I
| can get a borderless window as a GL viewport, but I don't
| know how to detect clicks and match them to which GL
| object.
| tedunangst wrote:
| You have a click at pixel 43, so what did you draw
| between pixels 40 and 50? That's what they clicked. You
| have to know what's on the screen, but you should know
| this, because you put it there. Or just use dear imgui.
| redox99 wrote:
| I hate so much how it breaks many conventions. For example,
| when you right click, the menu opens onPress instead of
| onRelease.
|
| I wish they had at least a setting to change that.
| Manozco wrote:
| I've not used blender but it seems to me that Chrome is
| doing that too (at least it's doing that on my machine )
| capableweb wrote:
| I think it's UX that commonly works differently in
| consumer software vs pro software. I think parent is
| talking about professional software.
|
| Pro software made for speed and efficiency, you usually
| want to be able to do things quickly, even if sometimes
| people not used to the software might screw up. Holding
| right-click, selecting menu item and releasing I think is
| one of those things.
|
| In consumer software, users would be confused because
| maybe they long-press the right-click, drag the mouse a
| little while holding down then releasing, and the menu
| would just appear and disappear. Confusing UX for most
| users, I bet.
| Manozco wrote:
| It looks like Chrome is doing the pro software then.
|
| Parent said blender was opening the menu onPress, which
| according to your comment is OK for pro software, Chrome
| is also doing the menu onPress
| capableweb wrote:
| Maybe it depends on the platform? For me, on Windows with
| Chrome, it only opens the context menu once you've
| stopped holding down the button. In Blender (on Windows),
| the menu opens as soon as you hold the button.
| redox99 wrote:
| I think I've seen that on some Linux distros. But on
| Windows, chrome works onRelease (like all built in
| windows programs do)
| Manozco wrote:
| Hum that might explain the situation here. I'm on Ubuntu
| with KDE
| jdiff wrote:
| It makes it way faster when you can right click, hold, and
| release on the item in one smooth motion. I believe most
| pro software is like this, it's hardly breaking convention.
| redox99 wrote:
| I understand why some people like it, and yes a lot of
| software does that as well, but in my case sometimes I
| accidentally end up pressing some menu option because I'm
| not perfectly steady. That's why I'd like it to be an
| option.
| mrob wrote:
| Did you get those the right way round? All other software I
| tested opens menus on button press. IIRC, Blender defaults
| to opening menus on button release, adding unnecessary
| latency and making it feel slow. You can change it, but you
| have to go through the whole Keymap Preferences and find
| every menu and change it individually, so it's annoying.
| redox99 wrote:
| On my Windows machine, all the "native" software like the
| file explorer and so on, opens when releasing the right
| click. Blender 3.6 opens as soon as you press the right
| click (allowing you to "drag" the cursor to the menu
| option and releasing it there)
| redwall_hp wrote:
| That's the traditional Mac way. e.g. historically you
| would "pull down" on the menu bar at the top of the
| screen. You would click and hold, and slide the mouse
| down, releasing the button to choose an item. If you were
| to just click on a menu, it would quickly open and close
| again. I want to say it's typical for Linux desktop
| environments to open contest menus on mouse down, as
| well, but don't recall offhand.
|
| Blender dates back to 1994, when many modern conventions
| weren't really a thing yet (Windows 95 didn't even
| exist)...and they have put a lot of time into
| modernizations in recent years. Back when I was dabbling
| in Blender, in the early 2000s, Ctrl+S was the keyboard
| shortcut for "erase everything and create a new scene."
| KittyCatCuddler wrote:
| They're actually porting everything over to Vulkan now. That,
| and Apple devs are also working on maintaining and developing
| a Metal backend.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Vulkan is a drawing API, not a GUI toolkit.
| tpush wrote:
| Presumably they meant porting from OpenGL to Vulkan &
| Metal.
| i_am_a_peasant wrote:
| I wouldn't bother with vulkan and just go with wgpu,
| rewrite it in rust while you're at it ;D
| gosub100 wrote:
| when the whole application is OpenGL it makes perfect sense.
| Just like how the interface to managing sql databases is done
| using SQL tables.
| dagw wrote:
| Unlike most open source projects, Blender started its life as a
| professional piece of software by and for artists who had to
| deliver commercial projects on a dead line. First as an in
| house tool for an animation studio, and later as a commercial
| software product. It only became open source later in its life
| cycle after the commercial Blender company went bankrupt. It
| has also been headed by the same lead developer from its
| earliest days as an in-house tool right up until today. All
| these things really shine through and make it quiet unique
| among open source applications.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Interesting but the special part about blender is the open
| source part, they managed to keep it alive, revamp the UI
| fully and bring on new and hard features on a regular basis.
| I don't remember another foss project of that kind.
| joshfee wrote:
| krita.org is a similarly polished and professional open
| source project, but I agree these types of projects are the
| exception rather than the rule (though I suppose the same
| could be said about most products).
| jansan wrote:
| Krita is nowhere near the level of Blender. It is more on
| the level of Inkscape.
| hellcow wrote:
| As a hobbyist digital painter and 3D artist who has used
| both Blender and Krita, I strongly disagree with this.
| Krita is simply best-in-class at digital painting on a
| PC. Both are exceptional pieces of software.
|
| It did take me a week or two to adjust to Krita's hotkeys
| coming from a lifetime of Photoshop, but the software in
| the end is leagues better for painting.
| danShumway wrote:
| Krita isn't on the same level as Blender, but it's not on
| the same level as other Open Source projects either. I'd
| put it in the same camp as projects like Ardour, and
| arguably above projects like Godot (although I'm sure
| some people would debate me on that).
|
| It's an exceptional drawing tool that is well-suited for
| professional work and is headed in a really promising
| direction. It's got a couple of weaknesses (vector
| layers) but it really shouldn't be discounted as a
| professional-level tool.
|
| Unless you're claiming that Inkscape is in the same
| position and has gotten a lot better than the last time I
| used it, which :shrug: could be true, I don't know. I'm
| not trying to bash Inkscape here.
| syntheweave wrote:
| I can vouch for Krita and Inkscape pairing well as vector
| art programs and even doing things that CSP, whose vector
| layers are pretty well liked, can't match. The issue is
| that drawing in Inkscape is a little bit broken(it can be
| done, but the current UX is death by papercut) - thus I
| approach it through the other program, which is basic but
| consistent.
|
| So the workflow I end up using for digital inks is: Open
| both programs, sketch in Krita, copy-paste the vector
| data into Inkscape, stroke->path, then use tweak tool to
| sculpt the lines. This adds line weight in seconds-to-
| minutes. Alternately, I can apply path effects instead of
| stroke->path, if I want a more programmatic design. If I
| want to paint, I can copy-paste the shape back into
| Krita.
| danShumway wrote:
| I'll have to give that a try some time, thanks for the
| tip!
| agumonkey wrote:
| no but he's right, there's a level of polish that was
| higher than average there too, i actually thought about
| it but couldn't remember the name when i wrote.
| crote wrote:
| KiCad is slowly inching in this direction! It used to be an
| absolute pain to use 3-4 years ago, but it has
| significantly matured since then.
|
| With the death of EAGLE it's rapidly becoming the obvious
| choice for all hobbyist use, and it is powerful enough for
| quite a bit of commercial work too. It definitely isn't at
| Altium's level yet, but unless you're designing something
| like a motherboard you probably won't be missing much.
| dmazzoni wrote:
| Would you consider Audacity another example? (I'm one of
| the original authors.) It survived for ~20 years as a
| community-supported project - it was popular but clunky and
| limited in many ways. Since being acquired by Muse the UI
| has been cleaned up and modernized quite a bit, while still
| keeping it open-source.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Audacity is pretty cool, but it's not the magnitude of
| blender in terms of complexity.
| yterdy wrote:
| This is an innocent misrepresentation of Blender's
| development history. While nothing you've said is false,
| Blender has been open source for more than 2 decades. It
| began that portion of its life as something of a mess, with a
| truly Byzantine user interface that made even trivial tasks
| troublesome, and lacking a vast majority of the features it's
| now known for. Getting it to its contemporary state was a
| long and painful process, including at least two major front-
| end overhauls and who-knows-how-many under-the-hood, and a
| commendable (though not unimpugnable) humility from
| developers who (finally) found the wherewithal to put the
| user experience before FOSS dogma or their own ambitions.
|
| That's what separates it from most open source projects: not
| that it started as a commercial product, but because its
| designers and developers stowed their egos and worked
| diligently on creating a solid piece of software (and
| documentation and community and support) for a long, long
| time. In this way, it surpasses even many of its commercial
| contemporaries, which are driven by a profit motive to become
| increasingly paywalled and enshitified.
| jasode wrote:
| _> This is an innocent misrepresentation of Blender's
| development history. While nothing you've said is false,
| Blender has been open source for more than 2 decades. It
| began that portion of its life as something of a mess, with
| a truly Byzantine user interface that made even trivial
| tasks troublesome, and lacking a vast majority of the
| features it's now known for. [...] That's what separates it
| from most open source projects: not that it started as a
| commercial product, _
|
| I think your minimization of its original commercial nature
| with additional facts about the UI is also an innocent
| misrepresentation.
|
| Even though the 2003 Blender didn't have the optimal UI,
| what the commercial investment did for Blender was put
| enough value into software such that _it had a headstart
| and momentum for subsequent investment from corporate
| donors /sponsors and volunteers_ to create the later UI
| overhauls. The substantial EUR4.5M business investment _set
| the stage_ for the later developments. That it happened 20
| years ago isn 't the key. What's key is the _financial
| investment_ to help motivate 20 additional years of work.
|
| Compare that to the open-source development of Octave (a
| MATLAB alternative) where the developer is lacking money
| and is looking for employment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603575
|
| Observers can say Octave is not as polished as MATLAB. But
| a similar hypothetical investment of EUR4.5M of 20 years
| ago might have helped give it the "Matthew Effect" like
| Blender got. That the hypothetical Octave v2023 has a
| revamped UI compared to Octave v2003 would not remove all
| the causal effects of that hypothetical investment.
| jampekka wrote:
| MATLAB is a mess that's in use solely due to history,
| network effects, stockholm syndrome and vendor lock-in.
| Octave is doing laudable job in the latter, but I fully
| expect it to die out after MATLAB whimpers away. And I
| don't think the GUI is much of a priority for Octave.
| crote wrote:
| The EUR4.5M business investment in 2000 was to make it a
| freemium product. This obviously failed, which is why the
| community was able to acquire the rights via a EUR110k
| crowdfund. Just because they shoveled a lot of money into
| it, doesn't mean they actually created a _great product_.
| Blender wouldn 't have been open-source today if the
| investors didn't decide to shut down the (quite
| incomplete) project due to disappointing sales.
|
| The next substantial investment was a EUR1.2M grant in
| 2019, and it was a _direct_ result of the development of
| 2.80, both the new GUI and other improvements. It
| suddenly became an actual viable alternative to
| commercial products, making it worth investing in. These
| developments only happened due to the hard work of mostly
| volunteers, and a lot of donations from primarily the
| community.
| yterdy wrote:
| _> Even though the 2003 Blender didn't have the optimal
| UI, what the commercial investment did for Blender was
| put enough value into software such that it had a
| headstart and momentum for subsequent investment from
| corporate donors/sponsors and volunteers to create the
| later UI overhauls. The substantial EUR4.5M business
| investment set the stage for the later developments._
|
| It did not, because Blender went 7+ years without
| substantial improvements to its modeling and rendering
| tools and interface. It was a zombie, with a lot of
| resources wasted on the now-defunct game engine. The
| pivot away from what it had been is what made Blender
| what it is today.
| jasode wrote:
| _> yterdy: Blender went 7+ years without substantial
| improvements to its modeling and rendering tools and
| interface. It was a zombie, with a lot of resources
| wasted on the now-defunct game engine. The pivot away
| from what it had been is what made Blender what it is
| today._
|
| _> crote: Just because they shoveled a lot of money into
| it, doesn't mean they actually created a great product._
|
| I'm citing these 2 comments because it's another example
| of _mentioning observations that can be true_ -- but are
| still not a good explanation of _why_ Blender 's level of
| polish is different from other open-source projects.
|
| You guys are emphasizing the _artifacts of the software_
| as the proof of Blender 's unique situation. Instead of
| the artifacts, I'm emphasizing the _community_ and _why_
| they're invested in Blender to _motivate the work_ on the
| subsequent artifacts (e.g. revamped UI) that you 're
| referring to. The explanation of the community momentum
| starts from the _business investment_. In this framing,
| it doesn 't matter that Blender v2003 wasn't great
| software. What matters is that v2003 (with whatever
| flaws) -- _attracted enough community_ -- to keep working
| on it (and eventually "pivoting") for 20 years.
|
| I go back to this you claimed as the key reason :
|
| _> yterdy: , but because its designers and developers
| stowed their egos and worked diligently on creating a
| solid piece of software_
|
| That would be a more convincing argument if the
| developers used the 2002 crowdsource money _to build a
| clean-room rewrite from scratch_ instead of buying the
| existing codebase to get the millions in sunk development
| work at a steep discount. E.g., if what truly matters is
| the humble developer egos rather than the value of the
| exiting codebase, then there was no need to buy the old
| codebase. Just advertise the 2002 crowdsource money as
| paying for humble diligent developers to build a new 3D
| modeler from scratch. But that 's not what happened. Both
| the crowdfunders and the original developers _wanted that
| old codebase that was already paid for by business
| investments_ as a starting point. Even though the later
| v2.5 was a big rewrite, that doesn 't change how the
| community thought of the v2002 software. It already has
| the _interest level and evangelism to attract future
| work_ leading to the 2.5 rewrite.
|
| If Blender was "zombie" software, _why_ were people
| working on "bad software" to make it better? Work
| backwards from that. Consider the motivations and
| interests. Saying _" Blender v2003 wasn't great"_ doesn't
| really explain things.
| yterdy wrote:
| _> The explanation of the community momentum starts from
| the business investment. _
|
| Again, an emphatic, "No." Blender's massive improvements
| in the early-to-mid 2010s are what brought investment
| from outside sources, not the other way around. It was an
| artifact around which interested parties could rally;
| that says nothing of its value as an executable piece of
| software, but rather its value as a focus to fulfill a
| need, which could be freely used to fulfill it. Its
| commercial codebase was not valuable to anyone but the
| people who meant to work on it as an open-source project,
| and only _because_ it could be picked-through, modified,
| even most of it scrapped if desired. This can be - and
| has been - done with software that descended from non-
| commercial codebases, because the motivation to create a
| polished product does not necessarily lie in a profit
| motive, and it definitely is not a product of some
| esoteric design homeopathy wherein that profit motive
| lies buried somewhere in Blender 's code.
|
| I think it's an insult to the hard work of the people
| who've produced the modern version of Blender that you
| insist on attributing the decisions they've made and
| implemented to some dedication to maintaining standards
| that _did not exist for the product_ before they arrived.
|
| What I will concede is that everything that has happened
| was necessary for Blender to be precisely what it is
| precisely at this moment, for better or worse. Including
| it's commercial history. I don't like that this
| conversation is becoming so contentious and I would
| suggest you think about what like concessions you can
| make to your counterargument before becoming married to a
| wholly antagonistic stance.
| danShumway wrote:
| This feels like a bit of an over-extrapolation. Blender
| succeeded in no small part because of _investment_.
|
| As a commercial product, it failed. We shouldn't say that
| being commercial is a model for success, Blender tried
| being commercial and it didn't work. If it had stayed
| commercial and had not been Open Sourced, it likely
| wouldn't exist today.
|
| As a side effect of its origins and what people saw as
| the opportunity behind the project, it then got a lot of
| investment, and it turns out that Open Source projects
| with heavy involvement from their userbase (and not just
| from programmers) and with heavy monetary investments and
| a positive community that gets excited about the project
| -- it turns out that yields exceptional tools. But it's
| not the commercial aspect that caused that, the
| investments caused that, and other Open Source projects
| could be given the same level of investment -- after all,
| many of them are as good or as competitive (if not more
| competitive) than Blender was when it was Open Sourced.
|
| As an Open Source program Blender has introduced
| architectural improvements and structural improvements
| that rival its origin, and it was able to do that without
| going commercial, which is evidence that this kind of
| investment and funding can exist for a non-commercial
| project if a significant portion of a community and
| businesses think the project is worth funding. It is
| arguable that starting out as a commercial project helped
| fuel that optimism. But to say Blender owes its success
| to being commercial feels backwards. Blender owes its
| success to the fact that it stopped being commercial,
| which was (and is) a contributing factor to why people
| and organizations feel so good donating to it. Like if
| we're going to take a lesson away from Blender, that
| lesson might be, "want to compete with Maya? Dissolve
| your company and give away your code."
|
| I very much believe that Blender wouldn't have a
| community today if it had stuck with its commercial
| origins.
| jasode wrote:
| _> As a commercial product, it failed. We shouldn't say
| that being commercial is a model for success, [...] But
| to say Blender owes its success to being commercial feels
| backwards. _
|
| You're misunderstanding what my attempted explanation is
| about. You're arguing about _reasons for Blender 's
| success_. That's not my angle.
|
| My explanation is about something else: why Blender's
| _level of polish_ (not "success") seems to be so
| advanced _in relative comparison with other open source
| projects out there_ such as Gimp, etc.
|
| In other words, people's _expectations_ of open-source
| software usability /polish is _so low_ that Blender 's
| level of execution is _surprising_. This is the gp 's
| particular wording I'm commenting on, _> " I'm amazed at
| how professional and finished Blender is for being an
| open source project."_
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38262825)
|
| The negative (usability) connotations with the phrase _"
| for being an open source project"_ is something I've
| analyzed before:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29605885
|
| ...all those open-source projects (Gimp, SageMath, etc)
| that are GUI instead of command-line that people complain
| of not having the polish of their peers -- don't have
| Blender's unique accidental history of having the
| (failed) commercial product _kickstart the momentum and
| evangelism of a community_ to make subsequent Blender
| versions eventually _exceed the expectations_ of typical
| open source projects. The multi-millions gave it a
| unusual headstart that Gimp, Octave, etc do not have.
|
| I do agree with the following parts of your comment which
| don't contradict my argument:
|
| _> Blender owes its success to the fact that it stopped
| being commercial, which was (and is) a contributing
| factor to why people and organizations feel so good
| donating to it. [...] I very much believe that Blender
| wouldn't have a community today if it had stuck with its
| commercial origins._
| danShumway wrote:
| Sorry for the misunderstanding. Unfortunately, I sort of
| feel like I would disagree more with your statement now
| that I understand it better? :D
|
| I think the majority of Blender's polish came after being
| Open Sourced, and I don't think that movement was
| kickstarted by its origins. I do think its origins
| arguably played a role in its investment, but early
| Blender had a reputation of being exactly like many other
| Open Source projects -- powerful if you knew how to use
| it, but unpolished and arcane and difficult to learn.
|
| When I first ran into the Blender, its interface was the
| biggest criticism I saw online about the project.
| Wherever the momentum came from to say "we could refactor
| this and make it attractive to regular modelers" I don't
| think that momentum was present in its early days or
| right after it was Open Sourced.
|
| I'm tempted to dig into the history a bit more now,
| because I bet if I went back in HN history to the early
| 2.0 days, I would find comments saying that Blender is
| just like other Open Source projects in that its too
| confusing and difficult to use. The interface was what
| everyone trashed about Blender.
|
| Of course investment helped with giving Blender the
| ability to undergo those kinds of radical
| transformations, but the transformations were sorely
| needed and I'm not sure that its UI was what fueled that
| investment. I think both overstate the connection, but
| I'm more sympathetic to a claim that Blender's commercial
| origins fueled its architecture or resources than I am to
| a claim that it fed its interface polish or excitement
| about its interface.
|
| ----
|
| Personally, I think the biggest contributor to Blender's
| interface is the fact that its community is made up of a
| ton of artists and not just programmers. Additionally, a
| lot of its investment is coming from studios -- notably
| not from a company catered to studios, but specifically
| from people who are using the tool in-house as they
| develop it. Greasepencil in particular is heavily
| influenced by this; the current rewrite for Greasepencil
| 3.0 is being pushed and developed by people who are
| intimately familiar with Greasepencil as a creative tool.
|
| In theory, Open Source should be a much better match for
| this than commercial software, because commercial
| software caters to a client-base but is developed usually
| by a player outside of that space that is seeking to
| monetize it. Open Source often falls into the same trap,
| but at least has the possibility to be developed and
| driven and to have feature requests prioritized primarily
| by artists and community members who rely on the software
| rather than by a separate entity that is interested
| primarily in how the software is marketed or sold. That
| Open Source very often fails at this is (imo) more of a
| commentary on the lack of community experience and
| community investment that most projects have.
| Stereotypical GUI Open Source projects are very often the
| result of external efforts from people who are not
| trained in GUI work and who are not quite as closely tied
| to their users.
|
| I'd bring up Krita as another example here -- Krita has
| no commercial origins (https://krita.org/en/about/krita-
| releases-overview/) but is miles ahead of Gimp in terms
| of building a polished interface that caters to artists.
| One immediately obvious difference is that Krita's artist
| community is heavily engaged in the project and in
| regular communication with the developers and regularly
| gets involved in feature development and prototyping and
| testing. _< incorrect, see correction below>_In fact,
| Krita started out as a fork of Gimp, and yet has
| surpassed Gimp in terms of ease of use and polish. _<
| /incorrect>_
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Krita was never a fork of Gimp (and that's not what your
| link says). The idea of a Qt wrapper around Gimp was a
| kind of inspiration for Krita in a roundabout way but the
| codebases are entirely separate.
| danShumway wrote:
| Good correction, I misunderstood what that part of the
| link was implying.
| Applejinx wrote:
| In a recent comment on one of my DSP plugin videos I
| directly addressed this:
|
| "I think this is because plugins are made for people to
| pay attention to them and then buy more plugins. I just
| do patreon, so I make plugins to be used, and only by
| those who need them. They should be boring and never
| change, but the sound should be amazing and just
| immediately there so you can pay attention to the music,
| not the plugin, and then not have to buy more."
|
| That's the secret to open source software if we choose to
| maintain it. There's a catch: OSS projects also gain
| mindshare through promotion and attention, putting them
| on exactly the same grounds as commercial software, and
| if you had an ideal project that perfectly met a need
| without drawing any attention to itself, that need would
| prosper and the OSS project would languish.
|
| It's the old 'tiny piece of unsupported OSS software on
| which the world depends' problem. You absolutely can do
| that and the cost is that the project either languishes
| or fails (in the sense that it can't be maintained, not
| that it fails its task). Or you can lean towards seeking
| payback, in the form of money or in the form of
| attention, and it costs the users something but sustains
| the project more fully.
| huijzer wrote:
| > That's what separates it from most [...] projects: [...]
| and worked diligently on creating a solid piece of software
| (and documentation and community and support) for a long,
| long time.
|
| I'm starting to believe more and more that this is the
| essence to most things that look beautiful/simple/elegant.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| What's I really love about it now is how deeply and
| sincerely it's integrated with Python. That didn't used to
| be the case originally, but I believe it happened kind of
| early on, so it's had a lot of time to mature, and there's
| all that RNA/DNA stuff to automate Python bindings. I'm
| working on learning more about that stuff myself! Do you
| know any more of the history, trials, and tribulations of
| that?
| yterdy wrote:
| I do not, but thank you for bringing it up. The free
| extensibility of the core software is related to its
| Python integration and a major part of Blender's current
| success. Some essential add-ons have even become part of
| that core software over time.
|
| It would definitely be nice to know more about that
| history, though.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| >and a commendable (though not unimpugnable) humility from
| developers who (finally) found the wherewithal to put the
| user experience before FOSS dogma or their own ambitions.
|
| That's just what I was getting at when comparing Blender to
| GIMP in this other discussion:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38235871
|
| >All of these ideas could be applied to Gimp too, of
| course, but I've found the Blender developers to be much
| more open to entertaining other people's ideas and
| contributions about user interface design than the Gimp
| developers, who have been historically NIH-limited and
| stubborn (especially about changing the name to something
| less offensive to the general public). At least Blender
| already supports pie menus well, and changed the default
| mouse bindings in response to user demand, and has made
| huge strides in usability lately. At this point I think it
| would be much easier to just add a great image editor to
| Blender, integrated with its video editor, than try to
| change the minds of the Gimp developers.
|
| [...]
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38232543
|
| >>Blender has something else. Loads of money compared to
| Gimp.
|
| >Blender EARNED every cent of its loads of money be being
| RESPONSIVE TO ITS USERS.
| croes wrote:
| Wasn't the user interface fundamentally changed after the
| open source release because it was so cumbersome to use?
| sbuk wrote:
| Not for a while. The first revamp was 2.5, then another big
| one with 2.8, which was the starting point for the current
| UI, in 2019.
| taneq wrote:
| (That's a "yes". Blender 2.4 was an in-house gamedev
| asset authoring tool that was open sourced, Blender 2.8+
| is very different and apparently pretty pro-level.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Not fundamentally. Some very carefully thought out tweaks
| were made to make the interface more approachable.
|
| The overall UX structure has not diverged much from the old
| 2.x days.
| crote wrote:
| Blender only became successful _well after_ it was made open
| source.
|
| As a commercial project it was a failure. It only became
| successful due to two decades of open-source development, and
| the willingness of its users to invest in it - even if only
| to stimulate the development of a competitor to expensive
| proprietary software.
|
| Blender only became an even remotely viable option in 2011,
| after being open-source for 9 years. Its popularity only
| really started in 2019 after a massive UI rework made it
| actually _nice to use_. This and related changes led to
| Blender receiving a $1.2M grant in 2019, leading to other
| companies re-evaluating it and awarding even more grants.
|
| If anything, compared to today's successes its initial
| proprietary development should be seen as nothing more than a
| historical curiosity.
| grobbyy wrote:
| It's not a historical curiosity. The decisions needed to
| make an architecture viable on the long term happen early
| on and need to be sustained as code is being developed.
|
| A lot of that comes down to days structures used, system
| modules, abstractions, If that's done right, it's possible
| to make a good UX later.
|
| That's very hard in modern software processes which
| emphasize short term spirits.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Blender received huge infusions of cash before 2019.
|
| Back in the mid 2000s, I was on the "FOSS talk circuit" in
| Europe talking about Ardour. Blender stuff was often
| happening in the room next door (way more people ...
| graphics ... sigh :)
|
| Blender got huge grants from both the EU and also, I think,
| Apple back in the mid-to-late 2000s that in retrospect look
| critical in boosting them out of their somewhat "stuck"
| development status.
| fb03 wrote:
| Thank you for writing Ardour. Lovely piece of software
| neovive wrote:
| Blender has such a rich and amazing history! I used it for
| some hobby projects many years ago, but the UI was very
| complex and the learning curve was high. Recent versions
| have greatly simplified the UI and the features feel on par
| with many of the proprietary industry tools. The future
| definitely seems bright.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Most of this is _technically_ true but not really relevant,
| and no, this is not what makes it stand out.
|
| Very little of what constitutes modern Blender came from
| NeoGeo/NaN. The original software was uncompetitive and
| unremarkable. In fact, Blender had to change most of its
| original UI conventions to feel less alien for CGI
| professionals. (because the original paradigm was from the
| ancient times before the commonplace UI conventions)
|
| What made it stand out in the open-source community is devs
| using it for actually creating something (best investment!),
| positioning it at the intersection of interests of non-
| competing companies that need to get shit done, and also
| attracting a massive army of game modders.
| somat wrote:
| Not really, I find the blender workflow is still very
| similar to the old 1.7, fits on a floppy disk, days.
|
| It's the same modal editor with a million hotkeys and dense
| packed stacked dialogs, the most intrusive workflow change
| was when they swapped the default mouse keys.
|
| Not to say the blender project has not done amazing work
| making things more discoverable. But as a occasional
| blender user from the sgi 1.X days. I suspect "the complete
| 3.0 overhaul making blender more standard" was more
| marketing than anything else. Blender had got a reputation
| has being hard to learn(all 3d programs are hard to learn).
| So while they did do a lot of work on the UI and it is much
| better, mainly it was loudly saying "we made the UI easier"
| and everybody sort of went along with it.
| jve wrote:
| They have quite a list of sponsors: https://fund.blender.org/
|
| Like EPIC giving them 1.2M: https://www.blender.org/press/epic-
| games-supports-blender-fo...
| ics wrote:
| Is the EUR134k/mo figure including all corporate sponsors?
| Approximating that as one developer salary per month then
| what they've continued to accomplish is still very
| impressive.
| robin_reala wrote:
| No one developer gets paid EUR134k/month in Europe. Average
| salary is probably more like EUR65k/year across the EU.
| ics wrote:
| I was going to ask if all Blender developers were in
| Europe but was able to answer my own question from https:
| //www.blender.org/development/top-27-committers-2022/
|
| It does appear that the majority of top contributors are
| from European countries but overall pretty diverse:
| China, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Brazil, Egypt are
| represented as well.
|
| That said, if I revised my comment to say two developer
| salaries per month, or 3, 4, etc. it is still impressive
| in my view.
| agent327 wrote:
| Where in the world can you earn EUR134k/mo as a developer?
| jve wrote:
| That is probably excluding onetime donations
| jasode wrote:
| _> I 'm amazed at how professional and finished Blender is for
| being an open source project. It feels like I'm using an Adobe
| product or similar. _
|
| The "open source" label applied to Blender today inadvertently
| minimizes the _commercial origins_ of it.
|
| Blender's development has a unique (accidental) history that
| other open-source projects can't replicate deliberately:
| https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/getting_started/ab...
|
| In summary:
|
| - Blender was originally paid commercial software that attracts
| venture capitalists to invest EUR4.5M and funds the salaries of
| 50 people to work on it
|
| - The VC investors later sell it at a loss for EUR100k back to
| the original team to release it as open source.
|
| Because many users of Blender are unfamiliar with the timeline
| of its development, they wonder why other open-source software
| like Gimp "isn't more polished" like Adobe Photoshop. Well,
| Gimp never had investors write off EUR4.5M of development on
| it.
| magpi3 wrote:
| Haven't used it in ages, but Blender did not feel like an
| Adobe product when it was first open sourced. IIRC its UI was
| considered notoriously unintuitive.
| yterdy wrote:
| That was literally over 20 years ago. The majority of
| Blender's development has taken place while it was open-
| source; most of the features it's known for did not exist in
| the commercial version.
| js8 wrote:
| With selling it as OSS, they only wrote off 4.4M euros. So
| given the situation it was still a better option for
| investors.
| danShumway wrote:
| > Gimp never had investors write off EUR4.5M of development
| on it.
|
| Notably, there is literally nothing stopping other Open
| Source projects from being given grants of millions of
| dollars other than social convention.
|
| We saw this with Godot after Unity. There's a coordination
| problem here, but we all mostly recognize that many of these
| fundamental tools would be better if we all collectively put
| our resources into an Open tool that is focused on serving
| the community rather than exploiting it.
|
| It's just that without shocking events that prompt the bigger
| players to say, "you know what, heck this, let's just fund a
| good tool", it's very tough to get people to make that kind
| of investment, even though it would very likely be better for
| them and in the long-run more cost effective for them if they
| did.
|
| I would argue that the majority of Blender's development
| (both architecturally and in terms of cost) happened after
| its commercial origins. But Blender continued to get
| investment because the community was invested in building a
| usable tool that wouldn't force them to deal with the crap of
| the other commercial products in the 3D industry.
| marcodiego wrote:
| > I'm amazed at how professional and finished Blender is for
| being an open source project.
|
| I'm amazed at how much prejudice people still have about open
| source projects.
| sbuk wrote:
| When you compare it to GIMP, it's night and day. Not only is
| Blender open source, it _is_ professional software.
| crote wrote:
| Yup. GIMP feels like it's being developed by a bored
| engineer in their spare time to play around with image
| editing algorithms. Blender feels like a professional
| workhorse you can build your whole business around.
| beezlewax wrote:
| If gimp did a UI overhaul akin to what Blender did and
| changed their name they could do much better that the
| current state of things.
|
| Blenders ui overhaul made it an entirely different beast
| aequitas wrote:
| I started using Blender to do modelling 20 odd years ago when I
| was still in school finding my direction in life. The graphics
| design path didn't stick, but Blender integrated with Python to
| allow automations, which I learned along the way and it put me
| firmly on the path of software development, where I still
| happily am, still programming (some) Python. Funny that I have
| my career partly to thank to the software choices of fellow
| Dutchmen.
| ragebol wrote:
| Wow, very similar story here. In highschool, I think I messed
| up a week of exams because I was too busy modeling a
| Fellbeast/nazgul from LoTR in Blender. I still have the model
| somewhere, copied over in 20 years of USB sticks and external
| HDDs.
|
| Learned python for use in blender, am a software dev in
| robotics now, using a lot of python.
| cableshaft wrote:
| Yeah, Blender is maybe the best open source software I use. I
| don't feel a need to use any other 3D modeling software, it's
| so robust and works so well (from what I can tell, I'm still
| mostly an amateur and have barely scratched the surface of
| Blender still).
| Finnucane wrote:
| The difference between Blender and Adobe is that the Blender
| folks actually give a shit if their product is good.
| boredtofears wrote:
| What did you use to get started?
|
| Every other year I follow that "make a realistic looking donut"
| tutorial but mine always comes out lumpy and misshapen.
| EatFlamingDeath wrote:
| The short movie is looking amazing:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9lj-c29dxI
| twoquestions wrote:
| This is amazing, it reminds me of Wile E Coyote cartoons which
| were always my favorite.
|
| Thank you for posting this :)
| EatFlamingDeath wrote:
| You're welcome :) I would totally watch it if they created an
| animated series out of it.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| There's a new Wile E Coyote movie coming. It was scrapped
| initially but due to backlash from fans, it was revived
| today.
| i_am_a_peasant wrote:
| Brooooo how do you even. I wish I had that time it takes to get
| this good at Blender. I might actually end up releasing some
| solid indie games.
|
| Demoscene people are the guys I'm most jealous of. Not some
| linux kernel maintainer of some fancy filesystem. Nah, but the
| things that can transport you into an entire new universe in
| your head.
| flkenosad wrote:
| My favourite Blender Studio short:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cMxraX_5RE
| i_am_a_peasant wrote:
| This makes me laugh so hard, it's so trippy
| Vinnl wrote:
| Oh wow, I thought I'd seen them all, but somehow I missed
| this one. Thanks for sharing, I think that's my favourite
| too now!
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Peertube link https://video.blender.org/w/a69d68a5-a0e0-4a8
| 0-9d66-49f093c9...
| capableweb wrote:
| > Brooooo how do you even. I wish I had that time it takes to
| get this good at Blender. I might actually end up releasing
| some solid indie games.
|
| Keep in mind that the Blender Open Movies are made by
| professionals who've been doing what they been doing for a
| long time, and there is a whole team making those, with roles
| specific to the area.
|
| I don't think you could single-handedly create something like
| that at the same timescale as they created it. They basically
| have made a proper studio at this point and they're fine-
| tuning the workflows and processes of Blender by doing these
| movies.
|
| So don't feel bad if you never would be able to create this
| alone, it is a team effort after all.
| i_am_a_peasant wrote:
| I still have dreams of being a 20x Engineer.
|
| I can be a 5x when I _really_ love what I 'm doing and I'm
| surrounded by fantastic people that I love being around.
| But I think I need another 10 years of experience to get to
| 10x, then maybe another 20 years to get to 20x.
| foobarian wrote:
| I'm a noob and I when kid asked me for help with Halloween
| costume I dug in making each triangle by hand, moving each
| vertex by hand, basically huge slow pain. Then I found the
| "remesh" button and the push/pull tools which felt like a
| superpower.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Having been a trader, regular guest on coding and Protracker
| parties, yep those were the days.
|
| I guess shadertoy and similar are where the Demoscene spirit
| lives on.
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| If you want an actual answer, you don't do it by yourself. I
| counted 50+ people credited. But if you want to start to play
| a part in doing it, basically just learn a lot of math. My gf
| is a technical director at a large animation studio and she
| got in by being an expert in linear algebra and spending a
| ton of time studying animation textbooks/tutorials/etc.
|
| That said, the market is evaporating. Almost everything has
| moved ~to India~ [e: abroad] and there are barely any jobs
| left in USA, and those that do exist are being fought for by
| the many folks who have been recently laid off stateside.
| Sounds familiar...
| JBits wrote:
| As someone who's keen on linear algebra but knows little
| about animation, how did linear algebra help her?
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| Helpful when writing shaders to describe surfaces and
| lighting, as well as working on the constraint
| optimization engines that go into physical body
| simulations.
| dagmx wrote:
| Computer graphics is based on linear algebra. Behind the
| artists are lots of engineers and technical director jobs
| where you're building software tools, render engines or
| character rigs. Animation is a lovely meld of art and
| technology, and has been so since the very first
| animations existed. Its one of the reasons I really enjoy
| the field.
| JBits wrote:
| The application of linear algebra to rendering I can
| understand. Character animation less so, apart from the
| physics aspect.
|
| Sounds like a nice field to work in! I didn't realise it
| used maths to that extent.
|
| Would you have any recommendations for someone of a
| linear algebra / programming background if they were
| interested in this field?
| truckerbill wrote:
| You'll need a demo reel.
| dagmx wrote:
| Not for an engineering role.
| dagmx wrote:
| So one caveat I would mention is that you will likely
| earn more outside of the animation industry with those
| skills than within it.
|
| With that out of the way, I think there are several
| avenues to get involved. Picking up a graphics
| engineering book, or learning OpenGL/Metal/DirectX will
| make you valuable as a realtime engineer.
|
| But otherwise I would recommend finding an open source
| project and contributing to it as a way to build up the
| repertoire that you can use to apply for jobs with.
| Blender is an excellent place to start, but so are any of
| the projects under the academy software foundation at
| https://www.aswf.io
|
| Getting more into the character animation side, you can
| look into Rigging, which is the process of setting up the
| armatures that move the characters. There are also things
| like simulation for cloth/hair etc...
|
| Blender is a good place for a lot of them.
| truckerbill wrote:
| What might be a better paying area with that background?
|
| Interesting that you say that technical art roles don't
| need a reel always assumed otherwise.
| dagmx wrote:
| Your comment about the market is incredibly wrong and
| jingoistic. The majority of popular feature and TV
| animation is made outside of India.
|
| Canada is a larger competitor to the US market than
| anything else, and very few companies have Indian
| outsourcing for feature/TV animation. Its more prevalent
| for VFX jobs, but even then many studios still have a large
| presence in North America/Europe.
|
| Studios like wild brain, titmouse etc are all North
| American based, while most feature animation is a mix of
| North America (Pixar, Dreamworks, Disney, Sony) and Europe
| (Illumination, Skydance)
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| I am sharing the lived experience of a person I am very
| familiar with. Do you have specific industry experience
| to back up your claims? If you know a place actively
| hiring technically minded animators, verily I say we
| would love to hear about it.
|
| I know for a fact that several of the studios you list as
| "North American" have recently laid off almost all their
| animation staff in favor of Indian vendor studios. Not
| feature, perhaps. But TV people do work too. Or did,
| rather.
| dagmx wrote:
| Yes I've been a supervisor in both feature film and vfx
| at major studios, as has my partner who currently still
| works in the industry. I maintain close ties with several
| major studios and am still a well known entity in the
| industry. I feel like I can speak with quite a reasonable
| level of confidence in this space
|
| You made two claims, that the jobs have been laid off
| (correct) and moved to India (incorrect). The layoffs are
| parts of market changes due to the strikes and production
| cuts before then. The implication that it was caused and
| will lead to outsourcing is not borne in reality for
| feature/tv animation.
|
| But yes several studios are hiring still. The job fair at
| the recent Spark conference in Vancouver had several
| studios open. Feature and Tv animation hasn't seen the
| slowdown that other areas of the market have and will
| bounce back faster.
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| It is most certainly incorrect to claim that the jobs
| have not (at least in part) moved to India. It is also
| incorrect to claim that laid off workers are not being
| replaced with foreign vendor studios, largely in India.
| This is a 100% verifiable fact for at least one of the
| "North American" studios you mentioned.
|
| It would appear you have taken your own experience, which
| I'm sure is vast, and made the mistake of assuming it
| applies to every studio. I can tell you that it does not.
|
| I can also tell you that the job market is quite dry
| indeed, and that studios that were attempting to headhunt
| just months ago will now no longer even reply to
| applications.
| dagmx wrote:
| I think you're greatly overestimating how many jobs have
| moved to India. The largest company to do so is MPC, but
| for feature and TV work, it hasn't really impacted job
| locality.
|
| It appears you're taking your own internal biases about
| India outsourcing and applying it more expansively.
|
| I didn't say the job market isn't dry. Again, I'm pushing
| back on the conflation of layoffs and jobs being
| offshored to India. Canada and Europe are much bigger
| source of offshoring for the US. However that isn't to
| say studios aren't hiring which was what you asked about,
| and I answered. It's definitely a lot lower, but it's not
| due to outsourcing. There's so many other factors that I
| already mentioned (lowered production, strikes) that play
| in first. Animation is affected to a much smaller degree
| and several studios in Canada are hiring in reasonable
| numbers at the moment.
|
| You can do with that info what you will, but it sounds
| like you don't actually want to hear an answer that
| contradicts your own and are doubling down on something
| that is not borne out of the reality of where the work is
| being done right now. It's especially exasperating
| because you're not even involved in said industry,
| outside of your partner, whereas I am actively every day.
|
| Largely, the main jobs that get outsourced to India is
| stuff like match move and rotoscoping. There's very
| little Core Animation, lighting or rendering work for
| most of the major studios done there, with the exception
| of MPC
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| Dreamworks has specifically stated that lighting and
| rendering work is being outsourced to India and that this
| was the reason for their recent laying off of their
| entire TV animation department (HUB). You act like
| somehow me directly knowing someone who was directly told
| this information by the people making the decision is
| somehow not a strong enough source? Compared to you who
| isn't in this country and previously stated you don't
| even work in the industry anymore?
| dagmx wrote:
| Dreamworks has been scaling back their India operations
| but has been included Indian animation in their work for
| over a decade and a half now.
|
| https://www.cartoonbrew.com/business/breaking-dreamworks-
| ani...
|
| https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2011-oct-29-la-
| fi-ct...
|
| They set up their Indian studios in 2008 and have had
| portions of their work done there and in China (now
| Pearl) for years now. They haven't increased that
| outsourcing within the last few years, and as I mentioned
| have been reducing it so your points regarding the
| current state of things isn't very valid. It also never
| resulted in job reductions in North America, but rather
| more films per year.
|
| In fact, Dreamworks is a key example of a studio that is
| outsourcing their work to Canada, which is what spurred
| their most recent layoffs:
| https://www.cartoonbrew.com/studios/dreamworks-shifting-
| away...
|
| And so what if I don't work directly in the industry
| anymore? I'm very involved in it still, and my partner is
| still in the industry. And we did work in the US for
| several years, so your point is moot.
|
| Is it possible that your girlfriend is not a reliable
| source of information here? Because I have multiple
| friends who are fairly senior at both DWA Glendale and
| Bangalore, and coupled with the news, you're clearly not
| lining up with anything they're saying. And if she's laid
| off, then she's no longer in the industry either, so you
| can't really claim that as a statement piece either.
|
| I would really examine your own biases here as to why
| you're so hellbent on focusing on India here, and not any
| of the other countries that are actually taking the jobs
| away from them. Again, Canada is a MUCH bigger source of
| job diversion for the industry than India is.
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| Frankly I don't really care if Canada or India is the
| bigger outsourcing destination and I don't see why you're
| getting so hung up on the specific country. The fact of
| the matter is Dreamworks TV laid off their entire HUB
| staff in favor of Indian vendor studios ( _not_
| Dreamworks Bangalore. Mikros is one example.), and there
| is no job market in America (look at the "Careers" pages
| for every American studio you listed).
|
| I don't know why I'm debating this with someone who is so
| far removed from anything actually going on.
|
| This is what's happening. These are the facts. If you
| refuse to accept them, that's your own internal biases,
| not mine.
| dagmx wrote:
| You clearly seem hung up on one country over another, and
| continue to ignore the specifics of the situation or any
| nuance to the situation. I think that speaks volumes.
| Especially when Dreamworks TV has been heavily outsourced
| based since the beginning. Just look at how many of their
| shows are produced at Bardel in Vancouver.
|
| Anyway, agreed there's no point arguing with someone who
| has no actual roots in this industry. Have a good day, I
| hope your partner finds work soon, but maybe don't place
| the blame where it doesn't belong.
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| You're hung up on India bro. I mentioned them in passing
| as that's where that specific department was laid off in
| favor of, then went back and edited that out when you
| commented the first time. You've been making this whole
| thread about India when the point is the job market. The
| country is incidental to everyone but you.
| i_am_a_peasant wrote:
| I've never been hit by offshoring but I have been on the
| other end of it. When I lived in a relatively affordable-
| workforce central European country we once had to do a
| knowledge transfer from our Canadian office which all got
| laid off.
|
| We took all their work, the whole experience was
| bittersweet, some of the folks there took it well others
| less so. But I can say that the project itself was
| reaching a stagnating phase where not much new work
| needed to be done, and we were mostly doing
| maintenance/bug fixing. The company itself wasn't doing
| anything innovative either and there wasn't leadership to
| put the Canadian guys skills to good use.
|
| Eventually most of those guys were hired by Intel and all
| got to work on exciting new technology that none of us
| were qualified to do.
|
| I think this is more or less okay when it happens, if a
| company does massive layoffs I take it more as a sign
| that they are not producing much anymore. And when many
| companies fire tens of thousands of people all at once I
| basically take it as a sign that the tech sector as a
| whole is taking a big downturn. Maybe things will improve
| when we finally stumble upon some tech that needs
| developing that has a great potential to be profitable
| and takes a lot of people to develop.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| _Almost everything has moved ~to India~ [e: abroad] and
| there are barely any jobs left in USA, and those that do
| exist are being fought for by the many folks who have been
| recently laid off stateside._
|
| This is simply wrong, and if anything the reverse is true:
| the jobs that had been outsourced to India are being
| brought back to the U.S. after several years of subpar
| work. See, for example, the most recent Marvel movies and
| TV shows. The abysmal VFX work was the product of
| outsourced VFX shops. You can bet your rear that Disney
| won't be repeating that mistake in the future.
| greggsy wrote:
| I like the reference to "...the big red _shiny_ button..." in
| Space Madness
| mr_sturd wrote:
| I love it. Though I'm really going to miss seeing screen grabs
| of Big Buck Bunny as _the_ placeholder image in media-adjacent
| projects.
| vdnkh wrote:
| dooooooo dooo dooooo, doooooooo doooo doooooooo doooo
| unshavedyak wrote:
| There have been a lot of these (they're basically always
| dogfooding the next one, i believe). Is there something
| special about Big Buck Bunny and Wing It?
| vanderZwan wrote:
| BBB was the first one that was really famous for some
| reason, so I guess it has the benefit of familiarity.
| That's what makes it a good video equivalent to Lorem Ipsum
| I guess
| tomstockmail wrote:
| Peertube link:
| https://video.blender.org/w/ee623d80-fd8d-4a2a-8aae-1f5acf79...
| lyu07282 wrote:
| amazing to see the geometry node setups in the outro, the smoke
| trail from splines (3:38) so cool! And you can get the blend
| files yourself to learn exactly how they did it.
| qwertox wrote:
| I loved it, in my opinion the best one so far, but I've seen it
| around two months ago. I think previously these shorts were
| released specifically to highlight new features which got added
| to Blender on a mayor release, which doesn't appear to be the
| case with that short.
| crawsome wrote:
| It looks so much better than average rig animation you see in
| most cartoons nowadays, but I still prefer hand-drawn
| animation. The bending/squeezing/rigging of assets still feels
| like a program's procedure rather than an artist's touch.
| geenat wrote:
| Would really love to see more resources be put into smoothing out
| the workflow of the video editor.. even just quality of life
| features such as "always showing waveforms" and auto-snapping
| clips when you cut would make a drastic difference and make it
| highly competitive with Premiere because you already have a world
| class 3D suite built in.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Its interface is pretty horrible but it's serviceable for basic
| video editing, and parameters can be keyframed, so that's
| something. The issue is that the video editor uses the same UI
| philosophy as the 3D editor... and it feels awkward. Same with
| the 2D editor, Grease Pencil.
|
| I don't think it would ever be able to compete with Premiere or
| Da Vinci Resolve, unless they put significant resources on that
| stuff.
|
| There is no better free alternative for non CAD 3D modeling,
| sculpting, texturing or 2D animation AFAIK. There are
| alternative rendering engines though.
|
| For video editing, compositing there are free alternatives that
| are much better than what Blender has.
| throwaway17_17 wrote:
| What is the current leader for compositing in the open source
| space?
| chabad360 wrote:
| Probably Natron. Although, Blender is certainly catching
| up.
| geenat wrote:
| It's okay-ish for projects that involve planned, pre-rendered
| scenes of pre-determined length.
|
| For anything involving live-action clips (using it for
| "talking head + b roll".. tutorials, documentaries etc)
| mainly could use the features I noted above.
|
| More workflow polish the better, though. Makes it good for a
| wider variety of video types.
| Zetobal wrote:
| Blender 4.0 RC1 would be a fitting headline....
| tokai wrote:
| "please use the original title, [...] don't editorialize."
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| wccrawford wrote:
| I think the point is that it's no longer RC as of today.
| Someone else said that that page is lagging a little bit.
| Zetobal wrote:
| ...but it is because there is no release yet.
| justinclift wrote:
| There's no official RC1 build for download either, and hasn't
| been from the first of Nov (when it was supposed to be
| available).
|
| I've been looking every few days from the 1st of Nov, and the
| _Release Candidate_ date on the projects page was pushed back
| to the 8th, but not updated since then.
|
| The official Projects page still lists the Blender 4.0 goal as
| only "92% Completed":
|
| https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/milestone/7
|
| There's nothing on the Blender Blog about an RC1 being
| available for testing:
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20231114142752/https://code.blend...
|
| Nor is there any mention in yesterday's weekly Devtalk:
|
| https://devtalk.blender.org/t/13-november-2023/31960
|
| If there _really is_ a 4.0 release that 's available now, then
| they've seriously gone wrong with the communication parts of
| their release process. :( :( :(
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| This seems a bit premature. The announcement page isn't up yet
| and the download link still points to 3.6
| jansan wrote:
| HN:
|
| Ahead of schedule
|
| Under budget
|
| Never wrong
| executesorder66 wrote:
| Karma whores do this all the time. It used to be a big problem
| in /r/firefox for a long time, and somehow stopped happening
| eventually.
|
| Just flag it and move on.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I'm hoping for a built-in resource sharing mechanism. I have a
| dual 4090 server accessible but right now all I can do is run
| blender on it. I'd love a way to just transparently use its
| resources while working on my machine.
|
| Seems I'll have to keep waiting.
| rvrs wrote:
| >dual 4090 server
|
| What do you mean? 4090s don't have SLI.
| valine wrote:
| You don't need SLI to render with dual GPUs in cycles.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| I'm not sure waiting will change anything, usually you save the
| blend file somewhere and a render cluster picks it up for
| render. Blender already supports everything you would need to
| set this up and there are already tons of cloud services and
| third party solutions for that.
| opencl wrote:
| Does Flamenco[1] not meet your requirements? Technically not
| built in but it gives a button right in the Blender UI to send
| render jobs to remote machines.
|
| [1] https://flamenco.blender.org/
| mentos wrote:
| The control scheme in Blender is so foreign to me.
|
| When they support rmb + WASD to fly around maybe I'll be able to
| use it heh
| genpfault wrote:
| Fly/Walk Navigation[1]?
|
| [1]:
| https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/editors/3dview/nav...
| coder543 wrote:
| https://github.com/SpectralVectors/RightMouseNavigation
| rspoerri wrote:
| There are Builds that are listed as "Blender 4.0.0 - Stable" in
| various formats and for all platforms on the Daily Builds page:
|
| https://builder.blender.org/download/daily/
|
| But i don't know whether those are the ones that will go
| official.
| iamgopal wrote:
| Slightly unrelated, but is there anything that can be scripted
| using code for making animation ?
| cshimmin wrote:
| blender has tightly integrated support for python scripting.
| justinclift wrote:
| Blender can be controlled using Python, so yes.
| dagmx wrote:
| Here's the Blender 4.0 content reel while you wait for the site
| itself to update
|
| https://youtu.be/eoY1Mc70uTo?si=ttU7szWsbWNXwLEz
|
| The new features overview
|
| https://youtu.be/LcQkk7NbOoY?si=ldo4tKz2WonBSe0h
|
| The introduction to Node Tools
| https://youtu.be/Y8Udi1AkdGY?si=95AKQ0tUg4FJSLpM
| butz wrote:
| Any alternative platforms to watch those videos?
| perryprog wrote:
| The content reel was uploaded to their PeerTube[1]; I don't
| see the other two videos on there yet, though.
|
| Edit: The node tool introduction is now also live[2]!
|
| [1] https://video.blender.org/w/ni4S8WYzVG9kqQ6mDjnY1s [2]
| https://video.blender.org/w/hyq7PB9uaUUKkjwSENxid5
| ragebol wrote:
| Blender is on peertube:
| https://video.blender.org/videos/local?s=1
| specproc wrote:
| As a noob who's still finding his way around, space to search
| menus looks great.
|
| https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/commit/35d3d525...
| RobKohr wrote:
| Someone should make a video on this feature. I also am a noob
| who is lost in a sea of options when starting up blender.
| Zee2 wrote:
| This (in some form) has been in Blender since at least 10 years
| ago. It used to be the default behavior.
| perryprog wrote:
| The release page is now live at
| https://www.blender.org/download/releases/4-0/.
| brundolf wrote:
| Amazing that even blender.org isn't immune to the hug of death
| (though probably from more than just HN)
| pixelbyindex wrote:
| Is anyone here that might be a Blender contributor who could
| offer some insights or some tips on how to achieve the same spark
| with the Godot community? From the outside, the Blender community
| iterates very quickly, seem to work well together, and has
| figured out an approval process for integrating code that just
| works(tm).
|
| I would love to see a fire like this in Godot
| brundolf wrote:
| From my understanding Blender started getting a ton of
| corporate sponsorship a few years ago, and that was when
| development suddenly went into overdrive
| numlock86 wrote:
| Blender for 3D is what Postgres is for databases. It's really an
| exceptional piece of open source software and totally stands out.
| There's not many software projects like this.
| lvl102 wrote:
| I will go one step further and say they should teach kids
| Python using Blender. Such a powerful tool and so many learning
| possibilities.
| dmalik wrote:
| Nice! Time to create another donut.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| It's kind of amazing how a single tutorial project became so
| universal. I wonder if there are any other disciplines /
| platforms / projects that are equally universal in their
| domain. Programmers have "hello, world," but it's awfully tiny
| by comparison.
| golergka wrote:
| Here's a more user-friendly and beautiful page about 4.0 release:
| https://www.blender.org/download/releases/4-0/
| Cognitron wrote:
| Since nobody's mentioned Ian Hubert yet, his Dynamo Dream series
| is made in Blender:
|
| Episode 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsGZ_2RuJ2A
|
| Episode 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlqhdaLhRVY
|
| Episode 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM_WPiT6NRQ
| Kablys wrote:
| Thanks, I didn't know there were more episodes released.
| babypuncher wrote:
| A bit tangential, does anyone know of a good resource for
| learning Blender, suitable for someone who has no real experience
| with 3D modeling/animation?
| qiller wrote:
| I still have the old 2.30 book signed by Ton from the original
| fundraiser, so glad it all worked out great.
|
| May be it's time to finally let go of 2.7 keymap and learn the
| new one :-\
| kaveh808 wrote:
| Is there any movement towards a C/C++ API in Blender 4.0? I feel
| extensibility may be where it lags behind Maya and Houdini.
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