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A developer’s introduction to 3D animation and Blender

129 points by okfine 11y ago

zaphar 11y ago
Blender may be one of the most successful and best run Artistic/Media projects in Open Source. It manages to pack a lot of power in a very small package. And the Open Movie/Open Game projects help to drive the direction of the Application with concrete goals. Personally I think it's one of the media production suites out there for the hobbyist. The power + price (free) can't be beat for the non-professional.
- daenz 11y ago
  It's one of the best pieces of software I've ever used as a creative. It has everything. Just as an example, people are constantly talking about how there's "no good video editors for linux" but not realizing that Blender itself has a built in full-featured video editor. The Python API could use a little work, and takes some getting used to, but it's also incredibly powerful. You can generate geometry from a Python script. You can script movement..anything.
  - rogeryu 11y ago
    You can get Lightworks for Linux. It's free, but with limited output options. If you want more, you pay, but it's reasonable. But it's not an easy interface in my experience. https://www.lwks.com/ https://www.lwks.com/
    - wazoox 11y ago
      There's also Da Vinci Resolve, the free version isn't available for Linux though, but the full package isn't very expensive, and ridiculously powerful.
- BoysenberryPi 11y ago
  Blender also has one of the most god awful UIs I have ever had the displeasure of working with. And it's not even the fact the UI is bad. It's the fact that when you tell someone in the Blender community that you don't like the UI they usually say "well once you understand why it's made that way you'll get it" which is pretty much saying "once you understand it you'll understand it" which is redundant. /rant
  - zaphar 11y ago
    Blender's UI is like Vim's powerful but with a steep learning curve. I happen to like Vim which perhaps explains why I like Blender. Blender isn't really designed for the dabbler. It's designed for the serious user. For that type of user it's worth the learning curve since you can get really fast in it. So fast that a common activity is speed modelling. If you only dabble then something like SketchUp is probably more your speed. If you plan to create stuff like this: http://blenderartists.org/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=402981&d=1443955428 http://blenderartists.org/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=... though then blender is well worth the learning curve.
    - BoysenberryPi 11y ago
      You can make that model in pretty much any 3D modeling software so I don't see how Blender is special. Just because a UI is powerful does not mean it has to be unintuitive. Unity is a very powerful game engine and it has a very intuitive UI to the point where if I'm just fiddling around with it I can generally figure out how to use it. Blender is pretty much the exact opposite. It comes down to cost vs time. Do I want to spend time to configure Blender or do I want to spend money and buy something that has a much more intuitive UI and use something that I can just get started with right away? For my sanity I would choose the latter.
      - geoka9 11y ago
        Just curious, are you a vi/emacs user by any chance? Just because a UI is powerful does not mean it has to be unintuitive. Unity is a very powerful game engine and it has a very intuitive UI... Let's not confuse the power of a software package with a powerful UI. Blender is the emacs/vi of 3D software - its UI is very unintuitive for beginners but extremely fast (and intuitive) to power users. Personally, I found that with Blender it's hard to master the basics but easy to learn the advanced stuff, once you have your basics down. With other packages I've used (3d max, Maya, Softimage) it may be easy to do a simple scene, but advanced stuff is very unintuitive to the point that you need a tutorial to do anything you haven't done before in that particular package.
- Animats 11y ago
  Blender is a commercial product which failed. It had enough users that the users bought the rights cheaply and open-sourced it. It's quite powerful, and good work has been done with it, but has a poor user interface, which open-sourcing has not helped. Supposedly it's become better in recent years. Here's an (out of date) overview of the hotkeys:[1] Some of the hotkeys change in each new release. In typical open source fashion, the "solution" to that mess was to make the several hundred hotkeys remappable: "Important note: the ever changing nature of Blender's development means features can be arbitrarily updated so shortcut keys may be mapped to different functions or be in different locations version to version - this is especially true of Blender 2.50 up to and included the latest versions." If you like EMACS, you might like Blender. From a developer perspective, the Blender game engine is interesting. An idea that keeps coming back is that programming should be done by wiring little boxes together in a GUI. The Blender game engine does that. This leads to giant, messy wiring diagrams. [1] http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/blender/useful-keyboard-shortcuts.php http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/blender/useful-keyboard-sh...
  - LifeQuestioner 11y ago
    I drastically prefer the interface over 3DS Max and Maya. Maybe i'm weird.
    - i80and 11y ago
      No, it's not just you. I learned animation in 3DS Max, but I'm far more comfortable with Blender.
    - TrevorJ 11y ago
      Same. I hate having to use a picky pie menu, or click buttons to do simple things like change the viewport angle.
  - 332451b 11y ago
    Blender 2.5 has changed the UI significantly from the original commercial version, and most comments I read about it say that it has improved significantly. Blender the open source project has changed and grown so much bigger than Blender the commercial product that they are totally different. Regarding hotkeys, there were some major changes for 2.5 along with other UI changes, but after that the default have barely changed, just additions and minor changes when the underlying features change. Making hotkeys remappable was in no way a solution to that "problem", it's a standard feature in other 3D software that a lot of users requested, especially those who wanted to make the hotkeys compatible with Maya and 3ds Max.
- ris 11y ago
  "Blender may be one of the most successful and best run Artistic/Media projects in Open Source." I would go one further and say one of the most successful and best run projects in Open Source. I have always been impressed with the Blender developers ability to just plain deliver. Features get built quicker than you can keep up with them, and they seem to have had the best success integrating GSoC projects & developers into the code & team I've seen. I don't know what their secret sauce is (Ton's enthusiasm?) but I think many projects could learn a lot from them.
- lucideer 11y ago
  I'm not a 3d designer, developer, nor any standard general user of Blender really, but from my limited trials of usage it's almost certainly the most well made, polished piece of open source software I've ever used. It's UI paradigm in particular is at first somewhat overwhelming and unintuitive, and then suddenly with the tiniest amount of instruction or direction perfectly understandable and infinitely flexible (once you "get" how it works you can imagine them adding any feature and it being just immediately, simply usable)
yohann305 11y ago
Feel free to downvote me but the title is quite misleading as I was expecting a developer introduction to 3D to be heavier on code and show what's behind the hood. For example, the tutorial starts by creating box, I'd love see the equivalent using code. Same goes for adding vertices, moving vertices. Cheers!
- entr0x 11y ago
  I agree, this is why I'm commenting. It's a non-article that doesn't even deliver what the title promises. Just an article to fill writing obligations and farm clicks.
- semi-extrinsic 11y ago
  I've done a bit of Blender Python scripting, and it's a bloody pain. The API is very much an afterthought, and it can't be much used by anyone. As an example, function calls in your script do different things based on which part of the UI has mouse focus. It's very easy to make loops eat all your RAM, hang everything for a few minutes and then segfault. I've even had it crash my X session. And the built-in IDE is crap. /rant
  - berkut 11y ago
    Is this post 2.5? I thought (and I don't know the answer, hence why I'm asking) 2.5's interface was built on the Python API? I tried doing some Python stuff with it in the 2.4 days and thought it was pretty poor as well, haven't tried since, but had (possibly incorrectly?) assumed 2.5 fixed this.
    - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
      I did most of the stuff on 2.7 and late 2.6. I believe what you say is true though, the interface is built on top of Python, so every button in the UI corresponds to a Python function. That has both pros and cons, I guess.
  - 332451b 11y ago
    The mouse focus issue is more related to missing APIs. If you call operators (tools) from Python they do indeed depend on context, just like they would if you use them from a toolbar, menu or shortcut key. These are not intended to be used for scripting really, but they are available and sometimes the only way to do things because there is no equivalent API function available.
PixelMath 11y ago
I used to work for Hollywood visual effects. Over the span of many years I have tried almost all the software out there and I find Blender very powerful but my personal favorite is a software named Houdini* (not free but you do get apprentice version). The core methodology Houdini is built on is for creating procedural systems for everything which i think is of more relevance for this community. Do check it out, I am sure members of this community can put it to use for the things not even their creators would have imagined. *http://www.sidefx.com/ http://www.sidefx.com/
- zaphar 11y ago
  I used a trial version of houdini once and the procedural workflow is amazing and I loved it. But I can't justify the cost and at the time the limitations of the community edition were prohibitive even for a hobbyist.
  - jacobwcarlson 11y ago
    I'm not sure when you used it, but Houdini Indie[1] looks pretty reasonable- $200/year and you don't have to upgrade until you're doing $100k/year in revenue. [1] https://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=244&Itemid=399 https://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blo...
    - zaphar 11y ago
      It was a long time ago. Like more than 10 years. The indie version is indeed much more reasonably priced but I don't do enough to justify 200/year. Blender hits my sweet spot :-)
      - PixelMath 11y ago
        well, now is the time to give it a try again. Last week they released Houdini 15 https://vimeo.com/135607909 https://vimeo.com/135607909
- MrScruff 11y ago
shawnfratis2 11y ago
With all the complaints with Blenders UI I've never understood why more people haven't developed plugins that offer a UI alternative. I wanted a simpler UI for Maya so I wrote my own : https://github.com/shawnfratis/Scrimshaw-MEL-Mini-GUI-for-Maya https://github.com/shawnfratis/Scrimshaw-MEL-Mini-GUI-for-Ma... . It's not perfect but it works for my uses. I'd think a program as open as Blender would lend itself to something like that.
thenomad 11y ago
Lots of talk about modeling in this thread - how's Blender for other applications these days? In particular, how's its animation capability (both UI and features-wise)? Does it have decent importers and exporters for industry-standard formats (I'm thinking FBX and Alembic)? Can it handle mocap data well? Does it have any 3D paint / texturing tools yet? I'd love to move away from Autodesk if it's possible!
- thedaemon 11y ago
  I'm a studying animator. I can safely say that it's animation capabilities have risen enough over the past few years that I am comfortable as I am in Maya animating. It does have decent import and export support. I haven't done any mocap so can't comment there. I haven't tried to 3d paint either. Not sure about that. It does have sculpting similar to zbrush though.
  - thenomad 11y ago
    Whoa, Zbrush-style sculpt? Nice. Does it have a non-linear animation editor similar to Maya? If so, bloody hell. I might be giving this another go...
    - dazirius 11y ago
      It's been a long time since I did anything in Maya, but if you mean keyframing, interpolation curves (possibly my most favourite thing in the world), drivers (second favourite), armature rigging, shape keys etc. etc. then yeah, Blender does have those features and as far as I can tell, they're pretty well polished. What I like best about the way animation is handled is that you can keyframe (almost) anything. As an example, you can add keys for the strength (or some other value) of the normal map that is a node in a material that is applied to one or more objects and animate that value. I dare say that's feasible in other packages too. Whether you can do it by just hitting "i" on the keyboard while mousing over the value you want to animate, I don't know.
AlexB3D 11y ago
...Blender it is for adult people I do not care to be difficult or easy. If I like, I learn. I do not stop interface. I like many programming interfaces, but I'm especially grateful to Blender. - It is a program made by 3D artists for 3D artists. - It is totally dynamic. - I've got a steady flow of work. - (Shorcuts) memory exercises. At 36 he is appreciated. - It is a professional program. - To use it you have to think. If not, use c4d, max, maya, blah, blah. - Jump from 3ds max Blender is not fair. Blender is vulgarly stable. It had been years since I felt emotion, learning a program. Blender can improve. I hope he does. It is on track.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Hello, welcome to HN! Quick hint on formatting lists and other site-specific things: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10411561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10411561.
  - AlexB3D 11y ago
    Thank you. I'll read.

129 points by okfine 11y ago

Blender may be one of the most successful and best run Artistic/Media projects in Open Source. It manages to pack a lot of power in a very small package. And the Open Movie/Open Game projects help to drive the direction of the Application with concrete goals. Personally I think it's one of the media production suites out there for the hobbyist. The power + price (free) can't be beat for the non-professional.

daenz 11y ago
It's one of the best pieces of software I've ever used as a creative. It has everything. Just as an example, people are constantly talking about how there's "no good video editors for linux" but not realizing that Blender itself has a built in full-featured video editor. The Python API could use a little work, and takes some getting used to, but it's also incredibly powerful. You can generate geometry from a Python script. You can script movement..anything.
- rogeryu 11y ago
  You can get Lightworks for Linux. It's free, but with limited output options. If you want more, you pay, but it's reasonable. But it's not an easy interface in my experience. https://www.lwks.com/ https://www.lwks.com/
  - wazoox 11y ago
    There's also Da Vinci Resolve, the free version isn't available for Linux though, but the full package isn't very expensive, and ridiculously powerful.
BoysenberryPi 11y ago
Blender also has one of the most god awful UIs I have ever had the displeasure of working with. And it's not even the fact the UI is bad. It's the fact that when you tell someone in the Blender community that you don't like the UI they usually say "well once you understand why it's made that way you'll get it" which is pretty much saying "once you understand it you'll understand it" which is redundant. /rant
- zaphar 11y ago
  Blender's UI is like Vim's powerful but with a steep learning curve. I happen to like Vim which perhaps explains why I like Blender. Blender isn't really designed for the dabbler. It's designed for the serious user. For that type of user it's worth the learning curve since you can get really fast in it. So fast that a common activity is speed modelling. If you only dabble then something like SketchUp is probably more your speed. If you plan to create stuff like this: http://blenderartists.org/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=402981&d=1443955428 http://blenderartists.org/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=... though then blender is well worth the learning curve.
  - BoysenberryPi 11y ago
    You can make that model in pretty much any 3D modeling software so I don't see how Blender is special. Just because a UI is powerful does not mean it has to be unintuitive. Unity is a very powerful game engine and it has a very intuitive UI to the point where if I'm just fiddling around with it I can generally figure out how to use it. Blender is pretty much the exact opposite. It comes down to cost vs time. Do I want to spend time to configure Blender or do I want to spend money and buy something that has a much more intuitive UI and use something that I can just get started with right away? For my sanity I would choose the latter.
    - geoka9 11y ago
      Just curious, are you a vi/emacs user by any chance? Just because a UI is powerful does not mean it has to be unintuitive. Unity is a very powerful game engine and it has a very intuitive UI... Let's not confuse the power of a software package with a powerful UI. Blender is the emacs/vi of 3D software - its UI is very unintuitive for beginners but extremely fast (and intuitive) to power users. Personally, I found that with Blender it's hard to master the basics but easy to learn the advanced stuff, once you have your basics down. With other packages I've used (3d max, Maya, Softimage) it may be easy to do a simple scene, but advanced stuff is very unintuitive to the point that you need a tutorial to do anything you haven't done before in that particular package.
Animats 11y ago
Blender is a commercial product which failed. It had enough users that the users bought the rights cheaply and open-sourced it. It's quite powerful, and good work has been done with it, but has a poor user interface, which open-sourcing has not helped. Supposedly it's become better in recent years. Here's an (out of date) overview of the hotkeys:[1] Some of the hotkeys change in each new release. In typical open source fashion, the "solution" to that mess was to make the several hundred hotkeys remappable: "Important note: the ever changing nature of Blender's development means features can be arbitrarily updated so shortcut keys may be mapped to different functions or be in different locations version to version - this is especially true of Blender 2.50 up to and included the latest versions." If you like EMACS, you might like Blender. From a developer perspective, the Blender game engine is interesting. An idea that keeps coming back is that programming should be done by wiring little boxes together in a GUI. The Blender game engine does that. This leads to giant, messy wiring diagrams. [1] http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/blender/useful-keyboard-shortcuts.php http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/blender/useful-keyboard-sh...
- LifeQuestioner 11y ago
  I drastically prefer the interface over 3DS Max and Maya. Maybe i'm weird.
  - i80and 11y ago
    No, it's not just you. I learned animation in 3DS Max, but I'm far more comfortable with Blender.
  - TrevorJ 11y ago
    Same. I hate having to use a picky pie menu, or click buttons to do simple things like change the viewport angle.
- 332451b 11y ago
  Blender 2.5 has changed the UI significantly from the original commercial version, and most comments I read about it say that it has improved significantly. Blender the open source project has changed and grown so much bigger than Blender the commercial product that they are totally different. Regarding hotkeys, there were some major changes for 2.5 along with other UI changes, but after that the default have barely changed, just additions and minor changes when the underlying features change. Making hotkeys remappable was in no way a solution to that "problem", it's a standard feature in other 3D software that a lot of users requested, especially those who wanted to make the hotkeys compatible with Maya and 3ds Max.
ris 11y ago
"Blender may be one of the most successful and best run Artistic/Media projects in Open Source." I would go one further and say one of the most successful and best run projects in Open Source. I have always been impressed with the Blender developers ability to just plain deliver. Features get built quicker than you can keep up with them, and they seem to have had the best success integrating GSoC projects & developers into the code & team I've seen. I don't know what their secret sauce is (Ton's enthusiasm?) but I think many projects could learn a lot from them.
lucideer 11y ago
I'm not a 3d designer, developer, nor any standard general user of Blender really, but from my limited trials of usage it's almost certainly the most well made, polished piece of open source software I've ever used. It's UI paradigm in particular is at first somewhat overwhelming and unintuitive, and then suddenly with the tiniest amount of instruction or direction perfectly understandable and infinitely flexible (once you "get" how it works you can imagine them adding any feature and it being just immediately, simply usable)

yohann305 11y ago

Feel free to downvote me but the title is quite misleading as I was expecting a developer introduction to 3D to be heavier on code and show what's behind the hood. For example, the tutorial starts by creating box, I'd love see the equivalent using code. Same goes for adding vertices, moving vertices. Cheers!

entr0x 11y ago
I agree, this is why I'm commenting. It's a non-article that doesn't even deliver what the title promises. Just an article to fill writing obligations and farm clicks.
semi-extrinsic 11y ago
I've done a bit of Blender Python scripting, and it's a bloody pain. The API is very much an afterthought, and it can't be much used by anyone. As an example, function calls in your script do different things based on which part of the UI has mouse focus. It's very easy to make loops eat all your RAM, hang everything for a few minutes and then segfault. I've even had it crash my X session. And the built-in IDE is crap. /rant
- berkut 11y ago
  Is this post 2.5? I thought (and I don't know the answer, hence why I'm asking) 2.5's interface was built on the Python API? I tried doing some Python stuff with it in the 2.4 days and thought it was pretty poor as well, haven't tried since, but had (possibly incorrectly?) assumed 2.5 fixed this.
  - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
    I did most of the stuff on 2.7 and late 2.6. I believe what you say is true though, the interface is built on top of Python, so every button in the UI corresponds to a Python function. That has both pros and cons, I guess.
- 332451b 11y ago
  The mouse focus issue is more related to missing APIs. If you call operators (tools) from Python they do indeed depend on context, just like they would if you use them from a toolbar, menu or shortcut key. These are not intended to be used for scripting really, but they are available and sometimes the only way to do things because there is no equivalent API function available.

PixelMath 11y ago

I used to work for Hollywood visual effects. Over the span of many years I have tried almost all the software out there and I find Blender very powerful but my personal favorite is a software named Houdini* (not free but you do get apprentice version). The core methodology Houdini is built on is for creating procedural systems for everything which i think is of more relevance for this community. Do check it out, I am sure members of this community can put it to use for the things not even their creators would have imagined. *http://www.sidefx.com/ http://www.sidefx.com/

zaphar 11y ago
I used a trial version of houdini once and the procedural workflow is amazing and I loved it. But I can't justify the cost and at the time the limitations of the community edition were prohibitive even for a hobbyist.
- jacobwcarlson 11y ago
  I'm not sure when you used it, but Houdini Indie[1] looks pretty reasonable- $200/year and you don't have to upgrade until you're doing $100k/year in revenue. [1] https://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=244&Itemid=399 https://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blo...
  - zaphar 11y ago
    It was a long time ago. Like more than 10 years. The indie version is indeed much more reasonably priced but I don't do enough to justify 200/year. Blender hits my sweet spot :-)
    - PixelMath 11y ago
      well, now is the time to give it a try again. Last week they released Houdini 15 https://vimeo.com/135607909 https://vimeo.com/135607909
MrScruff 11y ago

shawnfratis2 11y ago

With all the complaints with Blenders UI I've never understood why more people haven't developed plugins that offer a UI alternative. I wanted a simpler UI for Maya so I wrote my own : https://github.com/shawnfratis/Scrimshaw-MEL-Mini-GUI-for-Maya https://github.com/shawnfratis/Scrimshaw-MEL-Mini-GUI-for-Ma... . It's not perfect but it works for my uses. I'd think a program as open as Blender would lend itself to something like that.

thenomad 11y ago

Lots of talk about modeling in this thread - how's Blender for other applications these days? In particular, how's its animation capability (both UI and features-wise)? Does it have decent importers and exporters for industry-standard formats (I'm thinking FBX and Alembic)? Can it handle mocap data well? Does it have any 3D paint / texturing tools yet? I'd love to move away from Autodesk if it's possible!

thedaemon 11y ago
I'm a studying animator. I can safely say that it's animation capabilities have risen enough over the past few years that I am comfortable as I am in Maya animating. It does have decent import and export support. I haven't done any mocap so can't comment there. I haven't tried to 3d paint either. Not sure about that. It does have sculpting similar to zbrush though.
- thenomad 11y ago
  Whoa, Zbrush-style sculpt? Nice. Does it have a non-linear animation editor similar to Maya? If so, bloody hell. I might be giving this another go...
  - dazirius 11y ago
    It's been a long time since I did anything in Maya, but if you mean keyframing, interpolation curves (possibly my most favourite thing in the world), drivers (second favourite), armature rigging, shape keys etc. etc. then yeah, Blender does have those features and as far as I can tell, they're pretty well polished. What I like best about the way animation is handled is that you can keyframe (almost) anything. As an example, you can add keys for the strength (or some other value) of the normal map that is a node in a material that is applied to one or more objects and animate that value. I dare say that's feasible in other packages too. Whether you can do it by just hitting "i" on the keyboard while mousing over the value you want to animate, I don't know.

AlexB3D 11y ago

...Blender it is for adult people I do not care to be difficult or easy. If I like, I learn. I do not stop interface. I like many programming interfaces, but I'm especially grateful to Blender. - It is a program made by 3D artists for 3D artists. - It is totally dynamic. - I've got a steady flow of work. - (Shorcuts) memory exercises. At 36 he is appreciated. - It is a professional program. - To use it you have to think. If not, use c4d, max, maya, blah, blah. - Jump from 3ds max Blender is not fair. Blender is vulgarly stable. It had been years since I felt emotion, learning a program. Blender can improve. I hope he does. It is on track.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Hello, welcome to HN! Quick hint on formatting lists and other site-specific things: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10411561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10411561.
- AlexB3D 11y ago
  Thank you. I'll read.