8 ms·
Yet again I'm amazed by blenders progress. I've been a 'hobby 3d artist' for the past decade and find it incredibly useful in my full time job (front end dev).
by npolet 9y ago
Yet again I'm amazed by blenders progress. I've been a 'hobby 3d artist' for the past decade and find it incredibly useful in my full time job (front end dev). Blender to me is a shining example of an open source project that seems to constantly improve and give the proprietary apps like 3ds max and maya a run for their money.
While the learning curve for blender can be fairly steep, once you get over that hump, it's an absolute joy to use. A lot of people struggle with the UI, but once you 'get it', it becomes an incredibly fluid and well thought out interface. It still has it's quirks, but as far as 3D packages go, the UI is actually really great.
This update adds lots of things that I have been waiting for. Shadow catchers with cycles has always been possible, but it required a fairly obtuse method to get there. The denoiser for cycles as well in an incredibly nice feature and works incredibly well. The PBR shader is also a real joy to use. Coupled with a decent set of textures, PBR shaders make shading a seriously fun activity. Although it's nothing new (in the industry) it's really nice to have it in blender.
A real asset to any designers toolkit.
- voltagex_ 9y agoWhat do you use Blender for in your job?
- abledon 9y agoSick abstract backgrounds on internal wiki pages / out of this world renderings of office memes to keep morale high and people in good spirits
- feelandcoffee 9y agoI'm not him. But as a front-end too my guess can be a few: * WebGL and 3D Models * Creation of Assets for web * Maybe something more abstract like prototypes, flow control, etc
- santaclaus 9y agoBack before mobile interfaces went flat (the skeuomorphic days) people were rendering out tons of assets for interfaces. The pendulum will eventually swing back in that direction...
- npolet 9y agoTypically I use it to create illustration style renders that I use within pages. I create a lot of complex isometric diagrams for my current job that are interactive. So I create them in blender, chop them up, then load them in with WebGL or just slice them into image layers that allow me to create interactive elements.
- muhuk 9y agoFrom one Blender user to another; learning curve is not really steep compared to 3DS and Maya. Not noticeably steeper at least.
- omegote 9y agoI don't agree. For starters, the more traditional UI of Maya is easier to grasp than Blender's. That's quite a difference that makes the learning process much easier for Maya.
- NTripleOne 9y agoYup, both max and maya have such a 'traditional' (for lack of a better term) kind of UI - it's (for the most part) intuitive, whereas blender's just appears to be spread out all around the sides of the screen and it just feels like a mess. Even the basic aspect of interacting with the viewports is weird, why is there a crosshair, why can't I drag things around; what the hell is this weird lasso thing?
- pzone 9y agoBlender is definitely odd and quirky compared to Maya or Max. All of them have a steep learning curve, but Blender is weird on top of being complicated.
- codebeaker 9y agoI still don't "Get" it, but once someone told me it was a "modal gui" (as a vim user) it clicked a bit more for me, that helps, but I don't have an artistic bone in my body, and fail to pick up blender once a year. (that said, I have no reason to use it, save maybe toying with 3d printing meshes)
- bayesian_horse 9y agoAnother good reason to use Blender is video editing. You can edit the videos, and even create 2D graphics to lay over the video.
- nannal 9y agoI sure hope I can create my name but on fire with smoke effects, it'll look great at the start of all my youtube videos.
- neves 9y agoAs the other open source video editing software were so bad, and Blender had a so good reputation, I tried to use it to edit my family videos. But the interface were so weird for a casual user that I quit. This was one of the reasons that I came back to Windows after decades.
- Mister_Snuggles 9y agoI'm not sure what software you've tried, but I've found Kdenlive to be pretty good for video editing. It's best if you can use a recent version though, old versions that some LTS distributons picked up were not great. https://kdenlive.org https://kdenlive.org
- j_s 9y agoThe issue I ran into with Kdenlive was that I couldn't figure out how to cut within a clip without saving to a separate file. I don't have much experience with Kdenlive or video editing in general but am looking for an Audacity-like tool that can slice out useless portions of longer videos (and also mute sections of audio). For now I use ffmpeg on the command line, but wrangling timestamps is cumbersome.
- HNSucksAss 9y agoHow does it compare to Modo? And also: Why is there "render noise?"
- dom0 9y agoThe cycles render is a pseudo-random path tracer, so the less samples are taken the higher the random noise. Increasing the samples and some other tweaking reduces the noise significantly, but also takes much more time. Denoising the rendered image can produce better visual IQ for less render time. See https://docs.blender.org/manual/de/dev/render/cycles/optimizations/reducing_noise.html https://docs.blender.org/manual/de/dev/render/cycles/optimiz...
- HNSucksAss 9y agoThanks for that info. Do other renderers use non-pseudo-random methods that don't produce noise? I don't recall ever seeing noise brought as an issue in a 3-D renderer.
- sdwisely 9y agocompare in what area?
- HNSucksAss 9y agoUI polish, speed, rendering quality. I don't have much experience with 3-D modeling software, so I don't have further specifics.
- Florin_Andrei 9y agoIs Blender close enough to a 3D CAD app that I could use it to build my models for 3D printing? I've used SketchUp a lot, but it has many limitations. Other 3D modelers are either proprietary, or don't seem to provide enough automation to justify moving away from SketchUp.
- naikrovek 9y agoYes. It is a fully capable 3D authoring tool.
- Florin_Andrei 9y agoWould you use it for your 3D print projects? (assuming you did any 3D printing)
- cr0sh 9y agoI've personally considered it. If you're more of a visual modeller person, it very well might be ideal. If you're a programmer, however, consider looking into OpenSCAD or OpenJSCAD: http://www.openscad.org/ http://www.openscad.org/ https://openjscad.org/ https://openjscad.org/ Not only are they more programmer friendly, but making parametric models should be much easier as a side-effect.
- Doxin 9y agoI do use it for 3d printing projects. It's far from ideal, and doing anything precise in blender means having to learn your way around the various snap tools and the like. But it does work, and work nicely once you learn how to. That said: you should probably learn some other programs too. Personally I use openscad and solvespace too depending on the use case.
- qmoto0 9y agoI have used blender for some 3d printing projects. Shapeways has several articles describing the process and highlighting some of the issues (eg https://www.shapeways.com/tutorials/prepping_blender_files_for_3d_printing https://www.shapeways.com/tutorials/prepping_blender_files_f...). However, while I think it's very good for animation/rendering purposes, it is missing a lot of things you might expect in a full CAD app. I use it to build meshes and then describe how to deform it. It has some procedural constraints. I recall it has some snapping behavior, and googling around shows some plugins that try to add some of this missing CAD functionality, but I can't really judge their success. Maybe see also - https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/53293/is-blender-actually-useable-for-engineering https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/53293/is-blender...