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Blender 2.90
- 91edec 6y agoReally happy with the direction Blender is going, more polish and better outreach. Just scrolling through and being able to see the before/after for new features is amazing, makes it really easy to share with friends who haven't checked Blender out before.
- mkaic 6y agoRight? I also find the accelerating growth of their dev fund really exciting. Somehow this software just keeps getting more promising!
- bitbang 6y agoWell that was fast considering how long the 2.8 lts release series took...
- whateveracct 6y agoOne exciting thing is two long-standing reworks (GreasePencil for 2D art, and new Sculpt mode) landed in 2.8x and now are being iterated on.
- Wistar 6y agoGrease pencil is a feature that needs re-naming as it is now so much more than it was at the time it was originally named.
- mkaic 6y agoIIRC, they actually announced they’re changing how version numbering works starting with 2.90 :)
- Stevvo 6y agoThey messed up on the versioning; 2.8 should have been version as 3.0
- zaphar 6y agoBlender is as far as I can tell one the best run and marketed Open Source projects out there. They seem to have a great way to pay for development. They are have a lot of industry invested in their success. They have a great focus on the end power user.
- matsemann 6y agoThey got $1.2M from Epics megagrant last year, and has lots of people and companies donating. They are slightly above the goal of funding 20 full time employees. I'm happy that an open source software have been so successful. It's come very far since when I first used it, version 2.42 I think. Shoutout to those donating (and how to contribute): https://fund.blender.org/ https://fund.blender.org/
- freedomben 6y agoSomeday when I can afford to pause taking a paycheck for a while, I am going to figure out how to reproduce this sort of model for numerous other applications. At least, that's my dream.
- eitland 6y agoDo it for messaging! Make what WhatsApp was: - independent - financially sound - user friendly (ux) - respecting users (privacy) Add in what Telegram provides today: - bots - sign in - payments In addition: do tie yourself to the mast somehow so you can't give in to the siren song of Facebook or anyone else.
- danudey 6y agoJust make sure that millions of people use the application, that it's a niche application that no one else makes a competing version of at the same price point, and that giant corporations give you millions of dollars to keep making it. Boom, success.
- prox 6y agoGodot is slowly but surely moving in the footsteps of Blender. What you need is to craft your app and gather a loyal crowd who see a future in it. People skills are paramount, because here is where tons of open source projects fail to inspire. Set patreon like goals and hand off side projects to like minded devs. Blender also had its yearly feature reels and projects that helped its way to the limelight.
- ww520 6y agoThat's great news. Glad to see Blender keep moving forward. One thing I wish they would add is to export the color information along with the vertices in the Wavefront OBJ file when exporting an model.
- bootloop 6y ago.obj files don't hold any material information. When you check "Write Materials" in the obj-exporter properties (should be enabled by default) it will also export the materials to a separate .mtl file and reference them in the .obj file. Edit: see also here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavefront_.obj_file#Material_template_library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavefront_.obj_file#Material_t...
- ur-whale 6y agoThat's a very straightforward extension to add, and if Blender does it, its popularity will ensure everyone else picks it up.
- nineteen999 6y agoThis has been supported in Blender since the dark ages, eg. https://blenderartists.org/t/objs-and-mtls-how-do-you-work-with-them/408372 https://blenderartists.org/t/objs-and-mtls-how-do-you-work-w... Most artists don't really seem to work with OBJ anymore anyway, it's an ancient format. I only use it when working in conjunction with ZBrush. Most people have moved onto FBX (especially for rigged meshes) and glTF is the new format that supports way way more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IWKWT_2_Ls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IWKWT_2_Ls https://forums.unrealengine.com/development-discussion/content-creation/1415582-the-new-gltf-import-supported-in-4-19-preview-is-awesome-experimentation https://forums.unrealengine.com/development-discussion/conte...
- edflsafoiewq 6y agoThere is an "extension" to .obj where vertex colors are added to the v line, like v x y z r g b But this stores a color per-vertex. Vertex colors in Blender, like UVs, are per-corner-of-poly. The ideal way to store vertex color information in .obj would really be vc r g b p v1/vt1/vn1/vc1 ... As it is, exporting per-vertex colors would require splitting a vertex into multiple vertices, one per distinct vertex color that it uses.
- checker659 6y agoI wish there was support for Metal on macOS for EEVE.
- mkaic 6y agoAs a long-time Mac and Blender user, I used to be in the same camp. After looking into it though, I found out implementing Metal support would take thousands of developer hours, and knowing that I think I would rather just trust the Foundation to put those hours towards other development that would benefit more than just Max users.
- matsemann 6y agoThe new search will be great for people like me that only use Blender sporadically. I often know what I want to do but don't use it often enough to remember where to find it or the shortcut. And even for regular people it can be great, I use "find action" in IntelliJ all the time just because writing the name of a seldom used feature is faster than navigating to it.
- seccess 6y ago"The new shadow terminator offset setting helps you to avoid shading artifacts with smooth normals on low-poly meshes." THANK GOODNESS, man those shadows always looked so ugly. I primarily use EEVEE so this makes me happy.
- nyanpasu64 6y agoI scrolled down a page or two... > Meet Nishita, a physically based texture built-in Cycles. I think the hyphen shouldn't have been added. The sentence doesn't parse with it present.
- hbosch 6y agoThere are a few spelling and grammatical mistakes on the page. But that's okay, you knew what they meant. "Built-in" was probably just auto-corrected anyway: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/built-in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/built-in
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- agumonkey 6y agoseriously impressive, we're on an exponential
- mkaic 6y agoIt’s so exciting watching that dev fund number climb faster and faster. I mean just in the past year donations grew by about 20%, and seeing so many new corporate sponsors join up too... It’s just inspiring.
- hellking4u 6y agoThis is great, but I have to say, I'm a bit concerned about multiple Intel tools (Embree, OpenImageDenoise) that are now integrated into Blender. The tools seem to depend on Intel MKL, which has famously been crippled on non Intel CPUs. The big concern, for me, is the wide usage of Blender in common CPU benchmarks, which potentially could give Intel an unfair advantage in those.
- archgoon 6y agoAMD can contribute their own tooling if they feel it's worth it. They aren't broke.
- valine 6y agoAMD helped pay for the development of the OpenCL backend for cycles. Before that cycles gpu support was limited to CUDA. They actually hired a developer to work on it full time.
- mrguyorama 6y agoAs a user of blender on AMD GPUs, they should probably put a little more effort in. Many of the shaders used to render scenes in cycles from 2.82 onward crash, and therefore make it impossible to use an AMD GPU to run cycles. I'm surprised they don't push their ProRender renderer into the main release. I can't tell if I like it or not
- danudey 6y agoI tried to play with ProRender a while ago, because we had a few people working in Blender who had to suffer with lousy performance on Cycles on our iMacs, but because ProRender requires a bunch of different settings, our artists would have had to migrate existing projects, as well as (potentially) their workflow, to what ProRender supports. I couldn't tell if that was "everything, but differently" or "most things, occasionally", or some other venn diagram of confusion, and they didn't have time to figure it out because they were busy doing actual work, so we just ended up paying some company that apparently has massive render cluster that you can rent out for basically pennies.
- polskibus 6y agoI'd love to see blender expand into precise modeling area more (CAD).
- ur-whale 6y agoStrongly agree, and I'd also wish they took a shot at the Architecture market (god knows Autodesk and Archicad sorely deserves the competition) but it's not easy to build a product that fits all possible uses cases, especially when the initial focus of the app was SFX and animation. Specifically, for CAD, blender lacks IMO two fundamental things: - a strong NURBS engine, complete with filleting, trimmed NURBS, CSG, full brep, etc.. (something at least on par with OpenCascade). - a node-based (à la Houdini) modeling system to do full blown paramaterics. The current destructive + Undo/Redo model is simply not strong enough for serious CAD used. For the latter, there are add-ons (e.g. sorcar, sverchok) that try to patch the gap, but they all feel like band-aids when you try to really put them to work.
- phkahler 6y agoAfter spending a lot of time working on the code for SolveSpace, I can say NURBS are hard. Conceptually not bad, but in practice there are a lot of complex or tricky things to do well. My hope is to one day write a new NURBS kernel in Rust. But first I need to find good solutions to those tricky problems.
- wlesieutre 6y agoI’ve recently been picking up Fusion 360 for use with a 3D printer and I’d love to be able to model this precisely with blender. I don’t love having my projects live in someone’s cloud service (for non commercial use) where they could vanish at a moment’s notice. Tried FreeCAD which is in the same vein of parametric mechanical modeling, but had a lot of trouble getting anywhere productive.
- mkaic 6y agoAgreed. What I wouldn’t give for an Inventor-esque sketch-based parametric workflow.
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- mekster 6y agoHow is blender compared to competitors? Are people starting to use it as a professional tool?
- Stevvo 6y agoMost people like to stick with what they know, e.g. 3DS-Max is still very popular, despite being a slow, outdated bugfest with a terrible interface.
- mkaic 6y agoI work exclusively using Blender doing professional product visualization. It’s really an incredible triumph of open-source software. EDIT: I actually haven’t tried Max or Maya, but then again, I haven’t needed to. Blender’s feature set has been perfectly capable for my needs and use cases.
- Wistar 6y agoI think that Blender has pushed Autodesk and Side-Effects to recently offer vastly-reduced price "indie" licenses for Maya, Max and Houdini. There are some limitations, of course, particularly a maximum revenue limit of $100K/yr, the licenses can't be used in the same pipeline as full-license seats, etc.
- nineteen999 6y agoIt was used fairly extensively on Amazon's "The Man in the High Castle": https://www.blender.org/user-stories/visual-effects-for-the-man-in-the-high-castle/ https://www.blender.org/user-stories/visual-effects-for-the-... https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5rvwo2/we_produced_the_visual_effects_for_man_in_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5rvwo2/we_produced_th...
- p_l 6y agoIt has significant professional following nowadays, including media studios - for example, Hideaki Anno's studio that was responsible for the Rebuild movies AFAIK switched 3D modelling fully to Blender for the last movie, including pledging non-trivial amounts of money to development of Blender itself. The reasoning included the part where they can simply sponsor features earlier for specific needs.
- bootloop 6y agoI used Blender extensively the last few weeks for a prototype project. It's really a great piece of software but when it came to baking/texturing/painting my models (game assets using the PBR workflow) I grew more and more impatient with the build-in tools it offers . So I gave up at some point and following some suggestions I finally tried Substance Painter to do these things (Industry standard). Using both tools in tandem was a real game changer for me. Definitely would recommend it if you want to speed up your process. I am sure all this can be done in Blender but it will be a pain to do so. Some things I was missing within Blender: - Baking and baking groups (it's extremely annoying to select all the objects each time but I have seen a few extension who help with this process) - Painting on multiple layers at the same time (e.g. paint a PBR material on a PBR material) - A non-destructive workflow with support for the above Nevertheless I love Blender and I would like to be able to use their UI-Framework for my own applications because it works just great.
- packetslave 6y agoThere's nothing wrong with using multiple apps to get what you want. That's what the pro VFX houses do A typical pipeline might be Maya for modeling, ZBrush for sculpting, Substance Painter for texturing, Houdini for procedural/dynamic effects, Nuke for compositing, and Renderman for generating the output. Nothing at all wrong about picking the best tool for the task at hand.
- bootloop 6y agoSure, I mean these are one of the best tools for each stage (and they are all not free). But all of it can be done in Blender too in some way or the other saving you from the upfront investment. I just wanted to highlight the texturing because I really didn't see a way how to achieve my results without going with a commercial product. So based on my experience Blender is lacking quite a bit of features in that space. I mean, I see the downvotes on my original post but I have the feeling that people tend to praise Blender without even using it productively. Edit: Can't edit the original post but here are some open tickets about these things if somebody is interested: https://developer.blender.org/D3203 https://developer.blender.org/D3203 https://developer.blender.org/T68896#988891 https://developer.blender.org/T68896#988891
- mhh__ 6y agoHaving recently started trying to learn to make and setup game assets (I can do CAD but not rigging etc.), I was really shocked how much cleaner Blender is compared to Maya. I'm aware Maya is more powerful for some tasks, but - considering that other Autodesk tools are not too bad - Maya genuinely nearly put me off doing it at all.
- arduinomancer 6y agoAfter trying blender for the first time the other day I was amazed at how good the interface is for an open source program, it feels really modern. I'm used to open source programs usually having pretty janky/outdated interfaces.
- mkaic 6y agoYou’re lucky enough to have started in the post 2.8 era :) Things used to be a lot less user friendly interface-wise. It was a major weakness of the program until 2.8 launched and magically fixed everything. The Blender Foundation is REALLY good about interacting with and gauging the needs of the community!
- nineteen999 6y agoHonestly, as a long term user, 2.8 is not that different to 2.6. From 2.4 to 2.6 was a much bigger jump in terms of UI improvements.
- brundolf 6y agoIt must be a really fun job to be the person that just makes all these different demo scenes to show off new features
- buovjaga 6y agoRecently on HN someone mentioned the core UV tools were lacking. Now the release notes highlight several improvements in that department :)
- open-source-ux 6y agoI've posted this before but it feels appropriate again...this Blender example of green screen VFX was created by a single person and demonstrates the amazing skill of the film-maker and how powerful Blender can be. It's really impressive work: https://twitter.com/DrewCoffman/status/1274743473732632576 https://twitter.com/DrewCoffman/status/1274743473732632576
- verytrivial 6y agohttps://youtu.be/RxD6H3ri8RI https://youtu.be/RxD6H3ri8RI -- hyper-speed, highly entertaining overview of the process he used.
- MH15 6y agoIan Hubert (the creator of that video), is arguably the best public creator in Blender VFX currently. His YouTube tutorials are fantastic and entertaining as well.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoWe need more open source software modeled off of the blender system. Imagine if customers of all the major closed-software players also put aside some small amount of funding to support full time developers of open source systems. This benefits everyone, because it gives these customers some potential future leverage for lower prices, it gives the closed-software players some competition to keep them nimble, and it benefits the next generation of users who can’t afford the closed-software prices, but could get their fingers wet with less capable software.
- danudey 6y agoIn my experience, a lot of open-source systems are managed by terrible teams with their own priorities or ideas, regardless of what the actual community wants. For example, The GIMP has been notorious for this for its entire history, and it still is[1]. I remember ages ago, the discussion basically went like this. > "Thanks to The GIMP, people can ditch Photoshop and Windows and move to Linux and an open-source workflow!" > "But The GIMP doesn't support a lot of features, like CMYK color." > "Sure, but nobody actually uses CMYK color though." > "Literally everyone who designs for print uses CMYK color, like print shops, magazine editors, etc., and that's a huge market." > "Well it's open source, so if it's so important to you then fix it yourself!" > "But I'm a photographer and magazine editor, not a programmer, so I'm just going to keep paying someone else for software I can use, instead of switching to a free version of something that literally refuses to add the features I need." Cue tons of Slashdot comments talking about how non-technical people are so rigid-minded that they're not willing to learn anything new and just make excuses instead. Blender is an exception, not just because it's an open-source success, but because it's managed by a team who are building it for the people who need it, and not just to stick it to closed-source companies by making a pale imitation of a production app, an all-too-common scenario in open-source development. [1] https://medium.com/linux-gossip/the-gimp-has-a-marketing-problem-edced42b0158 https://medium.com/linux-gossip/the-gimp-has-a-marketing-pro...
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y agoThe size of the (potential) user base matters. Back in the early 2000's, I did several workshops on Ardour (DAW) in the same context that Ton and others were doing workshops on Blender (sometimes in the room next door). Without fail, the Blender workshops had 10x more people than the Ardour one. Everybody knows that to do computer generated imagery you need only a computer, and skill. There's a LOT of need for computer generated imagery. The use cases extend far outside the obvious ones for Blender. For a DAW, most people understand that you probably need significant musical skill (which may or may not be true, depending on the genre of music you want to create). And if you're not actually making music, you probably don't need a DAW. The result is that an app like Blender has a user base at least as large as that of several DAWs put together (probably not all DAWs, but several of them). This changes the nature of the type of ecosystem (development, funding, user community) you can build around the software.
- travbrack 6y agomy main wish is for improved undo performance
- pradn 6y agoKudos to the team for the excellent work and for the flashy, yet useful release page!
- dinkblam 6y agothe update is already available for one-click install via MacUpdater: https://ibb.co/ftwPtv7 https://ibb.co/ftwPtv7
- ElijahLynn 6y agoToo new of a release on Arch. Still shows 2.83 in the repo and that is now 404ing. I'll check tomorrow.
- rguetzkow 6y agoYou can also download it directly from Blender's website [1] or build it yourself [2], if you're interested in that. [1] https://www.blender.org/download/ https://www.blender.org/download/ [2] https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Building_Blender/Linux/Arch https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Building_Blender/Linux/Arch
- vardump 6y agoNewest Blender on Raspberry Pi seems to be 2.7, which works surprisingly smoothly under a 64-bit OS. RPi4 has 96 Gflops of CPU FPU power, making it a reasonable option for 3D-rendering for kids. I hope there are chances to get 2.9 to run on Raspberry Pi, especially once RPi Vulkan support matures. How's Blender Vulkan rendering path doing? Is is possible to use it instead of OpenGL one day?
- rguetzkow 6y agoVulkan support is being worked on, the current progress can be seen here [1]. [1] https://developer.blender.org/T68990 https://developer.blender.org/T68990