17 ms·

Blender 2.92

465 points by dragonsh 6y ago

systemvoltage 6y ago
I find Cinema4D’s UI and approach toward everything just brilliant. Tried using Blender 5 years ago and it was extremely unintuitive to use. UI consistency was all over the place. Has that changed since?
- ur-whale 6y ago
  > Has that changed since? Blender's UI has evolved enormously in the last five years. It's come a very long way towards being more: - A) User-friendly - B) More "conventional" for people used to the (by decreasing order of user-friendliness) Houdinis, Mayas, 3DSMax, etc ...
- wes-k 6y ago
  Blender 2.8 (2018) included a big UI overhaul.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  2.8 brought back sanity
- prox 6y ago
  Night and day
- razster 6y ago
  I would give Blender another try. After 2.8 was released they did a great job on the new UI. 2.9 is showing much more of what’s to come. The grease pencil is turning out to be an amazing tool. I’m going to see if I can recreate some of my vector works using the grease pencil.
- Keyframe 6y ago
  Let's put it this way. I've professionally used 3D software since SGI/Amiga days, day in day out. I used them all, pretty much. The great UI/UX unification that happened around early 2000s was great - that's the period when most of the apps standardized around (Q)WERT keys for example, etc.. I tried getting into Blender numerous times, but muscle memory just couldn't give into the weird UI. So I thought, because even before this great unification, I used all those different tools without issue. There was something about Blender that just wasn't compatible with my brain.. which worked for eons in all of those apps, day in day out. Long story short, I've been professionally out of VFX/Animation for two or so years now, taking a break doing something else.. and recently I had to do a small type of work in 3D. Naturally, I lost access to most of my paid licenses during the period so I said, fuck it, let's try Blender again (2.8something). I kid you not, I managed to move my way around it on my own, with a bit of help of reading docs, and finished the actual work and be satisfied with it. I still did a little bit of work in Houdini, since I knew the tool better, but 90% of it was in Blender and it was great (Cycles is great too! We'll see about Eevee). So, something happened, probably recently, where Blender morphed (UI-wise) into this love child of Cinema4D meets Modo kind of thing and one can get around it with no to little help, if you have prior experience with similar tools. I also picked those industry-standard navigation key/mouse bindings and everything's almost there where you expect them to be.
zingplex 6y ago
Once again Blender is killing it! I find Blender to be one of the best examples of how FLOSS software can be substantially better than their proprietary alternatives.
- dagmx 6y ago
  Out of curiosity, what proprietary alternatives have you been using and in what professional capacity? "Substantially better" is a fairly large claim. To be clear, I use Blender and regularly use Maya, Houdini etc and I think all of them, including Blender have so many pros and cons, that I'd hesitate to say any one is better than the other in general.
  - TrevorJ 6y ago
    I would say that the realtime viewport (eevee) is now best in class. The rest is heavily dependent on opinion, familiarity and preferred workflow.
    - dagmx 6y ago
      Yeah Eevee and grease pencil are the two standouts. To your list of subjective metrics I'd also add scalability and performance. Also maybe pipelineibility. Each DCC has very different characteristics on those as well.
- the__alchemist 6y ago
  Blender is an exception to the rule, and a rolemodel. For example, FreeCAD and KiCad are OK, but not as nice (especially re FreeCad) as paid alternatives. GIMP isn't on the same level as Photoshop.
  - codetrotter 6y ago
    However, Krita seems really good also. Probably on par with Corel Painter.
    - 6y ago
Daub 6y ago
Just playing with it now. The new geometry nodes are the beginning of something big... a more procedural approach to modeling. Perfect for natural distribution of things like rocks and plants. Our department (art and design) moved from 3ds Max to Blender last year, and have not looked back. The rapid pace of development is testament to the fact that Blender now has more than twice as many full time devs working on it than Max.
- katmannthree 6y ago
  That is great to hear! I really hope that Autodesk starts feeling some pressure from FOSS and cools off on the blatant anti-consumer moves. The whole "now you have to pay us $XXXX/year in perpetuity or you lose access to all of your business files" has killed a lot of the goodwill they once had.
  - ur-whale 6y ago
    >cools off on the blatant anti-consumer moves That's just not going to happen, it's in their DNA (and the DNA of many of the small companies they borgified over the years). It's going to make them die, but it's going to take a loooong time (a generation of users who only know theri product and physically can't learn anything new will have to retire).
    - katmannthree 6y ago
      At least in my sphere it's also that the only competitor people see is Solidworks which they've had somewhat less than great experiences with, and more importantly, which is susceptible to the exact same issue on Dassault's whim. All of the drafters I work with are unhappy about the subscription licensing, know we're getting shafted from it, and wish there was a viable alternative. Maybe if Microsoft or some other tech giant decides to sponsor both opencascade and freecad we'd have something usable in a couple of years, but as it stands freecad is both the closest thing to and a _long_ way from even resembling a competitive product.
      - 6y ago
meshmonki 6y ago
The amount of support and updates Blender gets makes me extremely happy/confident in the amount of time I've spent with it over the years. New functionality tends to work really well with already implemented stuff and allows for a lot of cool experimentation. In that regard I'm really looking forward to messing with the geometry node stuff. Based on videos done with beta version it seems like there is a gigantic amount of potential there.
- razster 6y ago
  There are a hand of YouTube users making great tutorials using geometry nodes, worth a look. I know this is going to aid me when I start my projects.
a-saleh 6y ago
Damn, this looks nice! Especially the procedural stuff. I did use Blender roughly 10 years ago for school projects, and I would like to get back, anybody has a good tutorial lying around? :)
- adammenges 6y ago
  Look up blender donut on YouTube. Amazingly well done.
- mrnotcrazy 6y ago
  https://m.youtube.com/user/mrdodobird https://m.youtube.com/user/mrdodobird Highly recommend Ian Hubert! His tutorials are short but if your a bit technical and don't mind pausing to Google you can get pretty far pretty fast. Default cube, ducky 3d? There are a bunch of good ones on YouTube.
- ilikedthatone 6y ago
  this is better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j14b25SnYRY&list=PL3UWN2F2M2C8-zUjbFlbgtWPQa0NXBsp0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j14b25SnYRY&list=PL3UWN2F2M2... follow along..
- tpxl 6y ago
  I got into it by watching Imphenzia's 10 minute modelling videos (https://www.youtube.com/c/Imphenzia https://www.youtube.com/c/Imphenzia). It's low poly, if that's your style, but "extrude, scale, indent" is pretty powerful as far as low poly modelling goes.
  - a-saleh 6y ago
    Extrude/scale/indent reminds me of my university days, so this looks great :)
  - jermaustin1 6y ago
    I watch his 10 minute model videos every week. It is cathartic. I don't even follow his examples, I just watch.
- 6y ago
adammenges 6y ago
Is this the version that gets Apple M1 support? I know it’s on their roadmap and I thought it was 2.92, but I don’t see anything in the release notes. Might not be big enough to mention.
- kinghtown 6y ago
  I saw it was 2.93 for arm support. I’m waiting to see how it performs. The word is that M1 is fantastic for real-time animation playback and physics sims but lags a bit in rendering. So I’m curious about the next m1 chips and arm support from blender.
- slezyr 6y ago
  Well, it's dead. It was dead even before M1. It's not fun to render on CPU. > GPU rendering is only supported on Windows and Linux; macOS is currently not supported. https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/cycles/gpu_rendering.html#supported-hardware https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/cycles/gpu_...
  - thisisauserid 6y ago
    Not only not dead but almost done: https://developer.blender.org/T78710 https://developer.blender.org/T78710 It'll prolly be in the 2.93 alpha soon.
    - slezyr 6y ago
      That's just a support for CPU rendering. How are going to render without GPU acceleration? It might take hours to finish.
      - thisisauserid 6y ago
        The problems with GPU rendering and MacOS are myriad even outside the M1.
sillysaurusx 6y ago
I hope one day there's a "Blender, but it's actually ZBrush" open source alternative to ZBrush. Once you use ZBrush, you'll never want to go back to traditional CAD-style creation. I won't claim that Blender can't solve it, but, the workflows are completely different. You end up thinking of models like clay that you can shape and paint, not triangles with textures. Please, someone, somewhere, spend five years making that an open source project. (Realistically, it's a bit melancholy that such a project probably won't ever get made; there's no incentive to. ZBrush exists, and it has a fine price point. I just love thinking about all the algorithms under the hood that power the whole thing... It would be so cool to see the code.)
- brundolf 6y ago
  Blender already has a pretty advanced sculpting system? And it integrates with everything else for retopo and such. I don't really do sculpting so I don't know exactly how it stacks up against ZBrush, but I know it's going for the exact same use-case and I believe it's well-regarded
  - immigrantsheep 6y ago
    Blender is actually quite good for sculpting and the features set got much better with the last few versions. I'd say it's a very very light version of what ZBrush can do. The only problem is that blender's performance aren't nearly as good. The moment you subd a model for sculpting, the viewport because laggy and that's bad you're trying to paint.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ur-whale 6y ago
  > Once you use ZBrush, you'll never want to go back to traditional CAD-style creation That's a little too broad of a statement IMO. If you're building organic shapes / characters, then yes. For mechanical parts, using ZBrush is torture. Also: as others have pointed out, there's already quite a lot of ZBrush-type features in Blender.
Animats 6y ago
A completely new workflow for editing meshes Oh, no. I am so tired of re-learning Blender for each new minor revision. There have been about three major UI revisions in the last year or so. Another round of "where did they hide X this time", trying to use Google to find out and getting obsolete tutorials, and taking half an hour to do a two minute fix.
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  I'm curious, is there a lot of pressure to use the latest version of Blender? Back when I was a kid, I stuck with a certain version of 3DS Max to avoid exactly that type of problem. But I'm not familiar with Blender, so maybe it's not so straightforward just to stick with the old one you know.
  - jedimastert 6y ago
    Other than the pretty big UI overhaul in 2.8, not really.
  - themodelplumber 6y ago
    As far as I can tell, there's no pressure at all unless you are asking for help with a problem that a newer version solved. I love that they maintain a page with links to download all the older versions. Today's news reminded me to try one of the legacy 32-bit builds on my Puppy Linux netbook next time I'm playing on it, because Blender is a really fun tool once you learn the ropes, and has been since I started using it (2002-ish).
  - gotodengo 6y ago
    My issue is that the last year or two has seen a huge amount of technical improvements that I genuinely love. Those improvements are combined with UI and workflow changes which are big enough changes that you can't fully copy over your old defaults. I'm still using the new versions, and some of the workflow changes are genuine improvements as well. But I can mirror the GP comment of spending an hour googling something that I knew how to do by muscle memory in an older version. With the majority of results being older than a few months and not showing the current way to do it. *Edit: in the time I wrote this comment the GP comment appears to have been flagged (I don't recall if it said anything overly mean or anything, that may have something to do with it if so). The concern about the UI and workflow changes is real and has been brought up for a couple of years now however ([1], among others) [1] - https://devtalk.blender.org/t/huge-issue-community-split-between-2-7-and-2-8/7628 https://devtalk.blender.org/t/huge-issue-community-split-bet...
prideout 6y ago
I think Blender might be the most complex and feature rich open source application in existence, period. (By "application" I mean a standalone product for end users with a GUI.)
- hydroxideOH- 6y ago
  Firefox?
  - IshKebab 6y ago
    Yeah and I'd say OpenOffice would give them both a run for their money.
fctorial 6y ago
Is there any point in learning blender as a software developer? I like it a lot but feel like the learning curve is too high and not worth it for me?
- the_gastropod 6y ago
  For fun! I've been tinkering with it for a while, and I feel like it's a fairly accessible way for developer-types to be a little artistic. There are also concepts in Blender (like the whole node system) that might inspire some creative solutions in your day-to-day programming. Also, if you're at all inclined to try make video games, you can make your own 3d models. It pairs nicely with Unity or Unreal for a relatively low-barrier-to-entry to build something small and fun.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- jrockway 6y ago
  Do you want to model things in 3D and render them? If so, Blender is a great tool. I feel like this question is like going to an art forum and asking if you should learn Kubernetes. You could, but it's not going to help with your art.
  - fctorial 6y ago
    I was hoping for examples of situations in which blender helped a software developer.
    - singhrac 6y ago
      I've used Blender to build models for simulations and generated image/video data for training deep segmentation and image models, but it's all science related. Nothing that would help a software developer - I think that's too broad a label anyway.
    - jrockway 6y ago
adkadskhj 6y ago
Anyone know how Blender fairs with Linux & AMD GPUs? I'm in the market for GPUs and am super torn by AMD vs Nvidia. Not only is that a tough choice on Linux, but it sounds like Blender is simply much, much better on Nvidia.. at least for rendering. Thoughts? My goal is of course to use blender to build stuff, but also render them out performantly.
- ehnto 6y ago
  I can't help you for AMD, but I have been using Blender with nVidia in Linux for a while and it's been identical to my Win10 experience with it. Nvidia does have some caveats for linux machines in general, it is a slight pain in the ass to deal with drivers. But at least the support is there. I think with all the cross-platform APIs maturing it's going to matter less and less, but that is me being optimistic.
  - adkadskhj 6y ago
    Yea, i lean Nvidia - because i hear more consistently that they behave well in Linux, and doubly so with Blender. AMD seems to either be more hit or miss, OR it used to be, and a lot of that is just a poor history. Either way the GPU buying landscape is difficult for me.
    - dantondwa 6y ago
      I was in the same position as you a few months ago. I believe that currently Blender provides a much better workflow on Nvidia cards. The reason is simple: Optix. The speed advantage over CUDA (and openCL, of course) is really, really impressive. With Optix, I think I've seen the greatest performance improvement I've ever witnessed on Blender. Here is a Linux + Nvidia + Optix benchmark from 2019: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=blender-281-optix&num=2 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=blender-... And with 2.92 it's even faster and it now supports CPU+GPU rendering with Optix. Unfortunately, AMD doesn't have such good Blender support. You're stuck with OpenCL and slower rendering time. You could try using their Prorender renderer, but to be fair, it's a closed source and non-native to Blender. I'd rather stick to Cycles+Eevee. I wish one day AMD will work with Blender to better support it, as I much prefer them as a company and I like their opensource drivers. But really, Nvidia RTX cards with Blender at the moment are fantastic.
tomaszs 6y ago
I was trying Blender like 15 years ago and I was unable to do anything. But lately, for three or four months I am working on a video composed of multiple 3D and 2D animated scenes and it is mind blowing how easy it goes. I must say I'd never imagine to be able to do stuff I do. Blender is not only extremely stable, but also it is so easy to use. It is the finest software I have seen. You can see my results here if you like: https://twitter.com/SummonTheJson/status/1365363920417005570?s=19 https://twitter.com/SummonTheJson/status/1365363920417005570...
skykooler 6y ago
Oh wow, the Add Primitive tool looks so useful!
quickthrower2 6y ago
I’ll have to dust off my blender donut!
klmadfejno 6y ago
I've tried 3D modeling and failed to get anywhere several times. My only observation is that the mesh fairing example looks like a really cool feature. If 3D modeling "felt" like that, it probably wouldn't be so intimidating.
- nestorD 6y ago
  You might want to try Zbrush (and free alternative like Sculptris). It really breached the distance between clay and 3D modeling for me.
  - kilpikaarna 6y ago
    Sculptris hasn't been updated since like 2011. Pixologic has a free thing called ZBrushCoreMini now, that's basically the same.
3327 6y ago
Blender paywalled a bunch of lessons and tutorials, they are hypocrites.
gjstein 6y ago
The one killer feature I'm still missing from Blender is real-time simulation. I absolutely adore using Blender for hobby and art projects, but as a full-time robotics and computer vision researcher, Blender just still isn't quite there when it comes to being able to generate images in "real time" (even with Eevee) for robotics sim applications, and I'm still using hacked-together tools in game engines like Unity to achieve this and render images. Would really be great if the Blender Game Engine effort could continue as a part of the main branch, but I understand the need of a software to limit it's scope. Never hurts to dream...
- SEJeff 6y ago
  Can you not do that with the Blender python api? It is a shame they had to discontinue the Blender Game Engine which absolutely would have done this.
smcnally 6y ago
I'm in 2.92 now opening projects from previous versions and all is well so far. Q: When the new-version splash screen asks to select new or use previous config, am I missing out on optimizations or new features by selecting previous? - The render cache indicators in VSE are gone. The orange bar segments that show strip cache building is comforting while Preview FPS stutters. Confirm that caches are being built ... but in default /tmp/ vs what's in my previous config. Will start w/ a 2.92 config and update. Tangent: 2.92 was in the Snap Store earlier this week and updated without hassle. Understood there are issues w Snap, but this was a good experience.
- smcnally 6y ago
  “VSE: Hide cache settings and adjust defaults” was in this release and likely related. https://developer.blender.org/rBf448ff2afe7a https://developer.blender.org/rBf448ff2afe7a This page is well-done for other-than-major release highlights: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.92/More_Features https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.92/M...

465 points by dragonsh 6y ago

I find Cinema4D’s UI and approach toward everything just brilliant. Tried using Blender 5 years ago and it was extremely unintuitive to use. UI consistency was all over the place. Has that changed since?

ur-whale 6y ago
> Has that changed since? Blender's UI has evolved enormously in the last five years. It's come a very long way towards being more: - A) User-friendly - B) More "conventional" for people used to the (by decreasing order of user-friendliness) Houdinis, Mayas, 3DSMax, etc ...
wes-k 6y ago
Blender 2.8 (2018) included a big UI overhaul.
agumonkey 6y ago
2.8 brought back sanity
prox 6y ago
Night and day
razster 6y ago
I would give Blender another try. After 2.8 was released they did a great job on the new UI. 2.9 is showing much more of what’s to come. The grease pencil is turning out to be an amazing tool. I’m going to see if I can recreate some of my vector works using the grease pencil.
Keyframe 6y ago
Let's put it this way. I've professionally used 3D software since SGI/Amiga days, day in day out. I used them all, pretty much. The great UI/UX unification that happened around early 2000s was great - that's the period when most of the apps standardized around (Q)WERT keys for example, etc.. I tried getting into Blender numerous times, but muscle memory just couldn't give into the weird UI. So I thought, because even before this great unification, I used all those different tools without issue. There was something about Blender that just wasn't compatible with my brain.. which worked for eons in all of those apps, day in day out. Long story short, I've been professionally out of VFX/Animation for two or so years now, taking a break doing something else.. and recently I had to do a small type of work in 3D. Naturally, I lost access to most of my paid licenses during the period so I said, fuck it, let's try Blender again (2.8something). I kid you not, I managed to move my way around it on my own, with a bit of help of reading docs, and finished the actual work and be satisfied with it. I still did a little bit of work in Houdini, since I knew the tool better, but 90% of it was in Blender and it was great (Cycles is great too! We'll see about Eevee). So, something happened, probably recently, where Blender morphed (UI-wise) into this love child of Cinema4D meets Modo kind of thing and one can get around it with no to little help, if you have prior experience with similar tools. I also picked those industry-standard navigation key/mouse bindings and everything's almost there where you expect them to be.

zingplex 6y ago

Once again Blender is killing it! I find Blender to be one of the best examples of how FLOSS software can be substantially better than their proprietary alternatives.

dagmx 6y ago
Out of curiosity, what proprietary alternatives have you been using and in what professional capacity? "Substantially better" is a fairly large claim. To be clear, I use Blender and regularly use Maya, Houdini etc and I think all of them, including Blender have so many pros and cons, that I'd hesitate to say any one is better than the other in general.
- TrevorJ 6y ago
  I would say that the realtime viewport (eevee) is now best in class. The rest is heavily dependent on opinion, familiarity and preferred workflow.
  - dagmx 6y ago
    Yeah Eevee and grease pencil are the two standouts. To your list of subjective metrics I'd also add scalability and performance. Also maybe pipelineibility. Each DCC has very different characteristics on those as well.
the__alchemist 6y ago
Blender is an exception to the rule, and a rolemodel. For example, FreeCAD and KiCad are OK, but not as nice (especially re FreeCad) as paid alternatives. GIMP isn't on the same level as Photoshop.
- codetrotter 6y ago
  However, Krita seems really good also. Probably on par with Corel Painter.
  - 6y ago

Daub 6y ago

Just playing with it now. The new geometry nodes are the beginning of something big... a more procedural approach to modeling. Perfect for natural distribution of things like rocks and plants. Our department (art and design) moved from 3ds Max to Blender last year, and have not looked back. The rapid pace of development is testament to the fact that Blender now has more than twice as many full time devs working on it than Max.

katmannthree 6y ago
That is great to hear! I really hope that Autodesk starts feeling some pressure from FOSS and cools off on the blatant anti-consumer moves. The whole "now you have to pay us $XXXX/year in perpetuity or you lose access to all of your business files" has killed a lot of the goodwill they once had.
- ur-whale 6y ago
  >cools off on the blatant anti-consumer moves That's just not going to happen, it's in their DNA (and the DNA of many of the small companies they borgified over the years). It's going to make them die, but it's going to take a loooong time (a generation of users who only know theri product and physically can't learn anything new will have to retire).
  - katmannthree 6y ago
    At least in my sphere it's also that the only competitor people see is Solidworks which they've had somewhat less than great experiences with, and more importantly, which is susceptible to the exact same issue on Dassault's whim. All of the drafters I work with are unhappy about the subscription licensing, know we're getting shafted from it, and wish there was a viable alternative. Maybe if Microsoft or some other tech giant decides to sponsor both opencascade and freecad we'd have something usable in a couple of years, but as it stands freecad is both the closest thing to and a _long_ way from even resembling a competitive product.
    - 6y ago

meshmonki 6y ago

The amount of support and updates Blender gets makes me extremely happy/confident in the amount of time I've spent with it over the years. New functionality tends to work really well with already implemented stuff and allows for a lot of cool experimentation. In that regard I'm really looking forward to messing with the geometry node stuff. Based on videos done with beta version it seems like there is a gigantic amount of potential there.

razster 6y ago
There are a hand of YouTube users making great tutorials using geometry nodes, worth a look. I know this is going to aid me when I start my projects.

a-saleh 6y ago

Damn, this looks nice! Especially the procedural stuff. I did use Blender roughly 10 years ago for school projects, and I would like to get back, anybody has a good tutorial lying around? :)

adammenges 6y ago
Look up blender donut on YouTube. Amazingly well done.
mrnotcrazy 6y ago
https://m.youtube.com/user/mrdodobird https://m.youtube.com/user/mrdodobird Highly recommend Ian Hubert! His tutorials are short but if your a bit technical and don't mind pausing to Google you can get pretty far pretty fast. Default cube, ducky 3d? There are a bunch of good ones on YouTube.
ilikedthatone 6y ago
this is better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j14b25SnYRY&list=PL3UWN2F2M2C8-zUjbFlbgtWPQa0NXBsp0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j14b25SnYRY&list=PL3UWN2F2M2... follow along..
tpxl 6y ago
I got into it by watching Imphenzia's 10 minute modelling videos (https://www.youtube.com/c/Imphenzia https://www.youtube.com/c/Imphenzia). It's low poly, if that's your style, but "extrude, scale, indent" is pretty powerful as far as low poly modelling goes.
- a-saleh 6y ago
  Extrude/scale/indent reminds me of my university days, so this looks great :)
- jermaustin1 6y ago
  I watch his 10 minute model videos every week. It is cathartic. I don't even follow his examples, I just watch.
6y ago

adammenges 6y ago

Is this the version that gets Apple M1 support? I know it’s on their roadmap and I thought it was 2.92, but I don’t see anything in the release notes. Might not be big enough to mention.

kinghtown 6y ago
I saw it was 2.93 for arm support. I’m waiting to see how it performs. The word is that M1 is fantastic for real-time animation playback and physics sims but lags a bit in rendering. So I’m curious about the next m1 chips and arm support from blender.
slezyr 6y ago
Well, it's dead. It was dead even before M1. It's not fun to render on CPU. > GPU rendering is only supported on Windows and Linux; macOS is currently not supported. https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/cycles/gpu_rendering.html#supported-hardware https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/cycles/gpu_...
- thisisauserid 6y ago
  Not only not dead but almost done: https://developer.blender.org/T78710 https://developer.blender.org/T78710 It'll prolly be in the 2.93 alpha soon.
  - slezyr 6y ago
    That's just a support for CPU rendering. How are going to render without GPU acceleration? It might take hours to finish.
    - thisisauserid 6y ago
      The problems with GPU rendering and MacOS are myriad even outside the M1.

sillysaurusx 6y ago

I hope one day there's a "Blender, but it's actually ZBrush" open source alternative to ZBrush. Once you use ZBrush, you'll never want to go back to traditional CAD-style creation. I won't claim that Blender can't solve it, but, the workflows are completely different. You end up thinking of models like clay that you can shape and paint, not triangles with textures. Please, someone, somewhere, spend five years making that an open source project. (Realistically, it's a bit melancholy that such a project probably won't ever get made; there's no incentive to. ZBrush exists, and it has a fine price point. I just love thinking about all the algorithms under the hood that power the whole thing... It would be so cool to see the code.)

brundolf 6y ago
Blender already has a pretty advanced sculpting system? And it integrates with everything else for retopo and such. I don't really do sculpting so I don't know exactly how it stacks up against ZBrush, but I know it's going for the exact same use-case and I believe it's well-regarded
- immigrantsheep 6y ago
  Blender is actually quite good for sculpting and the features set got much better with the last few versions. I'd say it's a very very light version of what ZBrush can do. The only problem is that blender's performance aren't nearly as good. The moment you subd a model for sculpting, the viewport because laggy and that's bad you're trying to paint.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ur-whale 6y ago
> Once you use ZBrush, you'll never want to go back to traditional CAD-style creation That's a little too broad of a statement IMO. If you're building organic shapes / characters, then yes. For mechanical parts, using ZBrush is torture. Also: as others have pointed out, there's already quite a lot of ZBrush-type features in Blender.

Animats 6y ago

A completely new workflow for editing meshes Oh, no. I am so tired of re-learning Blender for each new minor revision. There have been about three major UI revisions in the last year or so. Another round of "where did they hide X this time", trying to use Google to find out and getting obsolete tutorials, and taking half an hour to do a two minute fix.

sillysaurusx 6y ago
I'm curious, is there a lot of pressure to use the latest version of Blender? Back when I was a kid, I stuck with a certain version of 3DS Max to avoid exactly that type of problem. But I'm not familiar with Blender, so maybe it's not so straightforward just to stick with the old one you know.
- jedimastert 6y ago
  Other than the pretty big UI overhaul in 2.8, not really.
- themodelplumber 6y ago
  As far as I can tell, there's no pressure at all unless you are asking for help with a problem that a newer version solved. I love that they maintain a page with links to download all the older versions. Today's news reminded me to try one of the legacy 32-bit builds on my Puppy Linux netbook next time I'm playing on it, because Blender is a really fun tool once you learn the ropes, and has been since I started using it (2002-ish).
- gotodengo 6y ago
  My issue is that the last year or two has seen a huge amount of technical improvements that I genuinely love. Those improvements are combined with UI and workflow changes which are big enough changes that you can't fully copy over your old defaults. I'm still using the new versions, and some of the workflow changes are genuine improvements as well. But I can mirror the GP comment of spending an hour googling something that I knew how to do by muscle memory in an older version. With the majority of results being older than a few months and not showing the current way to do it. *Edit: in the time I wrote this comment the GP comment appears to have been flagged (I don't recall if it said anything overly mean or anything, that may have something to do with it if so). The concern about the UI and workflow changes is real and has been brought up for a couple of years now however ([1], among others) [1] - https://devtalk.blender.org/t/huge-issue-community-split-between-2-7-and-2-8/7628 https://devtalk.blender.org/t/huge-issue-community-split-bet...

prideout 6y ago

I think Blender might be the most complex and feature rich open source application in existence, period. (By "application" I mean a standalone product for end users with a GUI.)

hydroxideOH- 6y ago
Firefox?
- IshKebab 6y ago
  Yeah and I'd say OpenOffice would give them both a run for their money.

fctorial 6y ago

Is there any point in learning blender as a software developer? I like it a lot but feel like the learning curve is too high and not worth it for me?

the_gastropod 6y ago
For fun! I've been tinkering with it for a while, and I feel like it's a fairly accessible way for developer-types to be a little artistic. There are also concepts in Blender (like the whole node system) that might inspire some creative solutions in your day-to-day programming. Also, if you're at all inclined to try make video games, you can make your own 3d models. It pairs nicely with Unity or Unreal for a relatively low-barrier-to-entry to build something small and fun.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
jrockway 6y ago
Do you want to model things in 3D and render them? If so, Blender is a great tool. I feel like this question is like going to an art forum and asking if you should learn Kubernetes. You could, but it's not going to help with your art.
- fctorial 6y ago
  I was hoping for examples of situations in which blender helped a software developer.
  - singhrac 6y ago
    I've used Blender to build models for simulations and generated image/video data for training deep segmentation and image models, but it's all science related. Nothing that would help a software developer - I think that's too broad a label anyway.
  - jrockway 6y ago

adkadskhj 6y ago

Anyone know how Blender fairs with Linux & AMD GPUs? I'm in the market for GPUs and am super torn by AMD vs Nvidia. Not only is that a tough choice on Linux, but it sounds like Blender is simply much, much better on Nvidia.. at least for rendering. Thoughts? My goal is of course to use blender to build stuff, but also render them out performantly.

ehnto 6y ago
I can't help you for AMD, but I have been using Blender with nVidia in Linux for a while and it's been identical to my Win10 experience with it. Nvidia does have some caveats for linux machines in general, it is a slight pain in the ass to deal with drivers. But at least the support is there. I think with all the cross-platform APIs maturing it's going to matter less and less, but that is me being optimistic.
- adkadskhj 6y ago
  Yea, i lean Nvidia - because i hear more consistently that they behave well in Linux, and doubly so with Blender. AMD seems to either be more hit or miss, OR it used to be, and a lot of that is just a poor history. Either way the GPU buying landscape is difficult for me.
  - dantondwa 6y ago
    I was in the same position as you a few months ago. I believe that currently Blender provides a much better workflow on Nvidia cards. The reason is simple: Optix. The speed advantage over CUDA (and openCL, of course) is really, really impressive. With Optix, I think I've seen the greatest performance improvement I've ever witnessed on Blender. Here is a Linux + Nvidia + Optix benchmark from 2019: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=blender-281-optix&num=2 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=blender-... And with 2.92 it's even faster and it now supports CPU+GPU rendering with Optix. Unfortunately, AMD doesn't have such good Blender support. You're stuck with OpenCL and slower rendering time. You could try using their Prorender renderer, but to be fair, it's a closed source and non-native to Blender. I'd rather stick to Cycles+Eevee. I wish one day AMD will work with Blender to better support it, as I much prefer them as a company and I like their opensource drivers. But really, Nvidia RTX cards with Blender at the moment are fantastic.

tomaszs 6y ago

I was trying Blender like 15 years ago and I was unable to do anything. But lately, for three or four months I am working on a video composed of multiple 3D and 2D animated scenes and it is mind blowing how easy it goes. I must say I'd never imagine to be able to do stuff I do. Blender is not only extremely stable, but also it is so easy to use. It is the finest software I have seen. You can see my results here if you like: https://twitter.com/SummonTheJson/status/1365363920417005570?s=19 https://twitter.com/SummonTheJson/status/1365363920417005570...

skykooler 6y ago

Oh wow, the Add Primitive tool looks so useful!

quickthrower2 6y ago

I’ll have to dust off my blender donut!

klmadfejno 6y ago

I've tried 3D modeling and failed to get anywhere several times. My only observation is that the mesh fairing example looks like a really cool feature. If 3D modeling "felt" like that, it probably wouldn't be so intimidating.

nestorD 6y ago
You might want to try Zbrush (and free alternative like Sculptris). It really breached the distance between clay and 3D modeling for me.
- kilpikaarna 6y ago
  Sculptris hasn't been updated since like 2011. Pixologic has a free thing called ZBrushCoreMini now, that's basically the same.

3327 6y ago

Blender paywalled a bunch of lessons and tutorials, they are hypocrites.

gjstein 6y ago

The one killer feature I'm still missing from Blender is real-time simulation. I absolutely adore using Blender for hobby and art projects, but as a full-time robotics and computer vision researcher, Blender just still isn't quite there when it comes to being able to generate images in "real time" (even with Eevee) for robotics sim applications, and I'm still using hacked-together tools in game engines like Unity to achieve this and render images. Would really be great if the Blender Game Engine effort could continue as a part of the main branch, but I understand the need of a software to limit it's scope. Never hurts to dream...

SEJeff 6y ago
Can you not do that with the Blender python api? It is a shame they had to discontinue the Blender Game Engine which absolutely would have done this.

smcnally 6y ago

I'm in 2.92 now opening projects from previous versions and all is well so far. Q: When the new-version splash screen asks to select new or use previous config, am I missing out on optimizations or new features by selecting previous? - The render cache indicators in VSE are gone. The orange bar segments that show strip cache building is comforting while Preview FPS stutters. Confirm that caches are being built ... but in default /tmp/ vs what's in my previous config. Will start w/ a 2.92 config and update. Tangent: 2.92 was in the Snap Store earlier this week and updated without hassle. Understood there are issues w Snap, but this was a good experience.

smcnally 6y ago
“VSE: Hide cache settings and adjust defaults” was in this release and likely related. https://developer.blender.org/rBf448ff2afe7a https://developer.blender.org/rBf448ff2afe7a This page is well-done for other-than-major release highlights: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.92/More_Features https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.92/M...