8 ms·

Watchtower – Blender Studio

217 points by Ivoah 5y ago

doctoboggan 5y ago
Blender is such an amazing open source tool. It used to have a reputation (along with GIMP) of having a steep learning curve, but that is definitely no longer true. They recently (v2.8) did a major UI/UX overhaul and its now very easy to use. Its also completely scriptable in python. I used blender on google cloud platform for my startup (https://lulimjewelry.com https://lulimjewelry.com) where I digitally engrave my customers fingerprints on a piece of jewelry and then 3d print it for them. I build the pipeline in blender on the backend using NYT's blender docker containers. Everything can run headless (although headless rendering with Eevee was a pain to set up). I have an un-related hobby where I often have to edit video. In the past I've used iMovie just because it comes on my machine, but I've been meaning to try out Blender. I've heard some good things about its editing capabilities.
- capableweb 5y ago
  > Blender is such an amazing open source tool. It used to have a reputation (along with GIMP) of having a steep learning curve, but that is definitely no longer true. They recently (v2.8) did a major UI/UX overhaul and its now very easy to use. Blender as a professional tool till has a steep learning curve, as all professional tools have. This is not a negative at all, as some has been led to believe. There is a difference in "Hard to master" VS "Hard to get started with". GIMP is both at the time, and Blender used to be the same, but now Blender is easier to get started with than before, but as with any professional tool, it's still hard to master as the area is difficult (3D modelling, animation, simulations and more), not because the tool itself. Luckily, mastering 3DS Max, Maya, Blender, Cinema4D or any other 3D suite makes it easy to master the others, as it's mostly the UI/UX that is different between them, not the concepts themselves. > I have an un-related hobby where I often have to edit video. In the past I've used iMovie just because it comes on my machine, but I've been meaning to try out Blender. I've heard some good things about its editing capabilities. You're probably better off using something else unless you're using Blender heavily in your process already. It's nice that the UX of general Blender translates to the video editor so when you're deep into modelling and just need some quick video edit it's fast to do it without too much context switching. But for larger video jobs, you're better off using a dedicated video editing tool like Resolve, as it's still miles ahead of the competition.
  - countrymile 5y ago
    It's definitely got more accessible. They're teaching 13yo children in England to use Blender as part of their curriculum: https://teachcomputing.org/curriculum/key-stage-3/media-animations https://teachcomputing.org/curriculum/key-stage-3/media-anim...
- emdowling 5y ago
  I’d go so far as to say it is one of the most successful open-source projects of all time, and a poster child for how OSS should be run. From the beginning, it has cultivated a welcoming community that produced a range of tutorials and learning materials for all skill levels. It’s evolution has been steady, and it has seemingly found a way to be successful and impactful in a space where closed-sourced competitors are vastly more well-funded. I distinctly remember how incredible it was when Big Buck Bunny was released with all assets and project files freely available. I learnt so much from that, and wouldn’t be surprised if it was a catalyst that led to many, many people gaining the skills and drive to produce new creative works. I hope Blender continues to inspire and enable many future generations of creators.
- notRobot 5y ago
  I'm so curious, what does the NYT use Blender for? The repo doesn't have much context: https://github.com/nytimes/rd-blender-docker https://github.com/nytimes/rd-blender-docker Edit: They have writeups here: https://rd.nytimes.com/research/3d-web-technology https://rd.nytimes.com/research/3d-web-technology
- causi 5y ago
  They recently (v2.8) did a major UI/UX overhaul and its now very easy to use. For me that's always been the issue. They change the UI all the time, which means 90% of the tutorials out in the wild are invalid in various different ways.
  - washadjeffmad 5y ago
    I usually recommend picking an LTS ("long term support") release and finding tutorials about those to establish a baseline familiarity with the interface and features. LTSs won't change for as long as they're supported. After that, Blender makes it easy to manage concurrent versions, so it's fine to just download and run additional versions if you're feature-chasing from a new tutorial or looking for a bug fix. Blender is a lot of people's first modal, process oriented software, and it does require a different mindset than working in other tools where menus and windows are all available from one interface. I'd still argue the amount of conceptual mastery and memorization needed for each is basically the same.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    Blender 2.8 was released on July 30, 2019.
- hwers 5y ago
  Right now is honestly a great time to get into 3D stuff with blender and threejs etc. They've been brewing in adolescence for like a decade but it's all suddenly really mature and exciting right now (and mobile GPUs have caught up nicely). If anyone finds themselves asking "where the heck are the low hanging fruit anymore?" (like I did recently) the answer is in 3D content for the web and other places. It's a much more exciting space than ML (which I played with before that), where things are mostly just in the hopeful research zone at the moment.
  - f0e4c2f7 5y ago
    I agree. Very exciting time and feels much more accessible now than when I tried it a few years back. I'd also reccomend trying unreal engine 5 which is royalty free up to $1M in revenue or something. You can also create in blender and then import into unreal.
  - mrtksn 5y ago
    +1 on this. Years ago I looked at it a bit but the interface was only for people who knew what they are doing and my laptop was way too slow anyway. This year, I’m giving it another try with the infamous Doughnut tutorial and I’m very impressed. Once I got a general idea on the thing, I’m able to navigate the interface and figure out how to do stuff without too much effort. It’s incredibly powerful piece of software(it has scripting and visual programming capabilities) with a very healthy community. Oh an my Macbook Air M1 is more than enough to get it going. Disney doesn’t need to get scared just yet but having access to such a powerful software on such a portable device makes you feel powerful.
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    The wonderful thing is that since Blender is totally scriptable in Python, and Python is the lingua franca of machine learning, you can seamlessly and efficiently use Blender to do all kinds of cool things with machine learning and AI! Both creating ML-enhanced content creation and editing tools of course, but also synthesizing images, videos, 2D and 3D content for ML training. For example, you can use using GPU-accelerated ray tracing and procedural character animation in photorealistic environments to train body tracking and pose estimation networks, since you get the precise "ground truth" and pixel-perfect semantic segmentation for free without enlisting Mechanical Turk to tediously and unreliably annotate millions of video frames. And you can use randomization and retexturing to plug in different body types, skin tones, hair styles, clothing, etc, to train it to work with diverse sets of people, in a wide range of environments, camera angles, and lighting conditions. BlenderAI : Artificial Intelligence in Blender: https://download.blender.org/documentation/bc2008/BlenderAI.pdf https://download.blender.org/documentation/bc2008/BlenderAI.... Blender for AI Devs, pt. 1: Overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtRxC9HPGd0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtRxC9HPGd0 Blender pipeline to generate images for deep learning (BlenderProc) - Maximilian Denninger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AvY_iS6xQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AvY_iS6xQA >Using blender to generate realistic images for ML training: >This is a two parts talk. It is based on the papers "3D Scene Reconstruction from a Single Viewport" presented at ECCV 2020 and the "BlenderProc" paper. The speaker is the main author of both papers. This is the recording of part 2. >Recording of part 1: https://youtu.be/cGGm3Vjdp8s https://youtu.be/cGGm3Vjdp8s >References to everything covered in the talk: https://www.reddit.com/r/2D3DAI/comments/jbkjdy/references_from_double_lecture_photorealistic/ https://www.reddit.com/r/2D3DAI/comments/jbkjdy/references_f... >Lecture abstract: We present BlenderProc, which is a modular procedural pipeline, helping in generating real looking images for the training of convolutional neural networks. These can be used in a variety of use cases including segmentation, depth, normal and pose estimation and many others. A key feature of our extension of blender is the simple to use modular pipeline, which was designed to be easily extendable. By offering standard modules, which cover a variety of scenarios, we provide a starting point on which new modules can be created. >arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01911 https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01911 >git: https://github.com/DLR-RM/BlenderProc https://github.com/DLR-RM/BlenderProc
- etrautmann 5y ago
  Wow, I’m designing a custom ring now and was wondering where I should fab it. Your service looks very cool.
- throwpupper 5y ago
  This person posts an identical comment in every single Blender thread to promote his startup. Check their post history. I am just wondering, is such a consistent plugging allowed on HN? To me it lowers the quality of the discussion and their posts are often voted to the top on all Blender related posts.
  - WHA8m 5y ago
    Thanks, I knew I've read this before...
  - HonestOp001 5y ago
    They are posting where necessary, it allows them to build seo and overall works for them. Smart play, as it feels organic until you pull back the veneer.
  - jermaustin1 5y ago
    Thought I was having Deja Vu. Why is it always near the top too. It's always one of the first comments I read on a blender post.
  - wccrawford 5y ago
    I read it and wondered if "recently" really still included 2.8? That was quite a while ago now.
  - Tomte 5y ago
    Copy-pasting the identical comment certainly isn't, dang told me so when I was once re-using a comment I made earlier for another thread. I think it's cool what doctoboggan has done with Blender, I feel it's okay to mention it in every Blender thread, but he should actually post a fresh comment. And then it's up to us users if we feel it's become a bit stale. Downvoting exists.
toppy 5y ago
Similiar tool would be great for movie players - interface where one can see overall view of a plot but also references to particular actor's appearance for instance.
- sodality2 5y ago
  I always thought something similar would be a cool side project. Annotating plot, character overlays, subtitles with the name of the character for easier understanding, etc. Prime Video has some feature that lets you see the characters in each scene. Getting at least some annotations done by hand would probably be not too difficult - some shows and movies have some VERY dedicated fans. I've attempted to start with something basic - some code to pare down an audio stream into basic hash identifiers a la Shazam - so that media can be identified regardless of quality etc (even encoded to 64kbps mp3, for example). Which is surprisingly difficult...
archerx 5y ago
I'm always told how blender is amazing and there seems to be some impressive tech under the hood, the simulations look amazing and some stuff produced with it looks great but every time I try to use it, it is incredibly frustrating, like it's close but still so far away when it comes to the UI. I have been doing 3D for about a decade and a half, I have made intros and virtual sets for TV shows so I have some experience with the industry. I just really hate the Blender UI, I have used many different 3D programs and blender by far has the most friction when it comes to creation. Blender users have baby duck syndrome and will argue that it's not the UI it is me and I always wonder why is it only blender's UI that has so much friction? Just manipulating the view port can be frustrating at times. Even the three.js 3d web editor feels much more intuitive to use than blenders UI. The best analogy that I have come up with is someone who has learned to ride a bicycle without a seat, while uncomfortable is still 100% usable, but when you come and say you prefer the bicycle with a seat and it's a better experience they tell you, no you are wrong for liking the seat. This gif represents what it feels like to use blender vs any other 3d software; https://media.giphy.com/media/l0HlHelCbB9fyXDOw/giphy.gif https://media.giphy.com/media/l0HlHelCbB9fyXDOw/giphy.gif Please Blender foundation hire some great UI and UX people, give them a budget and don't add any features until the UI is no longer a pain to use. I want to use blander very much but life is too short to deal with awful UIs. I will try Blender 3 but I doubt massive strides have been made to improve the UI/UX since 2.8
- doctoboggan 5y ago
  I am assuming you’ve used the UI since the 2.8 upgrade? Have you looked into the “industry compatible” key maps that you can switch to in the settings? I’ve used Rhino, Cinema4d, Maya, solid works and blender and while they all have their pros and cons blender doesn’t stand out as significantly worse in my opinion.
  - archerx 5y ago
    I have used the 2.8 "upgrade" but it was still a pain and things were much faster and easier to do in 3Ds max. Blender relies too much on shortcuts. With 3D max you can do almost everything with just the mouse and in blender that is not the case. I have used 3D max, Maya, XSI, Houdini, Modo, Unity, Unreal Engine 3/4/5 and all of these seemed intuitive and I never felt frustrated by them unlike blender. At this point I would rather play Autodesk than use blender for free which is sad.
mahdi7d1 5y ago
New features of Blender never cease to amaze me. It gives me some kind of satisfaction to see how much this piece of software has grown since first I used in in early 2010s.

217 points by Ivoah 5y ago

Blender is such an amazing open source tool. It used to have a reputation (along with GIMP) of having a steep learning curve, but that is definitely no longer true. They recently (v2.8) did a major UI/UX overhaul and its now very easy to use. Its also completely scriptable in python. I used blender on google cloud platform for my startup (https://lulimjewelry.com https://lulimjewelry.com) where I digitally engrave my customers fingerprints on a piece of jewelry and then 3d print it for them. I build the pipeline in blender on the backend using NYT's blender docker containers. Everything can run headless (although headless rendering with Eevee was a pain to set up). I have an un-related hobby where I often have to edit video. In the past I've used iMovie just because it comes on my machine, but I've been meaning to try out Blender. I've heard some good things about its editing capabilities.

capableweb 5y ago
> Blender is such an amazing open source tool. It used to have a reputation (along with GIMP) of having a steep learning curve, but that is definitely no longer true. They recently (v2.8) did a major UI/UX overhaul and its now very easy to use. Blender as a professional tool till has a steep learning curve, as all professional tools have. This is not a negative at all, as some has been led to believe. There is a difference in "Hard to master" VS "Hard to get started with". GIMP is both at the time, and Blender used to be the same, but now Blender is easier to get started with than before, but as with any professional tool, it's still hard to master as the area is difficult (3D modelling, animation, simulations and more), not because the tool itself. Luckily, mastering 3DS Max, Maya, Blender, Cinema4D or any other 3D suite makes it easy to master the others, as it's mostly the UI/UX that is different between them, not the concepts themselves. > I have an un-related hobby where I often have to edit video. In the past I've used iMovie just because it comes on my machine, but I've been meaning to try out Blender. I've heard some good things about its editing capabilities. You're probably better off using something else unless you're using Blender heavily in your process already. It's nice that the UX of general Blender translates to the video editor so when you're deep into modelling and just need some quick video edit it's fast to do it without too much context switching. But for larger video jobs, you're better off using a dedicated video editing tool like Resolve, as it's still miles ahead of the competition.
- countrymile 5y ago
  It's definitely got more accessible. They're teaching 13yo children in England to use Blender as part of their curriculum: https://teachcomputing.org/curriculum/key-stage-3/media-animations https://teachcomputing.org/curriculum/key-stage-3/media-anim...
emdowling 5y ago
I’d go so far as to say it is one of the most successful open-source projects of all time, and a poster child for how OSS should be run. From the beginning, it has cultivated a welcoming community that produced a range of tutorials and learning materials for all skill levels. It’s evolution has been steady, and it has seemingly found a way to be successful and impactful in a space where closed-sourced competitors are vastly more well-funded. I distinctly remember how incredible it was when Big Buck Bunny was released with all assets and project files freely available. I learnt so much from that, and wouldn’t be surprised if it was a catalyst that led to many, many people gaining the skills and drive to produce new creative works. I hope Blender continues to inspire and enable many future generations of creators.
notRobot 5y ago
I'm so curious, what does the NYT use Blender for? The repo doesn't have much context: https://github.com/nytimes/rd-blender-docker https://github.com/nytimes/rd-blender-docker Edit: They have writeups here: https://rd.nytimes.com/research/3d-web-technology https://rd.nytimes.com/research/3d-web-technology
causi 5y ago
They recently (v2.8) did a major UI/UX overhaul and its now very easy to use. For me that's always been the issue. They change the UI all the time, which means 90% of the tutorials out in the wild are invalid in various different ways.
- washadjeffmad 5y ago
  I usually recommend picking an LTS ("long term support") release and finding tutorials about those to establish a baseline familiarity with the interface and features. LTSs won't change for as long as they're supported. After that, Blender makes it easy to manage concurrent versions, so it's fine to just download and run additional versions if you're feature-chasing from a new tutorial or looking for a bug fix. Blender is a lot of people's first modal, process oriented software, and it does require a different mindset than working in other tools where menus and windows are all available from one interface. I'd still argue the amount of conceptual mastery and memorization needed for each is basically the same.
- onion2k 5y ago
  Blender 2.8 was released on July 30, 2019.
hwers 5y ago
Right now is honestly a great time to get into 3D stuff with blender and threejs etc. They've been brewing in adolescence for like a decade but it's all suddenly really mature and exciting right now (and mobile GPUs have caught up nicely). If anyone finds themselves asking "where the heck are the low hanging fruit anymore?" (like I did recently) the answer is in 3D content for the web and other places. It's a much more exciting space than ML (which I played with before that), where things are mostly just in the hopeful research zone at the moment.
- f0e4c2f7 5y ago
  I agree. Very exciting time and feels much more accessible now than when I tried it a few years back. I'd also reccomend trying unreal engine 5 which is royalty free up to $1M in revenue or something. You can also create in blender and then import into unreal.
- mrtksn 5y ago
  +1 on this. Years ago I looked at it a bit but the interface was only for people who knew what they are doing and my laptop was way too slow anyway. This year, I’m giving it another try with the infamous Doughnut tutorial and I’m very impressed. Once I got a general idea on the thing, I’m able to navigate the interface and figure out how to do stuff without too much effort. It’s incredibly powerful piece of software(it has scripting and visual programming capabilities) with a very healthy community. Oh an my Macbook Air M1 is more than enough to get it going. Disney doesn’t need to get scared just yet but having access to such a powerful software on such a portable device makes you feel powerful.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  The wonderful thing is that since Blender is totally scriptable in Python, and Python is the lingua franca of machine learning, you can seamlessly and efficiently use Blender to do all kinds of cool things with machine learning and AI! Both creating ML-enhanced content creation and editing tools of course, but also synthesizing images, videos, 2D and 3D content for ML training. For example, you can use using GPU-accelerated ray tracing and procedural character animation in photorealistic environments to train body tracking and pose estimation networks, since you get the precise "ground truth" and pixel-perfect semantic segmentation for free without enlisting Mechanical Turk to tediously and unreliably annotate millions of video frames. And you can use randomization and retexturing to plug in different body types, skin tones, hair styles, clothing, etc, to train it to work with diverse sets of people, in a wide range of environments, camera angles, and lighting conditions. BlenderAI : Artificial Intelligence in Blender: https://download.blender.org/documentation/bc2008/BlenderAI.pdf https://download.blender.org/documentation/bc2008/BlenderAI.... Blender for AI Devs, pt. 1: Overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtRxC9HPGd0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtRxC9HPGd0 Blender pipeline to generate images for deep learning (BlenderProc) - Maximilian Denninger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AvY_iS6xQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AvY_iS6xQA >Using blender to generate realistic images for ML training: >This is a two parts talk. It is based on the papers "3D Scene Reconstruction from a Single Viewport" presented at ECCV 2020 and the "BlenderProc" paper. The speaker is the main author of both papers. This is the recording of part 2. >Recording of part 1: https://youtu.be/cGGm3Vjdp8s https://youtu.be/cGGm3Vjdp8s >References to everything covered in the talk: https://www.reddit.com/r/2D3DAI/comments/jbkjdy/references_from_double_lecture_photorealistic/ https://www.reddit.com/r/2D3DAI/comments/jbkjdy/references_f... >Lecture abstract: We present BlenderProc, which is a modular procedural pipeline, helping in generating real looking images for the training of convolutional neural networks. These can be used in a variety of use cases including segmentation, depth, normal and pose estimation and many others. A key feature of our extension of blender is the simple to use modular pipeline, which was designed to be easily extendable. By offering standard modules, which cover a variety of scenarios, we provide a starting point on which new modules can be created. >arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01911 https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01911 >git: https://github.com/DLR-RM/BlenderProc https://github.com/DLR-RM/BlenderProc
etrautmann 5y ago
Wow, I’m designing a custom ring now and was wondering where I should fab it. Your service looks very cool.
throwpupper 5y ago
This person posts an identical comment in every single Blender thread to promote his startup. Check their post history. I am just wondering, is such a consistent plugging allowed on HN? To me it lowers the quality of the discussion and their posts are often voted to the top on all Blender related posts.
- WHA8m 5y ago
  Thanks, I knew I've read this before...
- HonestOp001 5y ago
  They are posting where necessary, it allows them to build seo and overall works for them. Smart play, as it feels organic until you pull back the veneer.
- jermaustin1 5y ago
  Thought I was having Deja Vu. Why is it always near the top too. It's always one of the first comments I read on a blender post.
- wccrawford 5y ago
  I read it and wondered if "recently" really still included 2.8? That was quite a while ago now.
- Tomte 5y ago
  Copy-pasting the identical comment certainly isn't, dang told me so when I was once re-using a comment I made earlier for another thread. I think it's cool what doctoboggan has done with Blender, I feel it's okay to mention it in every Blender thread, but he should actually post a fresh comment. And then it's up to us users if we feel it's become a bit stale. Downvoting exists.

toppy 5y ago

Similiar tool would be great for movie players - interface where one can see overall view of a plot but also references to particular actor's appearance for instance.

sodality2 5y ago
I always thought something similar would be a cool side project. Annotating plot, character overlays, subtitles with the name of the character for easier understanding, etc. Prime Video has some feature that lets you see the characters in each scene. Getting at least some annotations done by hand would probably be not too difficult - some shows and movies have some VERY dedicated fans. I've attempted to start with something basic - some code to pare down an audio stream into basic hash identifiers a la Shazam - so that media can be identified regardless of quality etc (even encoded to 64kbps mp3, for example). Which is surprisingly difficult...

archerx 5y ago

I'm always told how blender is amazing and there seems to be some impressive tech under the hood, the simulations look amazing and some stuff produced with it looks great but every time I try to use it, it is incredibly frustrating, like it's close but still so far away when it comes to the UI. I have been doing 3D for about a decade and a half, I have made intros and virtual sets for TV shows so I have some experience with the industry. I just really hate the Blender UI, I have used many different 3D programs and blender by far has the most friction when it comes to creation. Blender users have baby duck syndrome and will argue that it's not the UI it is me and I always wonder why is it only blender's UI that has so much friction? Just manipulating the view port can be frustrating at times. Even the three.js 3d web editor feels much more intuitive to use than blenders UI. The best analogy that I have come up with is someone who has learned to ride a bicycle without a seat, while uncomfortable is still 100% usable, but when you come and say you prefer the bicycle with a seat and it's a better experience they tell you, no you are wrong for liking the seat. This gif represents what it feels like to use blender vs any other 3d software; https://media.giphy.com/media/l0HlHelCbB9fyXDOw/giphy.gif https://media.giphy.com/media/l0HlHelCbB9fyXDOw/giphy.gif Please Blender foundation hire some great UI and UX people, give them a budget and don't add any features until the UI is no longer a pain to use. I want to use blander very much but life is too short to deal with awful UIs. I will try Blender 3 but I doubt massive strides have been made to improve the UI/UX since 2.8

doctoboggan 5y ago
I am assuming you’ve used the UI since the 2.8 upgrade? Have you looked into the “industry compatible” key maps that you can switch to in the settings? I’ve used Rhino, Cinema4d, Maya, solid works and blender and while they all have their pros and cons blender doesn’t stand out as significantly worse in my opinion.
- archerx 5y ago
  I have used the 2.8 "upgrade" but it was still a pain and things were much faster and easier to do in 3Ds max. Blender relies too much on shortcuts. With 3D max you can do almost everything with just the mouse and in blender that is not the case. I have used 3D max, Maya, XSI, Houdini, Modo, Unity, Unreal Engine 3/4/5 and all of these seemed intuitive and I never felt frustrated by them unlike blender. At this point I would rather play Autodesk than use blender for free which is sad.

mahdi7d1 5y ago

New features of Blender never cease to amaze me. It gives me some kind of satisfaction to see how much this piece of software has grown since first I used in in early 2010s.