9 ms·

Blender 3.2

423 points by victornomad 4y ago

royjacobs 4y ago
It never ceases to amaze me how much improvements Blender is getting all the time. I've never used it much, simply because I got burned in the past by the (legacy) esoteric UI, but it has increasingly become a joy to get started with and just noodle around with. There are other cool open source tools of course. Blender could've easily remained another one of those hard to use niche applications, but they've definitely managed to transcend that.
- Topgamer7 4y ago
  Blender was one of those things that I got into when I was in my early teens. This was around version 2.3X. It has always had a great community, and made amazing development progress. Version 2.5 was a big ui shift at the time. These days with 2.8 then 3, they have managed to make some amazing progress, in a much faster turn around time. I commend Ton's direction and the amazing work by the devs :)
- keewee7 4y ago
  The EU and the Dutch government does not get enough credit for sponsoring Blender until very recently when corporate sponsorships took off. In the US the commercial competitors would have sued the government for anti-competitive practices if they had sponsored Blender.
  - Shadonototra 4y ago
    - firefoxd 4y ago
      What the parent meant here is that competitors would have sued because Blender is free and open source. Which isn't the case for the companies you listed. More like the makers of Maya, 3dmax, etc.
      - DonHopkins 4y ago
        Speaking of monopolies, the makers (or rather buyer) of Maya and 3dsmax is now Autodesk. They both used to be owned by different companies, and benefited from the competition. But now they're owned by the same monopolistic giant Autodesk, so they're both entrenched in their captive markets, and have stagnated in comparison to how they used to evolve when there was competition. Autodesk really hates Blender, and has always spread a lot of FUD about it. For example, Ton has told me that Autodesk's sales people falsely told their customers that Blender's GPL license means that any content you develop in Blender is automatically licensed under the GPL, so you can't use it to make copyrighted artwork, which is bullshit. There's such a long history of Autodesk spreading FUD about Blender, that when Ton Roosendaal was attacked by a ceiling tile during his talk at the 2014 Blender Conference, he joked that it was Autodesk! ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk
    - hackernewds 4y ago
      You could argue all the money printing and zero interest rates gave companies easy capital access. People rail on them for doing share buybacks, however these companies have also went on to capture international markets, and even companies. Block (fka Square) acquiring Afterpay (an Aussie company) comes to mind.
      - Shadonototra 4y ago
        It's easy when you can bribe them in peace https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/25/microsoft_accused_of_corrupt_business/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/25/microsoft_accused_of_... > Block (fka Square) acquiring Afterpay (an Aussie company) comes to mind. A powerful weapon indeed -- it's unfortunate that people prefer to Flag comments rather than downvote when they disagree with someone, it feels like i'm being silenced for bringing counter arguments to the table American companies receiving government funding/subsidies: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-list-government-subsidies-tesla-billions-spacex-solarcity-2021-12?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-list-government-su... Anti-competitive practices: https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/71rjyx/why_exynos_is_not_used_by_samsung_in_the_us/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/71rjyx/why_exynos_...
  - pkaye 4y ago
    > In the US the commercial competitors would have sued the government for anti-competitive practices if they had sponsored Blender. Can you give an example of where this happened?
    - thatwasunusual 4y ago
      Heard of Google? The latest, and biggest one, is probably when 3K+ companies sued the Trump administration over the Chinese tariffs.[0] [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-china-tariffs-idUSKCN26H03S https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-china-tariffs-idUSKCN26H...
    - aliswe 4y ago
      Maybe they are talking about SpeedTax etc?
    - remuskaos 4y ago
      This sadly happened in Germany, actually. We have a state sponsored weather forecast service, who also released a free Android (and possibly IOS) app. They were successfully sued by a for-profit commercial weather app (that even uses the publicly available data from the state sponsored service). Now the state sponsored app is required by law to not be free. Last I checked it costs about two Euros.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  I have trouble keeping up with the updates lately. To be honest, compared to quite a few CAD programs common in mechanical engineering, Blender doesn't have to hide here. Quite the contrary indeed.
- whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  Honestly hats off to the Blender dev team for taking their technically impressive but extremely tricky to use software and managing to over just a few years turn it into the one piece of 3D software everyone is suggesting to beginners and the fact it's free isn't even what you mention because the software is just great. Really showing the great user experience on open source projects is possible and that the benefits are worth it.
  - Milner08 4y ago
    Well damn, I didn't know that it had gotten easier to use but I am so glad to here it! I will definitely be giving it another go.
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    Oh I had no idea it was improved now. I tried it about 5 years ago and couldn't make heads or tails of it. I'll try it again.
    - shahar2k 4y ago
      it's improved by quite a bit, I wouldnt call it "intuitive" to an existing 3d user, it just goes against so much pre-existing muscle memory and assumptions from other apps... but so does Z-brush and people love that, I'm using it more and more these days for little tasks, processing meshes, plug ins here and there, it has a beautiful and easy to use renderer but I dont work in a field where rendering matters. I dont really want an alternative way to sculpt texture or model, I have several already, and really my industry (film / previz) is moving to rendering in Unreal or Unity (much more unreal) but as a tool Blender is quickly becoming much more impressive. having tought myself zbrush before it was useful (2.something?) blender feels like it's just gaining that usability now to expose useful features... but there's so much more that can be done.
    - bsenftner 4y ago
      As a career developer 40 years into specializing on 3D graphics and animation, Blender's progress and accumulative feature set is stunning. I realized about 6 months ago Blender had cross a threshold of usability, and in those years of being "difficult to learn and use" the Blender community quietly built out a feature set that rivals, if not exceeds every commercial 3D modeler, animation, node based procedural subsystem, compositing, and scientific visualization product on the market. Due to Blender's deep Python integration, deep learning libraries can be imported and integrated to significant mad computer wizardry. Blender has come of age, and it is going to eat several commercial software publisher's lunch, if they don't wake up.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  Something about the project is very interesting indeed. It grows at a regular pace for non trivial ideas. And it seems all joyful and light.
justinsaccount 4y ago
There really needs to be a "the architecture of open source applications" type writeup about Blender. However it is that it is architectured internally seems to have helped it grow over time and not collapse under the weight of 30 years of hacks and poor decisions.
- alhirzel 4y ago
  Completely agree, I wonder if it could be proposed and crowd-funded, or perhaps supported by a grant? Link to AOSA for others' convenience: http://aosabook.org/en/index.html http://aosabook.org/en/index.html
- akersten 4y ago
  The lack of corporate pressures to just get features out the door and clean them up later (never) I assume is a huge factor. I agree, Blender releases new capabilities at such a rapid clip that there's certainly a solid base on which they're building that we could all learn a few lessons from.
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  > However it is that it is architectured internally… Countless hacks hanging off one giant MVC. And having a few core devs with veto powers has helped a bunch with it never getting bogged down with bad decisions. I tried to get some iffy stuff tacked on but they (mostly Campbell) would be “umm, what’s this good for?” And don’t even think about adding a null check to prevent a segfault without getting permission first, like, signed in blood…in triplicate.
- yobert 4y ago
  One of their very early decisions was extremely good in my opinion. Each blender file is saved with a complete schema at the start which basically describes a bunch of C structs, and has a marker for byte order. This means that .blend files can be backwards and forwards compatible, and in the most common case of the schema matching your memory layout, can have their data structures copied directly into memory and then only pointer patching is required. It's quite remarkable.
michaelsalim 4y ago
Blender is amazing. The other day, I needed to create a video of a rotating image so I looked around for potential software to use. Very quick and dirty job. I didn't want to download anything large like Davinci Resolve. I saw OpenShot but was not sure it can do what I needed easily. It's not even lightweight. Then someone mentioned that Blender can do video editing. Can you believe that blender is only around 200mb? I downloaded it, followed a quick tutorial on YouTube to figure out keyframes and how to render. 10 minutes after and I'm done. It's great to see even more features to the video sequencer in this update. Will probably use again for my next video editing needs.
- cowmix 4y ago
  I love Blender but NLE functionality still isn't there yet. Basic things like keeping audio in sync with video breaks all the time. I had to switch to Resolve for my little projects. I will continue to evaluate Blender, but for now it still isn't ready for primetime.
  - bavell 4y ago
    Agreed about the NLE. I tried using blender (iirc 2.9) to make a family vacation compilation and it was a lot of work and not very intuitive. I barely do any video editing though so I may just not have had a good workflow. I wasn't able to find very good workflows either, I'm assuming because blender was still awkward for this use case and others usually reach for another tool. I'm very much looking forward to further improvements and judging from the breakneck pace of features and how much love the project gets, I'm very optimistic about the future!
  - harvie 4y ago
    I had some issues with audio syncing to variable FPS video. Which is mostly used to save some space and battery when taking videos on consumer cameras, but probably something that profesional movie makers do not use at all. Still it would be nice for home video makers if that thing just worked out of the box.
    - 4y ago
tarr11 4y ago
I spent a lot of time during COVID learning Houdini as a hobbyist, because I really liked the concept of procedural modeling and node based development. However, with the continued iterations on Geometry nodes, it feels like a foregone conclusion that Blender will replace Houdini for hobbyist procedural artists. Cycles is a really nice GPU renderer and I don’t have to pay a subscription like I do with Redshift. Houdini still has some strong advantages built over decades such as dynamics and KineFX and is the industry leader for FX. But I wouldn’t be surprised if these tools appear in Blender in a future version, though.
- benrjackson 4y ago
  IMO geometry nodes are a bit lacking atm. No loops, no procedural uv unwrapping, no compact maths expressions, bare bones standard node selection in general etc. It feels like they've been concentrating on particle system type use cases at the expense of things like procedural architecture. However, its still a relatively new feature & I'm excited to see where it will be in a couple of years time. The great thing about blender 2.8+ is that it tends to be good enough in a lot of different areas even if it isn't best in class in any one area. If it can get to that state with geometry nodes that would be massive.
reactspa 4y ago
Question: do companies / startups hire people who know just Blender well (and Gimp/Photoshop), nothing else? (Asking for someone else, not myself.)
- dorkwood 4y ago
  I'd say the most important thing is that you're a good 3D artist and have a strong portfolio. Smaller studios have a good chance of being software-agnostic in the 3D department, unlike big AAA ones.
- stereocodes 4y ago
  The thing about 3d modeling and animation is that you should actually know a few tools. Most places ask you to have a portfolio with 3d projects. They almost never ask for specific applications. If you go to artstation.com and look at the tools modelers use they typically use a few at a time. Blender is insanely good for just modeling. you'll see lots of artist use blender just to model, then substance painter for materials then import into 3dsmax, cinema4d, or maya for the renderer. A cool note I just learned recently is that game companies are using blender to make hard surface modeling easy. Like EA is using blender to make all the levels in the Deadspace remake and importing that into Frostbite(their game engine)
andybak 4y ago
I know the potential audience is most likely a lot smaller than Blender but we're really struggling to grow the volunteer community around Open Brush (the open source fork of Google's Tilt Brush). I was expecting it to grow organically but it's actually gone quiet recently - despite continuingly healthly download and usage numbers. If anyone has any suggestions that don't involve me spending all my time on community building or PR then I'd love to hear them. https://openbrush.app/ https://openbrush.app/ https://github.com/icosa-gallery/open-brush/ https://github.com/icosa-gallery/open-brush/
- echelon 4y ago
  That's unfortunate, because this is such a killer app for VR-based creation. I expect advanced 3D workflows of the future to look less like Blender and Unreal Engine and more like Tilt Brush. Full degree of motion of both hands is so liberating. Plus it's fully immersive. When VR UIs improve around knolling and contextual tooling, this will become more obvious to people.
  - andybak 4y ago
    I agree to a large extent. Although not all interactions have been cracked for VR and there are things I'd still prefer to do in pancake mode with a keyboard and mouse. But anything spatial - most definitely. On the whole trying to arrange things fluidly in 3D space via a 2D monitor is like typing with gloves on.
- shahar2k 4y ago
  is Multibrush related to your project?
  - andybak 4y ago
    They are closed source and don't participate in the community any more. We're working on our own multiplayer functionality that will hopefully be less buggy and more flexible.
    - 4y ago
victornomad 4y ago
There is a release party stream that you can follow here https://youtu.be/0yGoeMfTY8Y https://youtu.be/0yGoeMfTY8Y
felixthehat 4y ago
I was reading this article yesterday: 'The best 3D modelling software in 2022' As a blender studio subscriber & hobbyist, I'm so grateful such incredible software has no barrier to entry, especially for creatives in developing countries. You can see this reflected in this great video of the worldwide blender community from last years blender conference https://youtu.be/uEjmbsiflMU?list=PLa1F2ddGya_8Wzpajwu1EtiS8E1Exm82S&t=292 https://youtu.be/uEjmbsiflMU?list=PLa1F2ddGya_8Wzpajwu1EtiS8... Autodesk Maya $4590 per year Zbrush $895 Houdini $4495 per year Cinema 4D $3495 3ds Max $1700 per year Modo $1596 Lightwave $995 https://www.creativebloq.com/features/best-3d-modelling-software https://www.creativebloq.com/features/best-3d-modelling-soft...
- archerx 4y ago
  To be fair you can get 3DS Max or Maya for $250 a year with a hobby licenses. You can get Houdini for free or super low price as well.
- ohgodplsno 4y ago
  Zbrush and Houdini are still in their own category, untouchable though. Blender is getting close to the sheer pleasure that is sculpting in Zbrush, but there's still quite a ways to go. And Houdini's particle work is unequaled.
- erichocean 4y ago
  For Houdini, you listed the price for the version used by major VFX studios. Houdini Indie (with no feature limitations) is only $269 per year, and you can also learn Houdini for free too with Houdini Apprentice (again: no feature limitations). Independent VFX artists earn well under the $100K/year revenue ceiling for Houdini Indie, so $269/year is their actual "cost."
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
stereocodes 4y ago
real caustics!! finally we don't have to make a mask with light nodes.
- hrnnnnnn 4y ago
  A couple of gotchas that caught me: doesn't work with flat shaded objects, so no crisp gemstone caustics, objects need to have a decent amount of geometry - three levels of subdiv did the trick for me.
programmarchy 4y ago
The pace of development on Blender is extremely impressive. Bravo!
dannytatom 4y ago
dreaming for the day blender has more support for 2d animation. software like toon boom harmony are way too expensive for hobbyist work and there aren't many alternatives for that paper cutout type of animation.
runevault 4y ago
Seeing this announced made me realize it has been a few months since I did anything with blender. I'm not doing much gamedev right now (and even when I am I started using all the assets I bought cheap in various humble bundles/etc for prototyping) but this is giving me the itch to build SOMETHING just to do it. I am far from a visual artist, but Blender is so satisfying to play with.
arboles 4y ago
> Gas simulations now support motion blur What? Isn't motion blur always done in post anyway? As far as I know, motion blur is just a property of the camera, it's caused by after images that show up in the picture when things move too fast, it has nothing to do with the actual 3d world out there.
- zootboy 4y ago
  You need information about the motion in order to simulate motion blur. It makes perfect sense for this to be generated by the 3D renderer rather than trying to guess at the motion after the fact when all you have are 2D frames.
  - arboles 4y ago
    Does 3D motion blur look better? The standard of realistic motion blur is probably real cameras, no? Real cameras don't need to guess the motion it's just an afterimage in a particular frame while the shutter is open.
    - zootboy 4y ago
      I don't have any knowledge of this specific implementation, but my guess would be that it is a question of optimization. If you were to implement something similar to what's physically happening in a camera with a long exposure, you'd have to do a large number of oversamples (e.g. generate 10 sub-frames for every output frame) and merge them together. That's a ton of extra rendering. If, on the other hand, you can get the 3D renderer to generate "smeared geometry" (based on its knowledge of the motion speed, direction, and virtual shutter duration) and render each output frame once, that will get you faster render times.
    - pixelbro 4y ago
      Bit late to the party, but I can shed some light on this. Since a real camera has the shutter open for some duration, any moving light will smear across the sensor. If you similarly "smear" a path traced object by stochastically randomizing the position of the object while the path tracer is gathering samples for the frame, you get exact physically plausible motion blur without having discrete "ghosts" corresponding to sampled subframes.
iod 4y ago
AMD HIP support on Linux now works without proprietary drivers on RDNA2 cards! My 6700xt is great as all I had to do was just install hip-runtime-amd package on Debian from AMD's ROCm repo¹. I am glad they are putting the work into supporting AMD hardware and I no longer have to use opencl and be stuck on older Blender versions. ¹ https://repo.radeon.com/rocm/apt/debian https://repo.radeon.com/rocm/apt/debian ubuntu main
senectus1 4y ago
I love blender. I've been using it to model the renovation for my house, and I have no prior skills or experience in 3d modelling or CAD. it makes me want to buy a 3D printer so i can make things for real.
- _carbyau_ 4y ago
  I bought a 3D printer then had to learn 3D modelling so got into Blender. Blender certainly works. Though keep in mind that mechanical parts - gears, bearings etc - are often easier to model in other CAD though plugins are changing this for Blender. The artistic side of Blender however allows things that other CAD can't dream of. Make an object, turn it liquid, turn on gravity, run a few frames of simulation to get a melted effect.

423 points by victornomad 4y ago

It never ceases to amaze me how much improvements Blender is getting all the time. I've never used it much, simply because I got burned in the past by the (legacy) esoteric UI, but it has increasingly become a joy to get started with and just noodle around with. There are other cool open source tools of course. Blender could've easily remained another one of those hard to use niche applications, but they've definitely managed to transcend that.

Topgamer7 4y ago
Blender was one of those things that I got into when I was in my early teens. This was around version 2.3X. It has always had a great community, and made amazing development progress. Version 2.5 was a big ui shift at the time. These days with 2.8 then 3, they have managed to make some amazing progress, in a much faster turn around time. I commend Ton's direction and the amazing work by the devs :)
keewee7 4y ago
The EU and the Dutch government does not get enough credit for sponsoring Blender until very recently when corporate sponsorships took off. In the US the commercial competitors would have sued the government for anti-competitive practices if they had sponsored Blender.
- Shadonototra 4y ago
  - firefoxd 4y ago
    What the parent meant here is that competitors would have sued because Blender is free and open source. Which isn't the case for the companies you listed. More like the makers of Maya, 3dmax, etc.
    - DonHopkins 4y ago
      Speaking of monopolies, the makers (or rather buyer) of Maya and 3dsmax is now Autodesk. They both used to be owned by different companies, and benefited from the competition. But now they're owned by the same monopolistic giant Autodesk, so they're both entrenched in their captive markets, and have stagnated in comparison to how they used to evolve when there was competition. Autodesk really hates Blender, and has always spread a lot of FUD about it. For example, Ton has told me that Autodesk's sales people falsely told their customers that Blender's GPL license means that any content you develop in Blender is automatically licensed under the GPL, so you can't use it to make copyrighted artwork, which is bullshit. There's such a long history of Autodesk spreading FUD about Blender, that when Ton Roosendaal was attacked by a ceiling tile during his talk at the 2014 Blender Conference, he joked that it was Autodesk! ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwG-qt-sgk
  - hackernewds 4y ago
    You could argue all the money printing and zero interest rates gave companies easy capital access. People rail on them for doing share buybacks, however these companies have also went on to capture international markets, and even companies. Block (fka Square) acquiring Afterpay (an Aussie company) comes to mind.
    - Shadonototra 4y ago
      It's easy when you can bribe them in peace https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/25/microsoft_accused_of_corrupt_business/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/25/microsoft_accused_of_... > Block (fka Square) acquiring Afterpay (an Aussie company) comes to mind. A powerful weapon indeed -- it's unfortunate that people prefer to Flag comments rather than downvote when they disagree with someone, it feels like i'm being silenced for bringing counter arguments to the table American companies receiving government funding/subsidies: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-list-government-subsidies-tesla-billions-spacex-solarcity-2021-12?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-list-government-su... Anti-competitive practices: https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/71rjyx/why_exynos_is_not_used_by_samsung_in_the_us/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/71rjyx/why_exynos_...
- pkaye 4y ago
  > In the US the commercial competitors would have sued the government for anti-competitive practices if they had sponsored Blender. Can you give an example of where this happened?
  - thatwasunusual 4y ago
    Heard of Google? The latest, and biggest one, is probably when 3K+ companies sued the Trump administration over the Chinese tariffs.[0] [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-china-tariffs-idUSKCN26H03S https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-china-tariffs-idUSKCN26H...
  - aliswe 4y ago
    Maybe they are talking about SpeedTax etc?
  - remuskaos 4y ago
    This sadly happened in Germany, actually. We have a state sponsored weather forecast service, who also released a free Android (and possibly IOS) app. They were successfully sued by a for-profit commercial weather app (that even uses the publicly available data from the state sponsored service). Now the state sponsored app is required by law to not be free. Last I checked it costs about two Euros.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
raxxorraxor 4y ago
I have trouble keeping up with the updates lately. To be honest, compared to quite a few CAD programs common in mechanical engineering, Blender doesn't have to hide here. Quite the contrary indeed.
whywhywhywhy 4y ago
Honestly hats off to the Blender dev team for taking their technically impressive but extremely tricky to use software and managing to over just a few years turn it into the one piece of 3D software everyone is suggesting to beginners and the fact it's free isn't even what you mention because the software is just great. Really showing the great user experience on open source projects is possible and that the benefits are worth it.
- Milner08 4y ago
  Well damn, I didn't know that it had gotten easier to use but I am so glad to here it! I will definitely be giving it another go.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  Oh I had no idea it was improved now. I tried it about 5 years ago and couldn't make heads or tails of it. I'll try it again.
  - shahar2k 4y ago
    it's improved by quite a bit, I wouldnt call it "intuitive" to an existing 3d user, it just goes against so much pre-existing muscle memory and assumptions from other apps... but so does Z-brush and people love that, I'm using it more and more these days for little tasks, processing meshes, plug ins here and there, it has a beautiful and easy to use renderer but I dont work in a field where rendering matters. I dont really want an alternative way to sculpt texture or model, I have several already, and really my industry (film / previz) is moving to rendering in Unreal or Unity (much more unreal) but as a tool Blender is quickly becoming much more impressive. having tought myself zbrush before it was useful (2.something?) blender feels like it's just gaining that usability now to expose useful features... but there's so much more that can be done.
  - bsenftner 4y ago
    As a career developer 40 years into specializing on 3D graphics and animation, Blender's progress and accumulative feature set is stunning. I realized about 6 months ago Blender had cross a threshold of usability, and in those years of being "difficult to learn and use" the Blender community quietly built out a feature set that rivals, if not exceeds every commercial 3D modeler, animation, node based procedural subsystem, compositing, and scientific visualization product on the market. Due to Blender's deep Python integration, deep learning libraries can be imported and integrated to significant mad computer wizardry. Blender has come of age, and it is going to eat several commercial software publisher's lunch, if they don't wake up.
agumonkey 4y ago
Something about the project is very interesting indeed. It grows at a regular pace for non trivial ideas. And it seems all joyful and light.

justinsaccount 4y ago

There really needs to be a "the architecture of open source applications" type writeup about Blender. However it is that it is architectured internally seems to have helped it grow over time and not collapse under the weight of 30 years of hacks and poor decisions.

alhirzel 4y ago
Completely agree, I wonder if it could be proposed and crowd-funded, or perhaps supported by a grant? Link to AOSA for others' convenience: http://aosabook.org/en/index.html http://aosabook.org/en/index.html
akersten 4y ago
The lack of corporate pressures to just get features out the door and clean them up later (never) I assume is a huge factor. I agree, Blender releases new capabilities at such a rapid clip that there's certainly a solid base on which they're building that we could all learn a few lessons from.
UncleEntity 4y ago
> However it is that it is architectured internally… Countless hacks hanging off one giant MVC. And having a few core devs with veto powers has helped a bunch with it never getting bogged down with bad decisions. I tried to get some iffy stuff tacked on but they (mostly Campbell) would be “umm, what’s this good for?” And don’t even think about adding a null check to prevent a segfault without getting permission first, like, signed in blood…in triplicate.
yobert 4y ago
One of their very early decisions was extremely good in my opinion. Each blender file is saved with a complete schema at the start which basically describes a bunch of C structs, and has a marker for byte order. This means that .blend files can be backwards and forwards compatible, and in the most common case of the schema matching your memory layout, can have their data structures copied directly into memory and then only pointer patching is required. It's quite remarkable.

michaelsalim 4y ago

Blender is amazing. The other day, I needed to create a video of a rotating image so I looked around for potential software to use. Very quick and dirty job. I didn't want to download anything large like Davinci Resolve. I saw OpenShot but was not sure it can do what I needed easily. It's not even lightweight. Then someone mentioned that Blender can do video editing. Can you believe that blender is only around 200mb? I downloaded it, followed a quick tutorial on YouTube to figure out keyframes and how to render. 10 minutes after and I'm done. It's great to see even more features to the video sequencer in this update. Will probably use again for my next video editing needs.

cowmix 4y ago
I love Blender but NLE functionality still isn't there yet. Basic things like keeping audio in sync with video breaks all the time. I had to switch to Resolve for my little projects. I will continue to evaluate Blender, but for now it still isn't ready for primetime.
- bavell 4y ago
  Agreed about the NLE. I tried using blender (iirc 2.9) to make a family vacation compilation and it was a lot of work and not very intuitive. I barely do any video editing though so I may just not have had a good workflow. I wasn't able to find very good workflows either, I'm assuming because blender was still awkward for this use case and others usually reach for another tool. I'm very much looking forward to further improvements and judging from the breakneck pace of features and how much love the project gets, I'm very optimistic about the future!
- harvie 4y ago
  I had some issues with audio syncing to variable FPS video. Which is mostly used to save some space and battery when taking videos on consumer cameras, but probably something that profesional movie makers do not use at all. Still it would be nice for home video makers if that thing just worked out of the box.
  - 4y ago

tarr11 4y ago

I spent a lot of time during COVID learning Houdini as a hobbyist, because I really liked the concept of procedural modeling and node based development. However, with the continued iterations on Geometry nodes, it feels like a foregone conclusion that Blender will replace Houdini for hobbyist procedural artists. Cycles is a really nice GPU renderer and I don’t have to pay a subscription like I do with Redshift. Houdini still has some strong advantages built over decades such as dynamics and KineFX and is the industry leader for FX. But I wouldn’t be surprised if these tools appear in Blender in a future version, though.

benrjackson 4y ago
IMO geometry nodes are a bit lacking atm. No loops, no procedural uv unwrapping, no compact maths expressions, bare bones standard node selection in general etc. It feels like they've been concentrating on particle system type use cases at the expense of things like procedural architecture. However, its still a relatively new feature & I'm excited to see where it will be in a couple of years time. The great thing about blender 2.8+ is that it tends to be good enough in a lot of different areas even if it isn't best in class in any one area. If it can get to that state with geometry nodes that would be massive.

reactspa 4y ago

Question: do companies / startups hire people who know just Blender well (and Gimp/Photoshop), nothing else? (Asking for someone else, not myself.)

dorkwood 4y ago
I'd say the most important thing is that you're a good 3D artist and have a strong portfolio. Smaller studios have a good chance of being software-agnostic in the 3D department, unlike big AAA ones.
stereocodes 4y ago
The thing about 3d modeling and animation is that you should actually know a few tools. Most places ask you to have a portfolio with 3d projects. They almost never ask for specific applications. If you go to artstation.com and look at the tools modelers use they typically use a few at a time. Blender is insanely good for just modeling. you'll see lots of artist use blender just to model, then substance painter for materials then import into 3dsmax, cinema4d, or maya for the renderer. A cool note I just learned recently is that game companies are using blender to make hard surface modeling easy. Like EA is using blender to make all the levels in the Deadspace remake and importing that into Frostbite(their game engine)

andybak 4y ago

I know the potential audience is most likely a lot smaller than Blender but we're really struggling to grow the volunteer community around Open Brush (the open source fork of Google's Tilt Brush). I was expecting it to grow organically but it's actually gone quiet recently - despite continuingly healthly download and usage numbers. If anyone has any suggestions that don't involve me spending all my time on community building or PR then I'd love to hear them. https://openbrush.app/ https://openbrush.app/ https://github.com/icosa-gallery/open-brush/ https://github.com/icosa-gallery/open-brush/

echelon 4y ago
That's unfortunate, because this is such a killer app for VR-based creation. I expect advanced 3D workflows of the future to look less like Blender and Unreal Engine and more like Tilt Brush. Full degree of motion of both hands is so liberating. Plus it's fully immersive. When VR UIs improve around knolling and contextual tooling, this will become more obvious to people.
- andybak 4y ago
  I agree to a large extent. Although not all interactions have been cracked for VR and there are things I'd still prefer to do in pancake mode with a keyboard and mouse. But anything spatial - most definitely. On the whole trying to arrange things fluidly in 3D space via a 2D monitor is like typing with gloves on.
shahar2k 4y ago
is Multibrush related to your project?
- andybak 4y ago
  They are closed source and don't participate in the community any more. We're working on our own multiplayer functionality that will hopefully be less buggy and more flexible.
  - 4y ago

victornomad 4y ago

There is a release party stream that you can follow here https://youtu.be/0yGoeMfTY8Y https://youtu.be/0yGoeMfTY8Y

felixthehat 4y ago

I was reading this article yesterday: 'The best 3D modelling software in 2022' As a blender studio subscriber & hobbyist, I'm so grateful such incredible software has no barrier to entry, especially for creatives in developing countries. You can see this reflected in this great video of the worldwide blender community from last years blender conference https://youtu.be/uEjmbsiflMU?list=PLa1F2ddGya_8Wzpajwu1EtiS8E1Exm82S&t=292 https://youtu.be/uEjmbsiflMU?list=PLa1F2ddGya_8Wzpajwu1EtiS8... Autodesk Maya $4590 per year Zbrush $895 Houdini $4495 per year Cinema 4D $3495 3ds Max $1700 per year Modo $1596 Lightwave $995 https://www.creativebloq.com/features/best-3d-modelling-software https://www.creativebloq.com/features/best-3d-modelling-soft...

archerx 4y ago
To be fair you can get 3DS Max or Maya for $250 a year with a hobby licenses. You can get Houdini for free or super low price as well.
ohgodplsno 4y ago
Zbrush and Houdini are still in their own category, untouchable though. Blender is getting close to the sheer pleasure that is sculpting in Zbrush, but there's still quite a ways to go. And Houdini's particle work is unequaled.
erichocean 4y ago
For Houdini, you listed the price for the version used by major VFX studios. Houdini Indie (with no feature limitations) is only $269 per year, and you can also learn Houdini for free too with Houdini Apprentice (again: no feature limitations). Independent VFX artists earn well under the $100K/year revenue ceiling for Houdini Indie, so $269/year is their actual "cost."

deleted 4y ago

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stereocodes 4y ago

real caustics!! finally we don't have to make a mask with light nodes.

hrnnnnnn 4y ago
A couple of gotchas that caught me: doesn't work with flat shaded objects, so no crisp gemstone caustics, objects need to have a decent amount of geometry - three levels of subdiv did the trick for me.

programmarchy 4y ago

The pace of development on Blender is extremely impressive. Bravo!

dannytatom 4y ago

dreaming for the day blender has more support for 2d animation. software like toon boom harmony are way too expensive for hobbyist work and there aren't many alternatives for that paper cutout type of animation.

runevault 4y ago

Seeing this announced made me realize it has been a few months since I did anything with blender. I'm not doing much gamedev right now (and even when I am I started using all the assets I bought cheap in various humble bundles/etc for prototyping) but this is giving me the itch to build SOMETHING just to do it. I am far from a visual artist, but Blender is so satisfying to play with.

arboles 4y ago

> Gas simulations now support motion blur What? Isn't motion blur always done in post anyway? As far as I know, motion blur is just a property of the camera, it's caused by after images that show up in the picture when things move too fast, it has nothing to do with the actual 3d world out there.

zootboy 4y ago
You need information about the motion in order to simulate motion blur. It makes perfect sense for this to be generated by the 3D renderer rather than trying to guess at the motion after the fact when all you have are 2D frames.
- arboles 4y ago
  Does 3D motion blur look better? The standard of realistic motion blur is probably real cameras, no? Real cameras don't need to guess the motion it's just an afterimage in a particular frame while the shutter is open.
  - zootboy 4y ago
    I don't have any knowledge of this specific implementation, but my guess would be that it is a question of optimization. If you were to implement something similar to what's physically happening in a camera with a long exposure, you'd have to do a large number of oversamples (e.g. generate 10 sub-frames for every output frame) and merge them together. That's a ton of extra rendering. If, on the other hand, you can get the 3D renderer to generate "smeared geometry" (based on its knowledge of the motion speed, direction, and virtual shutter duration) and render each output frame once, that will get you faster render times.
  - pixelbro 4y ago
    Bit late to the party, but I can shed some light on this. Since a real camera has the shutter open for some duration, any moving light will smear across the sensor. If you similarly "smear" a path traced object by stochastically randomizing the position of the object while the path tracer is gathering samples for the frame, you get exact physically plausible motion blur without having discrete "ghosts" corresponding to sampled subframes.

iod 4y ago

AMD HIP support on Linux now works without proprietary drivers on RDNA2 cards! My 6700xt is great as all I had to do was just install hip-runtime-amd package on Debian from AMD's ROCm repo¹. I am glad they are putting the work into supporting AMD hardware and I no longer have to use opencl and be stuck on older Blender versions. ¹ https://repo.radeon.com/rocm/apt/debian https://repo.radeon.com/rocm/apt/debian ubuntu main

senectus1 4y ago

I love blender. I've been using it to model the renovation for my house, and I have no prior skills or experience in 3d modelling or CAD. it makes me want to buy a 3D printer so i can make things for real.

_carbyau_ 4y ago
I bought a 3D printer then had to learn 3D modelling so got into Blender. Blender certainly works. Though keep in mind that mechanical parts - gears, bearings etc - are often easier to model in other CAD though plugins are changing this for Blender. The artistic side of Blender however allows things that other CAD can't dream of. Make an object, turn it liquid, turn on gravity, run a few frames of simulation to get a melted effect.