8 ms·

I recently started doing basic modeling work for my small hobby projects. I'm amazed at how professional and finished Blender is for being an open source projec

I recently started doing basic modeling work for my small hobby projects. I'm amazed at how professional and finished Blender is for being an open source project. It feels like I'm using an Adobe product or similar. Big props to the team behind it, you're awesome.

seritools 3y ago
> It feels like I'm using an Adobe product or similar. So it's slow, bloated, and crashes regularly?
- nkozyra 3y ago
  > So it's slow, bloated, and crashes regularly? I think Adobe has really improved the last decade or so in this regard. Blender is really amazing and just seems to get more powerful every year.
  - timeon 3y ago
    > improved the last decade I was experiencing less bloat and crashes in versions before Creative Cloud.
  - virtualritz 3y ago
    > I think Adobe has really improved the last decade or so in this regard Nope. Been using Photoshop since version 1, AfterEffects since its inception (by a company called Cosa AFAIR) and InDesign since version 1. 30+ years give or take. There all indeed so slow and bloated that they feel mostly unusable to me today. And it's the opposite. It got to this over the last 10–15 years. Except Are. That was always slow but for motion graphics it's hard to get around it. All the freelance VFX artists I know use old versions of PS and Ae. InDesign is so buggy that I switched to Affinity three years ago. Only younger people, who never experienced the snappy desktop systems & software of the 90's or early 2000's, think the state of things today is somehow normal.
    - CyberDildonics 3y ago
      The solution is to just to avoid adobe stuff as much as possible. A lot of what would be done in photoshop can be done in nuke and after effects can just be thrown in the trash when using nuke.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - Auracle 3y ago
      I spend a good amount of time in Photoshop and I disagree that it’s slow and bloated, in general. I know after a new version a year or two ago some actions were noticeably slower, but I complained to the project manager on Reddit on the specifics and it got tightened back up pretty quickly. Also, anyone using old versions of Photoshop are missing out. Both the new Remove tool along with the generative AI fill are absolute gamechangers.
    - nkozyra 3y ago
      Not version 1 but I've been on it since Photoshop 3 and have had the exact opposite experience. It was rough early on, crashed frequently and often. Got better around Photoshop 4/5 then had another rough period. I've found the latest Creative Cloud versions to be the most stable. I cannot recall a single Photoshop crash.
    - jwells89 3y ago
      Yep. In my experience CS1 and CS2 are somehow more responsive feeling running on now-ancient and comparably resource-bare hardware like PPC G5 or Core 2 Duo Macs than PS CC is on a modern armed-to-the-teeth workstation, which is ridiculous. The bloat was ramping up pretty aggressively through CS3, CS4, and CS5 but the shift to subscription model really gave Adobe a license to not care about efficiency or UI snappiness.
  - orbital-decay 3y ago
    > I think Adobe has really improved the last decade or so in this regard. They massively increased the complexity of their products after introducing the Creative Cloud. It's an absolute mess that can cause delays in Microsoft (!) just to make the new Windows release work with it. And Photoshop in particular has the byzantine PSD format that requires them to keep old versions of the code to read old versions of the format. Adobe software in general resembles Windows nowadays - they are trying to modernize it but legacy decisions keep them from doing too much, as they can't break backward compatibility, their entire business model depends on keeping the users locked in. As a result, their old software is a terrible mishmash of UIs from different eras.
- Maken 3y ago
  Also, it won't shut up about it's couple AI utilities.
  - cptskippy 3y ago
    Have you tried the AI Feedback Utility?
i_am_a_peasant 3y ago
And the user interface is all OpenGL... man I can't imagine how much time it would take to write a decent user interface starting with nothing but OpenGL. Like just rendering text to the screen is a pain. And it's so snappy and responsive and it looks sooooo good. Definitely not a one man project, there's just no way.
- themerone 3y ago
  If your choices are Motif or the Athena toolkit, rolling your own UI is an understandable choice.
  - mr_sturd 3y ago
    They should roll it out in to a separate library. Call it the Blender Toolkit, or BTK.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - i_am_a_peasant 3y ago
      I think there have been attempts.. but it's too deeply married to the rest of Blender for it to be worth extracting I think.
    - DonHopkins 3y ago
      BTK has a nice ring to it -- and it's an even more brilliant public relations disaster than the name "GIMP"! What kinds of widgets would Dennis Rader have in his "Bind, Torture, Kill" tookit? ;) It couldn't be any worse than Motif. BTK would also imply the existence of: BLIMP: Blender Image Manipulation Program Oh the humanity! BLOME Desktop: Blender Object Model Environment I would totally be down for that.
      - antod 3y ago
        or... BIOME: Blender Interactive Object Model Environment
dagw 3y ago
Unlike most open source projects, Blender started its life as a professional piece of software by and for artists who had to deliver commercial projects on a dead line. First as an in house tool for an animation studio, and later as a commercial software product. It only became open source later in its life cycle after the commercial Blender company went bankrupt. It has also been headed by the same lead developer from its earliest days as an in-house tool right up until today. All these things really shine through and make it quiet unique among open source applications.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  Interesting but the special part about blender is the open source part, they managed to keep it alive, revamp the UI fully and bring on new and hard features on a regular basis. I don't remember another foss project of that kind.
  - joshfee 3y ago
    krita.org is a similarly polished and professional open source project, but I agree these types of projects are the exception rather than the rule (though I suppose the same could be said about most products).
    - jansan 3y ago
      Krita is nowhere near the level of Blender. It is more on the level of Inkscape.
      - hellcow 3y ago
        As a hobbyist digital painter and 3D artist who has used both Blender and Krita, I strongly disagree with this. Krita is simply best-in-class at digital painting on a PC. Both are exceptional pieces of software. It did take me a week or two to adjust to Krita’s hotkeys coming from a lifetime of Photoshop, but the software in the end is leagues better for painting.
      - danShumway 3y ago
jve 3y ago
They have quite a list of sponsors: https://fund.blender.org/ https://fund.blender.org/ Like EPIC giving them 1.2M: https://www.blender.org/press/epic-games-supports-blender-foundation-with-1-2-million-epic-megagrant/ https://www.blender.org/press/epic-games-supports-blender-fo...
- ics 3y ago
  Is the €134k/mo figure including all corporate sponsors? Approximating that as one developer salary per month then what they've continued to accomplish is still very impressive.
  - robin_reala 3y ago
    No one developer gets paid €134k/month in Europe. Average salary is probably more like €65k/year across the EU.
    - ics 3y ago
      I was going to ask if all Blender developers were in Europe but was able to answer my own question from https://www.blender.org/development/top-27-committers-2022/ https://www.blender.org/development/top-27-committers-2022/ It does appear that the majority of top contributors are from European countries but overall pretty diverse: China, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Brazil, Egypt are represented as well. That said, if I revised my comment to say two developer salaries per month, or 3, 4, etc. it is still impressive in my view.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - agent327 3y ago
    Where in the world can you earn €134k/mo as a developer?
  - jve 3y ago
    That is probably excluding onetime donations
jasode 3y ago
> I'm amazed at how professional and finished Blender is for being an open source project. It feels like I'm using an Adobe product or similar. The "open source" label applied to Blender today inadvertently minimizes the commercial origins of it. Blender's development has a unique (accidental) history that other open-source projects can't replicate deliberately: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/getting_started/about/history.html https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/getting_started/ab... In summary: - Blender was originally paid commercial software that attracts venture capitalists to invest €4.5M and funds the salaries of 50 people to work on it - The VC investors later sell it at a loss for €100k back to the original team to release it as open source. Because many users of Blender are unfamiliar with the timeline of its development, they wonder why other open-source software like Gimp "isn't more polished" like Adobe Photoshop. Well, Gimp never had investors write off €4.5M of development on it.
- magpi3 3y ago
  Haven't used it in ages, but Blender did not feel like an Adobe product when it was first open sourced. IIRC its UI was considered notoriously unintuitive.
- yterdy 3y ago
  That was literally over 20 years ago. The majority of Blender's development has taken place while it was open-source; most of the features it's known for did not exist in the commercial version.
- js8 3y ago
  With selling it as OSS, they only wrote off 4.4M euros. So given the situation it was still a better option for investors.
- danShumway 3y ago
  > Gimp never had investors write off €4.5M of development on it. Notably, there is literally nothing stopping other Open Source projects from being given grants of millions of dollars other than social convention. We saw this with Godot after Unity. There's a coordination problem here, but we all mostly recognize that many of these fundamental tools would be better if we all collectively put our resources into an Open tool that is focused on serving the community rather than exploiting it. It's just that without shocking events that prompt the bigger players to say, "you know what, heck this, let's just fund a good tool", it's very tough to get people to make that kind of investment, even though it would very likely be better for them and in the long-run more cost effective for them if they did. I would argue that the majority of Blender's development (both architecturally and in terms of cost) happened after its commercial origins. But Blender continued to get investment because the community was invested in building a usable tool that wouldn't force them to deal with the crap of the other commercial products in the 3D industry.
marcodiego 3y ago
> I'm amazed at how professional and finished Blender is for being an open source project. I'm amazed at how much prejudice people still have about open source projects.
- sbuk 3y ago
  When you compare it to GIMP, it's night and day. Not only is Blender open source, it is professional software.
  - crote 3y ago
    Yup. GIMP feels like it's being developed by a bored engineer in their spare time to play around with image editing algorithms. Blender feels like a professional workhorse you can build your whole business around.
    - beezlewax 3y ago
      If gimp did a UI overhaul akin to what Blender did and changed their name they could do much better that the current state of things. Blenders ui overhaul made it an entirely different beast
aequitas 3y ago
I started using Blender to do modelling 20 odd years ago when I was still in school finding my direction in life. The graphics design path didn't stick, but Blender integrated with Python to allow automations, which I learned along the way and it put me firmly on the path of software development, where I still happily am, still programming (some) Python. Funny that I have my career partly to thank to the software choices of fellow Dutchmen.
- ragebol 3y ago
  Wow, very similar story here. In highschool, I think I messed up a week of exams because I was too busy modeling a Fellbeast/nazgul from LoTR in Blender. I still have the model somewhere, copied over in 20 years of USB sticks and external HDDs. Learned python for use in blender, am a software dev in robotics now, using a lot of python.
cableshaft 3y ago
Yeah, Blender is maybe the best open source software I use. I don't feel a need to use any other 3D modeling software, it's so robust and works so well (from what I can tell, I'm still mostly an amateur and have barely scratched the surface of Blender still).
Finnucane 3y ago
The difference between Blender and Adobe is that the Blender folks actually give a shit if their product is good.
boredtofears 3y ago
What did you use to get started? Every other year I follow that "make a realistic looking donut" tutorial but mine always comes out lumpy and misshapen.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

seritools 3y ago

> It feels like I'm using an Adobe product or similar. So it's slow, bloated, and crashes regularly?

nkozyra 3y ago
> So it's slow, bloated, and crashes regularly? I think Adobe has really improved the last decade or so in this regard. Blender is really amazing and just seems to get more powerful every year.
- timeon 3y ago
  > improved the last decade I was experiencing less bloat and crashes in versions before Creative Cloud.
- virtualritz 3y ago
  > I think Adobe has really improved the last decade or so in this regard Nope. Been using Photoshop since version 1, AfterEffects since its inception (by a company called Cosa AFAIR) and InDesign since version 1. 30+ years give or take. There all indeed so slow and bloated that they feel mostly unusable to me today. And it's the opposite. It got to this over the last 10–15 years. Except Are. That was always slow but for motion graphics it's hard to get around it. All the freelance VFX artists I know use old versions of PS and Ae. InDesign is so buggy that I switched to Affinity three years ago. Only younger people, who never experienced the snappy desktop systems & software of the 90's or early 2000's, think the state of things today is somehow normal.
  - CyberDildonics 3y ago
    The solution is to just to avoid adobe stuff as much as possible. A lot of what would be done in photoshop can be done in nuke and after effects can just be thrown in the trash when using nuke.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Auracle 3y ago
    I spend a good amount of time in Photoshop and I disagree that it’s slow and bloated, in general. I know after a new version a year or two ago some actions were noticeably slower, but I complained to the project manager on Reddit on the specifics and it got tightened back up pretty quickly. Also, anyone using old versions of Photoshop are missing out. Both the new Remove tool along with the generative AI fill are absolute gamechangers.
  - nkozyra 3y ago
    Not version 1 but I've been on it since Photoshop 3 and have had the exact opposite experience. It was rough early on, crashed frequently and often. Got better around Photoshop 4/5 then had another rough period. I've found the latest Creative Cloud versions to be the most stable. I cannot recall a single Photoshop crash.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    Yep. In my experience CS1 and CS2 are somehow more responsive feeling running on now-ancient and comparably resource-bare hardware like PPC G5 or Core 2 Duo Macs than PS CC is on a modern armed-to-the-teeth workstation, which is ridiculous. The bloat was ramping up pretty aggressively through CS3, CS4, and CS5 but the shift to subscription model really gave Adobe a license to not care about efficiency or UI snappiness.
- orbital-decay 3y ago
  > I think Adobe has really improved the last decade or so in this regard. They massively increased the complexity of their products after introducing the Creative Cloud. It's an absolute mess that can cause delays in Microsoft (!) just to make the new Windows release work with it. And Photoshop in particular has the byzantine PSD format that requires them to keep old versions of the code to read old versions of the format. Adobe software in general resembles Windows nowadays - they are trying to modernize it but legacy decisions keep them from doing too much, as they can't break backward compatibility, their entire business model depends on keeping the users locked in. As a result, their old software is a terrible mishmash of UIs from different eras.
Maken 3y ago
Also, it won't shut up about it's couple AI utilities.
- cptskippy 3y ago
  Have you tried the AI Feedback Utility?

i_am_a_peasant 3y ago

And the user interface is all OpenGL... man I can't imagine how much time it would take to write a decent user interface starting with nothing but OpenGL. Like just rendering text to the screen is a pain. And it's so snappy and responsive and it looks sooooo good. Definitely not a one man project, there's just no way.

themerone 3y ago
If your choices are Motif or the Athena toolkit, rolling your own UI is an understandable choice.
- mr_sturd 3y ago
  They should roll it out in to a separate library. Call it the Blender Toolkit, or BTK.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - i_am_a_peasant 3y ago
    I think there have been attempts.. but it's too deeply married to the rest of Blender for it to be worth extracting I think.
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
    BTK has a nice ring to it -- and it's an even more brilliant public relations disaster than the name "GIMP"! What kinds of widgets would Dennis Rader have in his "Bind, Torture, Kill" tookit? ;) It couldn't be any worse than Motif. BTK would also imply the existence of: BLIMP: Blender Image Manipulation Program Oh the humanity! BLOME Desktop: Blender Object Model Environment I would totally be down for that.
    - antod 3y ago
      or... BIOME: Blender Interactive Object Model Environment

dagw 3y ago

Unlike most open source projects, Blender started its life as a professional piece of software by and for artists who had to deliver commercial projects on a dead line. First as an in house tool for an animation studio, and later as a commercial software product. It only became open source later in its life cycle after the commercial Blender company went bankrupt. It has also been headed by the same lead developer from its earliest days as an in-house tool right up until today. All these things really shine through and make it quiet unique among open source applications.

agumonkey 3y ago
Interesting but the special part about blender is the open source part, they managed to keep it alive, revamp the UI fully and bring on new and hard features on a regular basis. I don't remember another foss project of that kind.
- joshfee 3y ago
  krita.org is a similarly polished and professional open source project, but I agree these types of projects are the exception rather than the rule (though I suppose the same could be said about most products).
  - jansan 3y ago
    Krita is nowhere near the level of Blender. It is more on the level of Inkscape.
    - hellcow 3y ago
      As a hobbyist digital painter and 3D artist who has used both Blender and Krita, I strongly disagree with this. Krita is simply best-in-class at digital painting on a PC. Both are exceptional pieces of software. It did take me a week or two to adjust to Krita’s hotkeys coming from a lifetime of Photoshop, but the software in the end is leagues better for painting.
    - danShumway 3y ago

jve 3y ago

They have quite a list of sponsors: https://fund.blender.org/ https://fund.blender.org/ Like EPIC giving them 1.2M: https://www.blender.org/press/epic-games-supports-blender-foundation-with-1-2-million-epic-megagrant/ https://www.blender.org/press/epic-games-supports-blender-fo...

ics 3y ago
Is the €134k/mo figure including all corporate sponsors? Approximating that as one developer salary per month then what they've continued to accomplish is still very impressive.
- robin_reala 3y ago
  No one developer gets paid €134k/month in Europe. Average salary is probably more like €65k/year across the EU.
  - ics 3y ago
    I was going to ask if all Blender developers were in Europe but was able to answer my own question from https://www.blender.org/development/top-27-committers-2022/ https://www.blender.org/development/top-27-committers-2022/ It does appear that the majority of top contributors are from European countries but overall pretty diverse: China, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Brazil, Egypt are represented as well. That said, if I revised my comment to say two developer salaries per month, or 3, 4, etc. it is still impressive in my view.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- agent327 3y ago
  Where in the world can you earn €134k/mo as a developer?
- jve 3y ago
  That is probably excluding onetime donations

jasode 3y ago

> I'm amazed at how professional and finished Blender is for being an open source project. It feels like I'm using an Adobe product or similar. The "open source" label applied to Blender today inadvertently minimizes the commercial origins of it. Blender's development has a unique (accidental) history that other open-source projects can't replicate deliberately: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/getting_started/about/history.html https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/getting_started/ab... In summary: - Blender was originally paid commercial software that attracts venture capitalists to invest €4.5M and funds the salaries of 50 people to work on it - The VC investors later sell it at a loss for €100k back to the original team to release it as open source. Because many users of Blender are unfamiliar with the timeline of its development, they wonder why other open-source software like Gimp "isn't more polished" like Adobe Photoshop. Well, Gimp never had investors write off €4.5M of development on it.

magpi3 3y ago
Haven't used it in ages, but Blender did not feel like an Adobe product when it was first open sourced. IIRC its UI was considered notoriously unintuitive.
yterdy 3y ago
That was literally over 20 years ago. The majority of Blender's development has taken place while it was open-source; most of the features it's known for did not exist in the commercial version.
js8 3y ago
With selling it as OSS, they only wrote off 4.4M euros. So given the situation it was still a better option for investors.
danShumway 3y ago
> Gimp never had investors write off €4.5M of development on it. Notably, there is literally nothing stopping other Open Source projects from being given grants of millions of dollars other than social convention. We saw this with Godot after Unity. There's a coordination problem here, but we all mostly recognize that many of these fundamental tools would be better if we all collectively put our resources into an Open tool that is focused on serving the community rather than exploiting it. It's just that without shocking events that prompt the bigger players to say, "you know what, heck this, let's just fund a good tool", it's very tough to get people to make that kind of investment, even though it would very likely be better for them and in the long-run more cost effective for them if they did. I would argue that the majority of Blender's development (both architecturally and in terms of cost) happened after its commercial origins. But Blender continued to get investment because the community was invested in building a usable tool that wouldn't force them to deal with the crap of the other commercial products in the 3D industry.

marcodiego 3y ago

> I'm amazed at how professional and finished Blender is for being an open source project. I'm amazed at how much prejudice people still have about open source projects.

sbuk 3y ago
When you compare it to GIMP, it's night and day. Not only is Blender open source, it is professional software.
- crote 3y ago
  Yup. GIMP feels like it's being developed by a bored engineer in their spare time to play around with image editing algorithms. Blender feels like a professional workhorse you can build your whole business around.
  - beezlewax 3y ago
    If gimp did a UI overhaul akin to what Blender did and changed their name they could do much better that the current state of things. Blenders ui overhaul made it an entirely different beast

aequitas 3y ago

I started using Blender to do modelling 20 odd years ago when I was still in school finding my direction in life. The graphics design path didn't stick, but Blender integrated with Python to allow automations, which I learned along the way and it put me firmly on the path of software development, where I still happily am, still programming (some) Python. Funny that I have my career partly to thank to the software choices of fellow Dutchmen.

ragebol 3y ago
Wow, very similar story here. In highschool, I think I messed up a week of exams because I was too busy modeling a Fellbeast/nazgul from LoTR in Blender. I still have the model somewhere, copied over in 20 years of USB sticks and external HDDs. Learned python for use in blender, am a software dev in robotics now, using a lot of python.

cableshaft 3y ago

Yeah, Blender is maybe the best open source software I use. I don't feel a need to use any other 3D modeling software, it's so robust and works so well (from what I can tell, I'm still mostly an amateur and have barely scratched the surface of Blender still).

Finnucane 3y ago

The difference between Blender and Adobe is that the Blender folks actually give a shit if their product is good.

boredtofears 3y ago

What did you use to get started? Every other year I follow that "make a realistic looking donut" tutorial but mine always comes out lumpy and misshapen.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]