14 ms·

Blender releases their Oscar winning version tool

811 points by appleaday1 2y ago

marcodiego 2y ago
Although I've never contributed with Blender, I felt proud when I saw "made with Blender" in the credits. Blender is a jewel of the FLOSS movement and a history and behavior that must be mimicked by many other projects. Looking forward to more successes like this.
- toblaroni 2y ago
  agreed, Blender is tremendous
  - echelon 2y ago
    Blender is amazing, and miles ahead of Gimp and other FOSS editors. That said, I can't help but feel that all of the current generation of leading 3D software (Blender, Unreal, etc. ) is going to be replaced by something just around the corner. The progress in 3D AI is nothing short of phenomenal. It feels like soon nobody will ever have to worry about sculpting or retopologizing or rigging. An entirely new class of tool will take over. It's not just 3D. It feels like the current generation of artistic tools (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) are about to be wholesale replaced with Gen AI tooling. AI plugins (eg. the Krita plugin) are too steeped in the old world of editing. New tools will probably be AI native and prefer AI workflows for reaching the same coarse- and fine-grained outcomes. I don't expect these tools to be used by the masses that are prompting AI slop like "50's Panavision Wes Anderson", but rather by working artists. Genuine Gen AI tools for artists. I've been making short films on the weekends with Blender, ComfyUI, and a mix of custom software. The AI pieces are doing the heavy lifting, and my productivity is 10x what it was before Gen AI.
    - appleaday1 2y ago
      https://github.com/ahujasid/blender-mcp https://github.com/ahujasid/blender-mcp something will definitely happen we will see what happens, 3D has always been tedious so any improvements in this space will be welcome.
      - UncleEntity 2y ago
        I totally forgot I was going to look into that... Seems to me the 'proper' way to do something like this is to hook into makesRNA and have the endpoints automagically be generated as part of the build process. Similar (or identical) to how the python and C++ APIs are created. I've been thinking for a while now that someone (much less lazy than myself) needs to get in there and have makesRNA generate something like IDL file(s) so any number of tools can hook into Blender's API without having to hand code the endpoints like this addon is apparently doing.
    - UncleEntity 2y ago
      Same could be said about Fender and Gibson.
    - progmetaldev 2y ago
      I think it depends on how much control you feel you want to have over your output. AI tools are decent at rendering video, but for those that want full control over the process, I feel like it's going to be a long way to go. If AI is able to generate the full source files to allow things to be modified, then I would 100% agree with you that it's going to be a new age for artists. If you're dealing with raw generated video, or even a frame by frame rendered image, your control is much more limited than if you could shape and customize your models. For most, this is probably fine, but for those that want fine-grained control, there is a far path to go in order to get to that point.
    - telchior 2y ago
      What / who is the leading edge of 3D AI? I took a look into it last year and the best tools were still a very long away from producing usable results (couldn't keep tri count under control, spiderweb rigging, shape jank, etc).
      - whstl 2y ago
        I don't care much for Generative AI (still too early) but I had some ok experiences with Tripo for retopology and auto rigging. Still super early days though, I did have some of the same issues you had.
        telchior 2y ago
        Thanks, I checked out Tripo. It produced some absolutely laughable trees for me, but a pretty decent looking barstool. Refused to rig it for me for some reason, though. I'd say it'll take them some years to finish figuring out 3D, it's a good stretch beyond 2D image generation.
- brcmthrowaway 2y ago
  Is the best OSS software Blender, Ghidra or Linux?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - appleaday1 2y ago
    to answer your question its probably git.
    - adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
      I think Git is probably the most "useful" but given how bad it is (despite how good it is), I have a hard time calling it the "best"
    - g-b-r 2y ago
      his question wasn't "what's the worst software ever created" ;)
    - bawolff 2y ago
      If we are going to go infrastructure, i would say sqlite or curl.
  - kadoban 2y ago
    Probably Linux if I had to pick one, partly because of how many tools were written for or on it and the ecosystem it's built up.
    - whoknowsidont 2y ago
      You mean GNU plus Linux?
      - kadoban 2y ago
        Yes, and more. It's a whole related world.
- mattl 2y ago
  I made a live action movie, edited with Blender as a video editor. It was great at the time, I’m sure has improved a lot in the last 8 years too. Blender and Inkscape are some of the software listed in the credits.
  - progmetaldev 2y ago
    Inkscape makes so much more sense to me than Adobe Illustrator ever made. Maybe it's how I use it, or what I'm looking for as output, but I've been happy with Inkscape since around 2006/2007.
- keyle 2y ago
  I remember using Blender when everyone was saying how terrible of a UX it was. They've turned it around and it's become a default-first for many artists. Open source of not, it of course helps, that the competition charges absolutely mind-bogglingly high amounts of money, for a similar offer.
  - tonetegeatinst 2y ago
    Is their a central place where other open source people or just programmers in general can get a breakdown on how they improved the UI/UX?
    - somat 2y ago
      I don't want to be too mean, The blender team has done a lot to make good solid UI improvements over the years. However as a long time casual user (since 1.7 minor projects once or twice per year) My take away was that the blender UI was always good, however it was a professional UI designed for professional use and had gathered a reputation as hard to use over the years. So the "Big UI change to make it easier to use" was mostly, wait for the rest of the industry to catch up, give it a dark mode, and most importantly, loudly issue a press release "we made the UI easier to use" to make people believe. But snark aside, my guess is that the main UI "improvement" was to make it slower, add a classical menu system to help ease you through hotkey hell. See, If I had to describe blenders UI in one blurb it would be "101 button mouse". Very quick, and fine control and less a steep learning curve than a learning cliff.
      - wlesieutre 2y ago
        The best thing they did to make blender more approachable was defaulting to left-click selection.
      - jampekka 2y ago
        This sounds a bit like the attitude that held back Blender UI for a long time. There were people seriously objecting introduction of the undo feature FFS. The UI stockholm syndrom is real. The 2.8 overhaul was not "slapping on a dark theme". It changed the UI from an alien spaceship mishmash of hundreds of randomly thrown around tiny icons and undocumented hotkeys into a discoverable and somewhat familiar interface. Or at least completed the UI overhaul, many of the improvements were incrementally introduced in prior versions. How was the UI made slower?
- WD-42 2y ago
  And GPL at that, thank goodness.
- MBCook 2y ago
  I remember when it was open sourced. Who would have ever thought at the time it would create and render a beautiful Oscar winning movie.
- culi 2y ago
  Blender and VLC are two amazing examples of the FLOSS tool not just being "the open-source alternative to ...". They are THE main tool
  - greenknight 2y ago
    FFMPEG is another. Any online video platform probably uses it.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- ragebol 2y ago
  Same. I've only ever been a user in Blender and it pushed me to use Python as my first programming language since I could script Blender with it. IIRC, I first started using it with version 2.32 when I was an early teen. I still have a .blend file somewhere with a textured model of a LOTR Fell beast/Nazgul, that I created painstakingly and cost me some exam points as I preferred 3D modelling to studying. Good times
g-b-r 2y ago
It's probably already been said in a thousand other discussions, but Flow is a really good movie, highly advised
- Daub 2y ago
  The thing that animators are talking about is the fact that they eschewed a storyboard in favour of an animatic (an animatic being a motion sketch of the animation). This is the workflow we now recommend to our students. This animatic can be found on YouTube.
  - JBits 2y ago
    With examples ranging from Avatar the Last Airbender, to Castlevania, to Monty Oum (who also completely eschewed storyboards), I can't help but that reducing the over reliance on storyboards and focusing on the animation instead is a recurring theme among unusually successful animations/animators. Flow's having an impact on animators seems great!
  - dagw 2y ago
    Animatics in my experience have always been a thing, it's just they were normally created from the storyboards. At least on the movies I've been involved in (admittedly years ago), it really came down to the fact that the directors really didn't know how to use 3d animation software, so they drew the story boards by hand, like they'd been taught. I'm guessing today most animation students don't really learn to draw or storyboard like that, and we're probably seeing the end of the classic storyboard.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    What tools do you use for an animatic?
    - Daub 2y ago
      As the previous poster has implied, An animatic can evolve directly from a storyboard. The frames of the storyboard are placed directly on a timeline (e.g. premier) and sometimes given a few animations (e.g. zoom, pan etc) and annotations. As the animation progresses, rough 3D renders (sometimes called flip books) can be dropped onto this timeline. In this way, the final movie can evolve directly from the animatic. What made Flow unusual is that they bypassed the storyboard almost entirely, which is unusual for a feature film. One rational is that the movie features significant and lengthy camera motion shots. Camera motion is very difficult to capture in a storyboard. At a student level, another motivation for lessening the importance of the storyboard is that they require not insignificant drawing skills in order to do effectively. Even animation students cannot be guaranteed to draw well, and the number of student filmmakers who can draw is vanishingly small.
wilg 2y ago
The phrasing of the submission title ("Blender releases their Oscar winning version tool") here is baffling, unless I'm misunderstanding something. A typical boring HN title would be "Blender 4.4"
- lgas 2y ago
  Seems like you understood it perfectly to me.
  - wilg 2y ago
    After some effort!
- appleaday1 2y ago
  I could do better tbh, more used to Reddit also fasting so its been interesting how it detracts my concentration when it comes to time to break the fast and afterwards.
- eichin 2y ago
  Ah, that makes more sense than anything I could find on the page (version only appeared as a substring of conversion.) Having only used blender for "minor tweaks to a collision model of a robot workspace" which got managed in git, model-aware version control sounded interesting.
- hackernudes 2y ago
  I was also confused. The HN title is weird. As I hovered over the description deciding whether to waste my precious seconds RTFA I had dreams of some sort of version control for 3d assets, but no.
- singularity2001 2y ago
  usually dang enforces the no editorialization rule, either he is benevolent towards this fantastic release or just not online;)
croemer 2y ago
Editorialized title? I can neither find anything saying "Oscar" nor "Version Tool"
- bool3max 2y ago
  Yeah the title truly makes no sense, how has it been up for 8 hours already?
- gblargg 2y ago
  I thought it was a source code control system at first.
- re 2y ago
  It's a confusingly jumbled title. I think it's supposed to mean something like "New version of Oscar-winning Blender software released" (which is still inaccurate—it wasn't Blender that won the Oscar, but an Oscar-winning film was made using it). It looks like this release celebrates that win by using art from the film for its splash image.
  - singularity2001 2y ago
    oh I was assuming it was tongue in cheeks praise for the outstanding visual presentation of the outstanding new release
- appleaday1 2y ago
  more like I have been fasting and wanted to get something out haha.
- jeffhuys 2y ago
  I was looking for a new, shiny Git alternative from the Blender team or something. "Blender releases their Oscar-winning version tool" like, what?!
milne-dev 2y ago
I've noticed a trend lately with open source projects, notably Godot and Blender, having visually impressive release notes. I hope this trend continues.
- appleaday1 2y ago
  now I am going to look into godots notes.
- p1necone 2y ago
  Dolphin and RPCS3 are also good examples of this. Less visually impressive than these, but definitely more than the norm, and packed with deep dives into the development of certain features.
- Gooblebrai 2y ago
  Yes, Godot goes in the same direction as Blender to become a very mainstream tool. Unity fucked up.
kaycey2022 2y ago
Rather than a tool, the real people should be highlighted here. Blender’s success in the open source space is atypical. The difference is surely just a group of brilliant people who just happened to take interest and found about this project. Or maybe animation studios are incentivising blender development because of the high price of commercial alternatives. Or both. In any case the individual devs should be championed than just the group.
- luqtas 2y ago
  it was from a guy with a considerable amount of money (and experience on Maya) compared to [most] people who use Blender daily... open source is not atypical, i think. Linux basically runs more than half of the computers worldwide, 3D printing software is FOSS as far as i'm aware, Godot is one of the biggest Github projects, programming languages are open-source, novel techniques of sound synthesis are already surfing on stuff like Csound/SuperCollider (which both are decades old and FOSS), a bunch of atemporal FOSS text-editors on the hand of a bunch of developers developing closed-source stuff and the list goes on
  - gorbypark 2y ago
    Open source rules the hidden parts of nearly everything (servers, programming languages, etc). It's atypical for user facing software to be open source and "world class". Of course there are exceptions (like Blender, for example) but generally the commercial version of user facing software is more advanced/well liked/industry standard.
- TimByte 2y ago
  It's rare, and it deserves more recognition than just, "Oh, cool, free 3D software."
chrismorgan 2y ago
> Blender 4.4 is all about stability. During the 2024–2025 northern hemisphere winter, Blender developers doubled down on quality and stability in a group effort called “Winter of Quality.” Given the name choice “Winter of Quality”, I’m impressed at the rare cultural and geographical awareness that led to specifying “the 2024–2025 northern hemisphere winter” here.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- zamalek 2y ago
  You get used to it. I didn't find it discriminatory or obnoxious. There are significantly bigger fish to fry. Source: was an African.
  - jb1991 2y ago
    I think you misinterpreted the comment you are replying to. It didn’t say anything about the phrase being discriminatory.
    - esperent 2y ago
      I also interpreted that as "Given the <bad> name choice...". Although given how common phrases like "winter of x" and "summer of x" are in English, I can't imagine what the problem is. Unless they think it's discrimination against people from the southern hemisphere?
      - swiftcoder 2y ago
        > Unless they think it's discrimination against people from the southern hemisphere? I don't suppose anyone takes it all that seriously in the case of the seasons, but it is a textbook example of a dominant group imposing their frame of reference on less dominant group
        2y ago
raincole 2y ago
It's just a gut feeling instead of a proper evaluation of different apps, but I always feel Blender and Houdini are made by developers who care, while other 3D packages are, well, not.
- pyinstallwoes 2y ago
  Touchdesigner too
  - danwills 2y ago
    I would love to check out touchdesigner some day, I'm a Houdini pipeline TD (and creative too) and Touch started as a fork of Houdini from quite some time ago specialised for real-time (and the real-time-ness of demoscene is one of my favourite things ever!) However iiuc Touch is Windows-only. I wonder whether under wine it might benefit from the 'ntsync' thing that just got added to the Linux kernel (as a module) (Currently also on hn front-page) as long as there's a free training version of Touch I'll definitely check it out once the new kernel gets into Gentoo!
    - pyinstallwoes 2y ago
      Touch is in Mac
- dsign 2y ago
  I really want to learn Houdini. Their pricing model is not even that bad (just 200 USD/year if you are indie), but even that is a hurdle when the alternative (Blender) is free and so good (or just plain better) for the 98% of what I want to do. Also, I do manage to crash Houdini more often than I manage to crash Blender, so there is that....
  - fp64 2y ago
    Anything procedural works so much better in Houdini I find. I was excited about the geometry nodes in Blender and had some fun with them, but always hit a wall where things in Houdini are much better designed and much more powerful and flexible. But it's a steep learning curve and I forgot most things again because I don't really have to use it regularly. I had the indie license for a while (purchased privately) and just making things shatter and explode was satisfaction enough. I did this mostly for learning and fun
EMIRELADERO 2y ago
Aside from all the usual and well-deserved high praise I'm seeing, I feel like there's something more worth pointing out: Blender has made 3D work much more "mainstream". I see many videos/pictures/tutorials with views in the millions(!), and much more overall interest in using the software. Not just the pretty visuals and talented people, but the whole program itself seems to be gaining traction with the more "normie" crowd. That also made me realize something else: Blender is now the default for anything that's not extremely high-end/resource-intensive. If you ever hear about anyone doing any kind of 3D work, they're probably using Blender. And this has creeped into the mainstream in a way only very established brands like Coca-Cola have. Nowadays, "Blender" might as well mean 3D photoshop/illustrator for most people.
- greenknight 2y ago
  I have been working in the CG / 3D industry for quite some time... when i first started about 15 years ago... Maya was the default... everyone knew it, it was THE default. That being said we have been on blender since 2.5 days. I was talking to someone on the weekend, and found out they were studying animation... i was like oh so youre using Maya? they were like whats maya? There has been a massive shift. I think there was a new era brought about when 2.8 was released. With it, they really pushed their dev fund, which helped them to get better, which made them bigger, which got them more donations, which made them get better. Cyclical loop. Im excited to see where they go next.
  - larusso 2y ago
    For me 20 years ago there was also the fight between Maya and Max. But yes Maya was the standard. Our company switched also to blender which would have been crazy 10 years ago. It’s an awesome story for Blender and it community and of course the people given their heart and some into this software.
  - xmprt 2y ago
    I remember hearing about Maya when I was studying in college. It's was so expensive and essentially unobtainable unless you were in the industry. Blender has democratized 3D modeling and animation so much.
pcl 2y ago
I've been using Blender recently to build 3D models for my new 3D printing obsession. The learning curve is significant, but the product seems great. I've gotten decent help from the chatbots, but does anyone here have any suggestions for good non-animation-focused tutorials?
- cshimmin 2y ago
  If you're making technical parts, I highly recommend just biting the bullet and learning parametric cad with fusion 360. There's a ton of learning resources on youtube etc. OnShape seems like a quite promising alternative but I assume there's less material since it's newer.
  - pcl 2y ago
    I've used OnShape a fair bit, and it's pretty solid for technical parts. But recently, I've been doing prints of 3D scans (which work surprisingly well these days!!), and OnShape is sorta the wrong tool for the job for that. I'm using a crazy combination of pre-processing in Blender and then post-processing in OnShape today, and feel like I should be able to just use Blender for the whole job.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  Yeah parametric CAD is better for most 3D printing (non-artistic). FreeCAD 1.0 is actually good now!
- rongrobert 2y ago
  I am learning Blender too after failing to learn Maya 20 years ago. To me, it is like learning to play guitar or piano. You just have to do 1-2 hours a day of practice and do it everyday. There are so many good youtube videos that it just will depend what you want to do and how you like the person doing the tutorial. Then at some point just start trying to model random objects that interest you.
senordevnyc 2y ago
How hard is it to learn Blender? I did a bunch of 3dsMax when I was in high school, but I haven’t touched any of this stuff in 25 years at this point.
- raxxorraxor 2y ago
  There are very good free and open tutorials for Blender. Just make sure you use a current one since the development speed was extremely high in the last years and controls changed here and there. One of the most famous is probably the donut one and I would wholeheartedly recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4haAdmHqGOw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4haAdmHqGOw
cloudking 2y ago
Cursor + blender-mcp are starting to make the UX easier https://github.com/ahujasid/blender-mcp https://github.com/ahujasid/blender-mcp Still has a ways to go, but shows promise.
- lionkor 2y ago
  It does say a lot about a person's attention span and intelligence when they cannot figure out one of the cleanest UIs in software, with such a buttload of tutorials and guides.
  - jampekka 2y ago
    Blender's UI has improved tremendously over the years, but I wouldn't call it one of the cleanest UI in software. It still has, for better or worse, quite idiosyncratic UI patterns (e.g. the panel juggling) and the underlying logic of e.g. objects, meshes, textures, materials, world, camera and renderer lining up is not very discoverable. I'm highly sceptical anyone could learn the Blender UI just by opening it and clicking around.
    - lionkor 2y ago
      No, you do tutorials, and plenty of them. Takes a few days, and then you're pretty familiar. I don't think AI is needed here at all.
      - jampekka 2y ago
        Specific features are hard to find from tutorials. LLMs don't replace tutorials, they augment documentation and stack exchange and such.
  - IshKebab 2y ago
    Visually clean, sure. Intuitive? Hmm Blender was notorious for having a difficult to follow UI for years. They've improved it a lot over the last 10 years but I still wouldn't say it's easy to use. Way more stuff requires a tutorial than one would hope. Honestly the fact that you're doubting the usefulness of AI for this makes me suspect you haven't really used Blender in anger.
ks2048 2y ago
Hidden towards the end of all the updates - now macOS Finder QuickLook can preview .blend files. Nice.
- singularity2001 2y ago
  if only Finder and Blender could actually OPEN other 3d formats in blender without cumbersomely having to go through the import menu
TheRealPomax 2y ago
title really should just be "Blender 4.4"
methuselah_in 2y ago
Blender has come a long way since 2013 when i had passed out my collage. Kudos to developer standing against few like Autodesk giving designers to try something for free.
d--b 2y ago
If I’m not mistaken the story was: despite the movie being much less impressive technically, its narrative and emotional force pushed it ahead of much more polished movies. Qualifying Blender as “Oscar-winning” is a bit of a stretch. It’s awesome for Blender, and it’s awesome that Blender allows people to create small budget animated movies. But the Oscar credit should mostly go to the guys who made the movie.
- theWreckluse 2y ago
  Well, people need an alternative to CG big tech. This fits the narrative really well, and was just the tipping point to a growing disdain towards Autodesk.
- hobofan 2y ago
  If you watch the release video embedded in the post you can hear both part of the acceptance speech from the makers of Flow where they explicitly thank Blender, and also can also see a special oscar scene, which I assume the creators of Flow made specifically for this version announcement. In general, there seems to be a close relationship with the creators and Blender, and the overall impression given is that the creators also think that Blender should receive part of the credit.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  I think that's a little unfair to Blender. Clearly "was able to produce an Oscar-winning animation" is a pretty high bar, even if it isn't as high as "actually won an Oscar for animation technology" (or whatever it is).
gnarbarian 2y ago
there is billions to be made bringing git to other industries.
contingencies 2y ago
For feature length pieces, independent animation is an existential threat to the established film studios that will only grow. Meanwhile, a friend of mine works (very) high up in studio land CGI and recently estimated five years outlook before a total industry implosion due to AI tooling. Leaving the whole Youtube killed TV thing aside (small point!), there has never been a better time to be an aspiring video story teller.
- TimByte 2y ago
  The gatekeepers are still around, but they don't hold the same power anymore
countrymile 2y ago
And it is also the goto tool for winners of the UK young animator of the year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42113898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42113898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38282166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38282166
zakariaelkha 2y ago
that is nice one
jrickert 2y ago
I’ve been using Blender for 20 years and it’s been amazing to see how far it’s come. Sadly, the writing is on the wall for my trusty Hackintosh since they recently decided to drop support for AMD GPU acceleration on macOS.
hermitcrab 2y ago
In the v4.4 showreel video there is a cool rendering of an O'Neal cyclinder (or similar space habitat) at 1:30. Anyone know where that is from?
skrebbel 2y ago
Can someone explain the title to me? What does it mean to release a "version tool"? Or do they have a special version for Oscar winners which is now publicly released? Or is this just some extra tool you can put on top of regular Blender? I simply don't follow.
- juanpicardo 2y ago
  I think the title is just nonsense. It's only about the release of a new version of Blender, which was used to make Flow.
- tomburgs 2y ago
  I don't think the title reflects the contents of the article. I believe a more accurate title would be "Blender, the tool behind an Oscar winning movie, releases a new version", because as far as I can tell the movie referenced that won the Oscar (Flow[0]), was using LTS version 3.6[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film) [1] https://www.blender.org/user-stories/making-flow-an-interview-with-director-gints-zilbalodis https://www.blender.org/user-stories/making-flow-an-intervie...
cylemons 2y ago
I thought from the title that Blender switched to their own source control tool instead of svn
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
fennecbutt 2y ago
furiously models doughnuts

811 points by appleaday1 2y ago

Although I've never contributed with Blender, I felt proud when I saw "made with Blender" in the credits. Blender is a jewel of the FLOSS movement and a history and behavior that must be mimicked by many other projects. Looking forward to more successes like this.

toblaroni 2y ago
agreed, Blender is tremendous
- echelon 2y ago
  Blender is amazing, and miles ahead of Gimp and other FOSS editors. That said, I can't help but feel that all of the current generation of leading 3D software (Blender, Unreal, etc. ) is going to be replaced by something just around the corner. The progress in 3D AI is nothing short of phenomenal. It feels like soon nobody will ever have to worry about sculpting or retopologizing or rigging. An entirely new class of tool will take over. It's not just 3D. It feels like the current generation of artistic tools (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) are about to be wholesale replaced with Gen AI tooling. AI plugins (eg. the Krita plugin) are too steeped in the old world of editing. New tools will probably be AI native and prefer AI workflows for reaching the same coarse- and fine-grained outcomes. I don't expect these tools to be used by the masses that are prompting AI slop like "50's Panavision Wes Anderson", but rather by working artists. Genuine Gen AI tools for artists. I've been making short films on the weekends with Blender, ComfyUI, and a mix of custom software. The AI pieces are doing the heavy lifting, and my productivity is 10x what it was before Gen AI.
  - appleaday1 2y ago
    https://github.com/ahujasid/blender-mcp https://github.com/ahujasid/blender-mcp something will definitely happen we will see what happens, 3D has always been tedious so any improvements in this space will be welcome.
    - UncleEntity 2y ago
      I totally forgot I was going to look into that... Seems to me the 'proper' way to do something like this is to hook into makesRNA and have the endpoints automagically be generated as part of the build process. Similar (or identical) to how the python and C++ APIs are created. I've been thinking for a while now that someone (much less lazy than myself) needs to get in there and have makesRNA generate something like IDL file(s) so any number of tools can hook into Blender's API without having to hand code the endpoints like this addon is apparently doing.
  - UncleEntity 2y ago
    Same could be said about Fender and Gibson.
  - progmetaldev 2y ago
    I think it depends on how much control you feel you want to have over your output. AI tools are decent at rendering video, but for those that want full control over the process, I feel like it's going to be a long way to go. If AI is able to generate the full source files to allow things to be modified, then I would 100% agree with you that it's going to be a new age for artists. If you're dealing with raw generated video, or even a frame by frame rendered image, your control is much more limited than if you could shape and customize your models. For most, this is probably fine, but for those that want fine-grained control, there is a far path to go in order to get to that point.
  - telchior 2y ago
    What / who is the leading edge of 3D AI? I took a look into it last year and the best tools were still a very long away from producing usable results (couldn't keep tri count under control, spiderweb rigging, shape jank, etc).
    - whstl 2y ago
      I don't care much for Generative AI (still too early) but I had some ok experiences with Tripo for retopology and auto rigging. Still super early days though, I did have some of the same issues you had.
      - telchior 2y ago
        Thanks, I checked out Tripo. It produced some absolutely laughable trees for me, but a pretty decent looking barstool. Refused to rig it for me for some reason, though. I'd say it'll take them some years to finish figuring out 3D, it's a good stretch beyond 2D image generation.
brcmthrowaway 2y ago
Is the best OSS software Blender, Ghidra or Linux?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- appleaday1 2y ago
  to answer your question its probably git.
  - adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
    I think Git is probably the most "useful" but given how bad it is (despite how good it is), I have a hard time calling it the "best"
  - g-b-r 2y ago
    his question wasn't "what's the worst software ever created" ;)
  - bawolff 2y ago
    If we are going to go infrastructure, i would say sqlite or curl.
- kadoban 2y ago
  Probably Linux if I had to pick one, partly because of how many tools were written for or on it and the ecosystem it's built up.
  - whoknowsidont 2y ago
    You mean GNU plus Linux?
    - kadoban 2y ago
      Yes, and more. It's a whole related world.
mattl 2y ago
I made a live action movie, edited with Blender as a video editor. It was great at the time, I’m sure has improved a lot in the last 8 years too. Blender and Inkscape are some of the software listed in the credits.
- progmetaldev 2y ago
  Inkscape makes so much more sense to me than Adobe Illustrator ever made. Maybe it's how I use it, or what I'm looking for as output, but I've been happy with Inkscape since around 2006/2007.
keyle 2y ago
I remember using Blender when everyone was saying how terrible of a UX it was. They've turned it around and it's become a default-first for many artists. Open source of not, it of course helps, that the competition charges absolutely mind-bogglingly high amounts of money, for a similar offer.
- tonetegeatinst 2y ago
  Is their a central place where other open source people or just programmers in general can get a breakdown on how they improved the UI/UX?
  - somat 2y ago
    I don't want to be too mean, The blender team has done a lot to make good solid UI improvements over the years. However as a long time casual user (since 1.7 minor projects once or twice per year) My take away was that the blender UI was always good, however it was a professional UI designed for professional use and had gathered a reputation as hard to use over the years. So the "Big UI change to make it easier to use" was mostly, wait for the rest of the industry to catch up, give it a dark mode, and most importantly, loudly issue a press release "we made the UI easier to use" to make people believe. But snark aside, my guess is that the main UI "improvement" was to make it slower, add a classical menu system to help ease you through hotkey hell. See, If I had to describe blenders UI in one blurb it would be "101 button mouse". Very quick, and fine control and less a steep learning curve than a learning cliff.
    - wlesieutre 2y ago
      The best thing they did to make blender more approachable was defaulting to left-click selection.
    - jampekka 2y ago
      This sounds a bit like the attitude that held back Blender UI for a long time. There were people seriously objecting introduction of the undo feature FFS. The UI stockholm syndrom is real. The 2.8 overhaul was not "slapping on a dark theme". It changed the UI from an alien spaceship mishmash of hundreds of randomly thrown around tiny icons and undocumented hotkeys into a discoverable and somewhat familiar interface. Or at least completed the UI overhaul, many of the improvements were incrementally introduced in prior versions. How was the UI made slower?
WD-42 2y ago
And GPL at that, thank goodness.
MBCook 2y ago
I remember when it was open sourced. Who would have ever thought at the time it would create and render a beautiful Oscar winning movie.
culi 2y ago
Blender and VLC are two amazing examples of the FLOSS tool not just being "the open-source alternative to ...". They are THE main tool
- greenknight 2y ago
  FFMPEG is another. Any online video platform probably uses it.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
ragebol 2y ago
Same. I've only ever been a user in Blender and it pushed me to use Python as my first programming language since I could script Blender with it. IIRC, I first started using it with version 2.32 when I was an early teen. I still have a .blend file somewhere with a textured model of a LOTR Fell beast/Nazgul, that I created painstakingly and cost me some exam points as I preferred 3D modelling to studying. Good times

g-b-r 2y ago

It's probably already been said in a thousand other discussions, but Flow is a really good movie, highly advised

Daub 2y ago
The thing that animators are talking about is the fact that they eschewed a storyboard in favour of an animatic (an animatic being a motion sketch of the animation). This is the workflow we now recommend to our students. This animatic can be found on YouTube.
- JBits 2y ago
  With examples ranging from Avatar the Last Airbender, to Castlevania, to Monty Oum (who also completely eschewed storyboards), I can't help but that reducing the over reliance on storyboards and focusing on the animation instead is a recurring theme among unusually successful animations/animators. Flow's having an impact on animators seems great!
- dagw 2y ago
  Animatics in my experience have always been a thing, it's just they were normally created from the storyboards. At least on the movies I've been involved in (admittedly years ago), it really came down to the fact that the directors really didn't know how to use 3d animation software, so they drew the story boards by hand, like they'd been taught. I'm guessing today most animation students don't really learn to draw or storyboard like that, and we're probably seeing the end of the classic storyboard.
- pjc50 2y ago
  What tools do you use for an animatic?
  - Daub 2y ago
    As the previous poster has implied, An animatic can evolve directly from a storyboard. The frames of the storyboard are placed directly on a timeline (e.g. premier) and sometimes given a few animations (e.g. zoom, pan etc) and annotations. As the animation progresses, rough 3D renders (sometimes called flip books) can be dropped onto this timeline. In this way, the final movie can evolve directly from the animatic. What made Flow unusual is that they bypassed the storyboard almost entirely, which is unusual for a feature film. One rational is that the movie features significant and lengthy camera motion shots. Camera motion is very difficult to capture in a storyboard. At a student level, another motivation for lessening the importance of the storyboard is that they require not insignificant drawing skills in order to do effectively. Even animation students cannot be guaranteed to draw well, and the number of student filmmakers who can draw is vanishingly small.

wilg 2y ago

The phrasing of the submission title ("Blender releases their Oscar winning version tool") here is baffling, unless I'm misunderstanding something. A typical boring HN title would be "Blender 4.4"

lgas 2y ago
Seems like you understood it perfectly to me.
- wilg 2y ago
  After some effort!
appleaday1 2y ago
I could do better tbh, more used to Reddit also fasting so its been interesting how it detracts my concentration when it comes to time to break the fast and afterwards.
eichin 2y ago
Ah, that makes more sense than anything I could find on the page (version only appeared as a substring of conversion.) Having only used blender for "minor tweaks to a collision model of a robot workspace" which got managed in git, model-aware version control sounded interesting.
hackernudes 2y ago
I was also confused. The HN title is weird. As I hovered over the description deciding whether to waste my precious seconds RTFA I had dreams of some sort of version control for 3d assets, but no.
singularity2001 2y ago
usually dang enforces the no editorialization rule, either he is benevolent towards this fantastic release or just not online;)

croemer 2y ago

Editorialized title? I can neither find anything saying "Oscar" nor "Version Tool"

bool3max 2y ago
Yeah the title truly makes no sense, how has it been up for 8 hours already?
gblargg 2y ago
I thought it was a source code control system at first.
re 2y ago
It's a confusingly jumbled title. I think it's supposed to mean something like "New version of Oscar-winning Blender software released" (which is still inaccurate—it wasn't Blender that won the Oscar, but an Oscar-winning film was made using it). It looks like this release celebrates that win by using art from the film for its splash image.
- singularity2001 2y ago
  oh I was assuming it was tongue in cheeks praise for the outstanding visual presentation of the outstanding new release
appleaday1 2y ago
more like I have been fasting and wanted to get something out haha.
jeffhuys 2y ago
I was looking for a new, shiny Git alternative from the Blender team or something. "Blender releases their Oscar-winning version tool" like, what?!

milne-dev 2y ago

I've noticed a trend lately with open source projects, notably Godot and Blender, having visually impressive release notes. I hope this trend continues.

appleaday1 2y ago
now I am going to look into godots notes.
p1necone 2y ago
Dolphin and RPCS3 are also good examples of this. Less visually impressive than these, but definitely more than the norm, and packed with deep dives into the development of certain features.
Gooblebrai 2y ago
Yes, Godot goes in the same direction as Blender to become a very mainstream tool. Unity fucked up.

kaycey2022 2y ago

Rather than a tool, the real people should be highlighted here. Blender’s success in the open source space is atypical. The difference is surely just a group of brilliant people who just happened to take interest and found about this project. Or maybe animation studios are incentivising blender development because of the high price of commercial alternatives. Or both. In any case the individual devs should be championed than just the group.

luqtas 2y ago
it was from a guy with a considerable amount of money (and experience on Maya) compared to [most] people who use Blender daily... open source is not atypical, i think. Linux basically runs more than half of the computers worldwide, 3D printing software is FOSS as far as i'm aware, Godot is one of the biggest Github projects, programming languages are open-source, novel techniques of sound synthesis are already surfing on stuff like Csound/SuperCollider (which both are decades old and FOSS), a bunch of atemporal FOSS text-editors on the hand of a bunch of developers developing closed-source stuff and the list goes on
- gorbypark 2y ago
  Open source rules the hidden parts of nearly everything (servers, programming languages, etc). It's atypical for user facing software to be open source and "world class". Of course there are exceptions (like Blender, for example) but generally the commercial version of user facing software is more advanced/well liked/industry standard.
TimByte 2y ago
It's rare, and it deserves more recognition than just, "Oh, cool, free 3D software."

chrismorgan 2y ago

> Blender 4.4 is all about stability. During the 2024–2025 northern hemisphere winter, Blender developers doubled down on quality and stability in a group effort called “Winter of Quality.” Given the name choice “Winter of Quality”, I’m impressed at the rare cultural and geographical awareness that led to specifying “the 2024–2025 northern hemisphere winter” here.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
zamalek 2y ago
You get used to it. I didn't find it discriminatory or obnoxious. There are significantly bigger fish to fry. Source: was an African.
- jb1991 2y ago
  I think you misinterpreted the comment you are replying to. It didn’t say anything about the phrase being discriminatory.
  - esperent 2y ago
    I also interpreted that as "Given the <bad> name choice...". Although given how common phrases like "winter of x" and "summer of x" are in English, I can't imagine what the problem is. Unless they think it's discrimination against people from the southern hemisphere?
    - swiftcoder 2y ago
      > Unless they think it's discrimination against people from the southern hemisphere? I don't suppose anyone takes it all that seriously in the case of the seasons, but it is a textbook example of a dominant group imposing their frame of reference on less dominant group
      - 2y ago

raincole 2y ago

It's just a gut feeling instead of a proper evaluation of different apps, but I always feel Blender and Houdini are made by developers who care, while other 3D packages are, well, not.

pyinstallwoes 2y ago
Touchdesigner too
- danwills 2y ago
  I would love to check out touchdesigner some day, I'm a Houdini pipeline TD (and creative too) and Touch started as a fork of Houdini from quite some time ago specialised for real-time (and the real-time-ness of demoscene is one of my favourite things ever!) However iiuc Touch is Windows-only. I wonder whether under wine it might benefit from the 'ntsync' thing that just got added to the Linux kernel (as a module) (Currently also on hn front-page) as long as there's a free training version of Touch I'll definitely check it out once the new kernel gets into Gentoo!
  - pyinstallwoes 2y ago
    Touch is in Mac
dsign 2y ago
I really want to learn Houdini. Their pricing model is not even that bad (just 200 USD/year if you are indie), but even that is a hurdle when the alternative (Blender) is free and so good (or just plain better) for the 98% of what I want to do. Also, I do manage to crash Houdini more often than I manage to crash Blender, so there is that....
- fp64 2y ago
  Anything procedural works so much better in Houdini I find. I was excited about the geometry nodes in Blender and had some fun with them, but always hit a wall where things in Houdini are much better designed and much more powerful and flexible. But it's a steep learning curve and I forgot most things again because I don't really have to use it regularly. I had the indie license for a while (purchased privately) and just making things shatter and explode was satisfaction enough. I did this mostly for learning and fun

EMIRELADERO 2y ago

Aside from all the usual and well-deserved high praise I'm seeing, I feel like there's something more worth pointing out: Blender has made 3D work much more "mainstream". I see many videos/pictures/tutorials with views in the millions(!), and much more overall interest in using the software. Not just the pretty visuals and talented people, but the whole program itself seems to be gaining traction with the more "normie" crowd. That also made me realize something else: Blender is now the default for anything that's not extremely high-end/resource-intensive. If you ever hear about anyone doing any kind of 3D work, they're probably using Blender. And this has creeped into the mainstream in a way only very established brands like Coca-Cola have. Nowadays, "Blender" might as well mean 3D photoshop/illustrator for most people.

greenknight 2y ago
I have been working in the CG / 3D industry for quite some time... when i first started about 15 years ago... Maya was the default... everyone knew it, it was THE default. That being said we have been on blender since 2.5 days. I was talking to someone on the weekend, and found out they were studying animation... i was like oh so youre using Maya? they were like whats maya? There has been a massive shift. I think there was a new era brought about when 2.8 was released. With it, they really pushed their dev fund, which helped them to get better, which made them bigger, which got them more donations, which made them get better. Cyclical loop. Im excited to see where they go next.
- larusso 2y ago
  For me 20 years ago there was also the fight between Maya and Max. But yes Maya was the standard. Our company switched also to blender which would have been crazy 10 years ago. It’s an awesome story for Blender and it community and of course the people given their heart and some into this software.
- xmprt 2y ago
  I remember hearing about Maya when I was studying in college. It's was so expensive and essentially unobtainable unless you were in the industry. Blender has democratized 3D modeling and animation so much.

pcl 2y ago

I've been using Blender recently to build 3D models for my new 3D printing obsession. The learning curve is significant, but the product seems great. I've gotten decent help from the chatbots, but does anyone here have any suggestions for good non-animation-focused tutorials?

cshimmin 2y ago
If you're making technical parts, I highly recommend just biting the bullet and learning parametric cad with fusion 360. There's a ton of learning resources on youtube etc. OnShape seems like a quite promising alternative but I assume there's less material since it's newer.
- pcl 2y ago
  I've used OnShape a fair bit, and it's pretty solid for technical parts. But recently, I've been doing prints of 3D scans (which work surprisingly well these days!!), and OnShape is sorta the wrong tool for the job for that. I'm using a crazy combination of pre-processing in Blender and then post-processing in OnShape today, and feel like I should be able to just use Blender for the whole job.
IshKebab 2y ago
Yeah parametric CAD is better for most 3D printing (non-artistic). FreeCAD 1.0 is actually good now!
rongrobert 2y ago
I am learning Blender too after failing to learn Maya 20 years ago. To me, it is like learning to play guitar or piano. You just have to do 1-2 hours a day of practice and do it everyday. There are so many good youtube videos that it just will depend what you want to do and how you like the person doing the tutorial. Then at some point just start trying to model random objects that interest you.

senordevnyc 2y ago

How hard is it to learn Blender? I did a bunch of 3dsMax when I was in high school, but I haven’t touched any of this stuff in 25 years at this point.

raxxorraxor 2y ago
There are very good free and open tutorials for Blender. Just make sure you use a current one since the development speed was extremely high in the last years and controls changed here and there. One of the most famous is probably the donut one and I would wholeheartedly recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4haAdmHqGOw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4haAdmHqGOw

cloudking 2y ago

Cursor + blender-mcp are starting to make the UX easier https://github.com/ahujasid/blender-mcp https://github.com/ahujasid/blender-mcp Still has a ways to go, but shows promise.

lionkor 2y ago
It does say a lot about a person's attention span and intelligence when they cannot figure out one of the cleanest UIs in software, with such a buttload of tutorials and guides.
- jampekka 2y ago
  Blender's UI has improved tremendously over the years, but I wouldn't call it one of the cleanest UI in software. It still has, for better or worse, quite idiosyncratic UI patterns (e.g. the panel juggling) and the underlying logic of e.g. objects, meshes, textures, materials, world, camera and renderer lining up is not very discoverable. I'm highly sceptical anyone could learn the Blender UI just by opening it and clicking around.
  - lionkor 2y ago
    No, you do tutorials, and plenty of them. Takes a few days, and then you're pretty familiar. I don't think AI is needed here at all.
    - jampekka 2y ago
      Specific features are hard to find from tutorials. LLMs don't replace tutorials, they augment documentation and stack exchange and such.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  Visually clean, sure. Intuitive? Hmm Blender was notorious for having a difficult to follow UI for years. They've improved it a lot over the last 10 years but I still wouldn't say it's easy to use. Way more stuff requires a tutorial than one would hope. Honestly the fact that you're doubting the usefulness of AI for this makes me suspect you haven't really used Blender in anger.

ks2048 2y ago

Hidden towards the end of all the updates - now macOS Finder QuickLook can preview .blend files. Nice.

singularity2001 2y ago
if only Finder and Blender could actually OPEN other 3d formats in blender without cumbersomely having to go through the import menu

TheRealPomax 2y ago

title really should just be "Blender 4.4"

methuselah_in 2y ago

Blender has come a long way since 2013 when i had passed out my collage. Kudos to developer standing against few like Autodesk giving designers to try something for free.

d--b 2y ago

If I’m not mistaken the story was: despite the movie being much less impressive technically, its narrative and emotional force pushed it ahead of much more polished movies. Qualifying Blender as “Oscar-winning” is a bit of a stretch. It’s awesome for Blender, and it’s awesome that Blender allows people to create small budget animated movies. But the Oscar credit should mostly go to the guys who made the movie.

theWreckluse 2y ago
Well, people need an alternative to CG big tech. This fits the narrative really well, and was just the tipping point to a growing disdain towards Autodesk.
hobofan 2y ago
If you watch the release video embedded in the post you can hear both part of the acceptance speech from the makers of Flow where they explicitly thank Blender, and also can also see a special oscar scene, which I assume the creators of Flow made specifically for this version announcement. In general, there seems to be a close relationship with the creators and Blender, and the overall impression given is that the creators also think that Blender should receive part of the credit.
IshKebab 2y ago
I think that's a little unfair to Blender. Clearly "was able to produce an Oscar-winning animation" is a pretty high bar, even if it isn't as high as "actually won an Oscar for animation technology" (or whatever it is).

gnarbarian 2y ago

there is billions to be made bringing git to other industries.

contingencies 2y ago

For feature length pieces, independent animation is an existential threat to the established film studios that will only grow. Meanwhile, a friend of mine works (very) high up in studio land CGI and recently estimated five years outlook before a total industry implosion due to AI tooling. Leaving the whole Youtube killed TV thing aside (small point!), there has never been a better time to be an aspiring video story teller.

TimByte 2y ago
The gatekeepers are still around, but they don't hold the same power anymore

countrymile 2y ago

And it is also the goto tool for winners of the UK young animator of the year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42113898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42113898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38282166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38282166

zakariaelkha 2y ago

that is nice one

jrickert 2y ago

I’ve been using Blender for 20 years and it’s been amazing to see how far it’s come. Sadly, the writing is on the wall for my trusty Hackintosh since they recently decided to drop support for AMD GPU acceleration on macOS.

hermitcrab 2y ago

In the v4.4 showreel video there is a cool rendering of an O'Neal cyclinder (or similar space habitat) at 1:30. Anyone know where that is from?

skrebbel 2y ago

Can someone explain the title to me? What does it mean to release a "version tool"? Or do they have a special version for Oscar winners which is now publicly released? Or is this just some extra tool you can put on top of regular Blender? I simply don't follow.

juanpicardo 2y ago
I think the title is just nonsense. It's only about the release of a new version of Blender, which was used to make Flow.
tomburgs 2y ago
I don't think the title reflects the contents of the article. I believe a more accurate title would be "Blender, the tool behind an Oscar winning movie, releases a new version", because as far as I can tell the movie referenced that won the Oscar (Flow[0]), was using LTS version 3.6[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(2024_film) [1] https://www.blender.org/user-stories/making-flow-an-interview-with-director-gints-zilbalodis https://www.blender.org/user-stories/making-flow-an-intervie...

cylemons 2y ago

I thought from the title that Blender switched to their own source control tool instead of svn

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

fennecbutt 2y ago

furiously models doughnuts