9 ms·

Blender 5.2 LTS

419 points by makizar 3mo ago

phren0logy 3mo ago
I don't use Blender, so my admiration is from a distance but: Wow - what an impressive project. At least if I understand it correctly, this is a real pro-level piece of free and open software that's equivalent to thousands and thousands of dollars in closed-source commercial software.
- keyle 3mo ago
  Yes, it's had a lot of money put through it since its early days, with quirky shortcuts and quirky features. Imagine if they made Gimp good, this would be what blender became in 3D. They've done it right, with a foundation and it appears to run like clockwork. Feature wise it now rivals with some pretty expensive alternatives. Open source; can win!
  - Joel_Mckay 3mo ago
    https://krita.org/en/ https://krita.org/en/ It is also free. =3
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - KPGv2 3mo ago
    > Imagine if they made Gimp good, I have a vague recollection that twenty years ago GIMP paid some designers to come up with a great UI, but once the design was ready, GIMP was like "nah we don't like that" and kept their bad UI. I do image stuff so rarely that GIMP is fine because it's free. But its UI is so bad. I don't know about now, but I remember a few years ago someone pointed out that GIMP had over a million dollars in a Bitcoin wallet and hadn't touched any of it in like a decade.
    - bigyabai 3mo ago
      For minimal edits, Pinta does the job IMO: https://www.pinta-project.com/ https://www.pinta-project.com/ Gimp still has a lot of good features that I find myself crawling back for, on bigger projects. But Pinta has that good ol' fashioned Paint.NET feel to it that a lot of people still strive for.
      - mghackerlady 3mo ago
        For even more minimal edits, I still use xpaint
- Joel_Mckay 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - cheschire 3mo ago
    I use blender constantly to make things for 3d printing and I haven’t spent a cent on it or any plugins I use for it. So for anyone on the fence about picking up blender and reading this comment above, no it doesn’t require hundreds of dollars of plugins to be useful. Not for every use case.
    - Joel_Mckay 3mo ago
      Every use-case differs. I like Blender even when they break my hobby projects every update. OpenScad and FreeCad also works for 3D cad files. However, many people that own 3D printers will never sculpt, re-mesh, or cad up their own objects. =3
      - cheschire 3mo ago
        FreeCAD is great if someone mainly wants to print functional, usable parts. That’s totally valid and honestly even more powerful than Blender for that use case. Autodesk Fusion (prev. Fusion 360) is also a popular option. I use blender because I also like to do a lot of 3d printed art, and as you mentioned, that sculpt tooling is one of many fantastic tools for that purpose. Also LLMs know a lot about Blender, making it very easy to describe what I want to do, and then get a walk through of how to do it with Blender.
        Joel_Mckay 3mo ago
        We found most of this devs work was popular with artists. May be worth a look. https://bartoszstyperek.gumroad.com/ https://bartoszstyperek.gumroad.com/ LLM are sometimes good at organizing the awful documentation for Blenders ever permuting API, but will not help you get better creatively. If you are interested in geometry nodes, than this channel offers a lot =3 https://www.youtube.com/@TheDucky3D/videos https://www.youtube.com/@TheDucky3D/videos
- sakjur 3mo ago
  Its history is also one of perseverance. Blender was never a runaway success story, but rather a matter of becoming a little better every day and eventually getting a recognition for that.
  - embedding-shape 3mo ago
    > Blender was never a runaway success story, but rather a matter of becoming a little better every day Also some extreme ups and downs along the way, almost succumbing at some point(s) and more along the way. It's a miracle it survived, a miracle performed by Ton Roosendaal most likely.
- jijijijij 3mo ago
  It's not just incredibly powerful software, it's also incredibly fun and intuitive to use (once the UI has clicked with you). There are still some areas where commercial competitors got edge, but Blender covers a wider base, is the more complete/universal software already. Lot's of people prefer Blender's UI. It's also rapidly developing, the competition is not. I am pretty sure it will become industry standard at some point. Maybe not for the big studios, who invested millions into custom pipelines, but anything up and coming. Role model FOSS project for sure.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3mo ago
    > I am pretty sure it will become industry standard at some point. I remember people saying this in 2004. Blender is widely used in "the industry" (whatever that industry is). What is has really accomplished in terms of "the industry standard" has, from my POV, been preventing a proprietary system from becoming the standard. That's what happened in the DAW space, where ProTools was the industry standard, and it has taken 20 years to get to the point where that hegemony is no longer as solid as it once was (thanks, Ableton!) There are several different choices for all the things Blender does, but the existence of a FLOSS tool that does them (and does them well) prevents any of the proprietary ones from being "the one".
    - jijijijij 3mo ago
      You are right, Blender doesn't just serve one industry. I had the movie industry in mind, because it demands the largest set of Blender's features. I believe Maya still has/had the edge in animation and particle stuff. Though, AFAIK the main reason is integration and custom tooling built on it, which makes switching to Blender less tempting than sticking up with license fees... which are rather negligible compared to overall operating costs. I believe, Blender is creeping in with smaller studios, especially anime/cartoon kinda stuff. I think one of Blender's biggest assets is its wide creative tool set. There is even a useful video editor included. Honestly, it's not far off from being the swiss army knife of digital creative work, a creative operating system. Maybe we get a DAW too at some point :D Anyway, I think that's why Blender will dominate. Anyone starting out got everything they need for "free" (with a consistent UI you only have to learn once), but they still won't outgrow the software professionally either, now. That's totally unique.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- ColdStream 3mo ago
  Yes, but open source will never work!!! That is 1000 proof pure distilled sarcasm.
- janc_ 3mo ago
  The Oscar-winning animated feature movie “Flow” was made with Blender.
- mghackerlady 3mo ago
  I really hope a similar revolution comes to photo and video editing. While there are plenty of really good FOSS video editors (including the one blender has), none of them are truly professional level. For photo editing, the GIMP is pretty much there, but it's old and crusty and maintained by a handful of people
unshavedyak 3mo ago
For those of you who get value out of Blender please consider donating: https://fund.blender.org/ https://fund.blender.org/ :) It's a wonderful project. Even small amounts help. Thanks!
- cheschire 3mo ago
  Done. I was feeling bad for saying how often I used blender without paying a cent not 20 seconds earlier in this very thread. Then I saw your message. The fact that Apple Pay is an option made it take only another 20 seconds for me to throw some money at a great project.
  - jijijijij 3mo ago
    Thanks for the Apple pay hint. That was just what I needed to get me over the mental threshold. It's been literally two clicks.
    - iamflimflam1 3mo ago
      Same here. I don’t use blender very often. But it’s in my regular toolbox. Hopefully my $25 will help.
  - jambalaya8 3mo ago
    One of my adopted "kids" I taught years ago picked this up at 17. He is 26, now. He "borrowed" the software to start (fair enough; it was a friend's license and not used at the same time), and didn't pay for a copy of Blender until he had a career path in mind and used Blender regularly. A monthly thing makes no sense; just letting hobbyists dabble until they are in a place to pay used to be a lot more normal. They ought to make the entry for paying a bit less heartburn-inducing, though.
    - homarp 3mo ago
      >borrowed the software >it was a friend's license >didn't pay for a copy of Blender just for the record, everyone can download, for free, Blender from https://www.blender.org/download/ https://www.blender.org/download/ for Win, MacOS or Linux
timonoko 3mo ago
[dead]
rafaelmn 3mo ago
404 link ?
- pcdavid 3mo ago
  https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2/ https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2/
IshKebab 3mo ago
The demo reel for this release is seriously impressive. The video editor is also starting to get good. Still pretty buggy though.
LoganDark 3mo ago
URL is now https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2/ https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2/
cheschire 3mo ago
If you’re getting a 404 from OP’s link, the URL was updated on their site: https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2/ https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2/ Hopefully a mod sees this.
- dang 3mo ago
  Changed from https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2-lts/ https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2-lts/ above. Thanks!
maqp 3mo ago
What's the ideal route for someone familiar with 3ds Max to learn Blender? I feel a bit stuck with my proprietary skillset.
- embedding-shape 3mo ago
  Do tiny projects in Blender and just trudge through the horrible experience of having to look up a bunch of stuff. I also moved from 3ds Max to Blender, but back in the Blender 2.7 days, I'm sure it's easier today. Basically take whatever you'd do in 3ds Max normally, commit to doing in in Blender and prepare to Google/Ask an LLM "I can do X in 3ds Max 2025, how can I do the same or equivalent in Blender 5.2?" A LOT. Nothing beats practice :)
  - Gigachad 3mo ago
    IMO it’s probably better to start following at least one tutorial video which will walk you through most of the common actions and UI.
    - embedding-shape 3mo ago
      Different minds learn best different ways I suppose, I could never go through a "tutorial video" for any visual programs, always done it "the hard way" by basically looking up action by action. But again, YMMV of course.
      - Matumio 3mo ago
        Yes, but I think for Blender specifically this is the hard way. After a video tutorial I always concluded that I had a few really clumsily ways to work around my lack of knowledge. Some workflows really need an expert demonstration, or you won't even know what is possible. (I do pause the videos to look up the docu.)
      - Gigachad 3mo ago
        The problem is you will develop an incomplete understanding, using a ton of weird workflows, and missing tools that are super useful that you didn't know existed. Just pushing through one end to end tutorial will introduce all the main concepts than asking gemini for bits and pieces won't get. It's not as satisfying as doing your own project but pushing through at least one of them is well worth it.
embedding-shape 3mo ago
> Node-powered physics Ah man, been waiting so long for this, finally! The integration with sound to geometry nodes is also great and will be a lot of fun for music videos. Every day Blender inches closer to Houdini, and I for one am very happy about it :) Really like the polished changelog notes they've done for quite some time as well, used to be a huge hassle to actually understand what changed and it's a breeze now.
- tecleandor 3mo ago
  An Animusic revival? :)
- sm-silversight 3mo ago
  >Blender inches closer to Houdini Yeah but the distance is crossing the atlantic. I saw this as a blender user who glimpsed houdini a bit. Damn that's a cool program.
  - embedding-shape 3mo ago
    > Yeah but the distance is crossing the atlantic Indeed, a far way to go. But I also remember discussing the Blender UI/UX with people back in 2.5 days, and we were all like "Yeah, the UI is something else, but it is what it is, maybe some day" and look at it now, it's a night and day difference. I have no doubt in Blender's ability to continue iterating over decades to reach something amazing, they've already proven this clearly :)
    - sm-silversight 3mo ago
      I agree.
  - CooCooCaCha 3mo ago
    I’ve been learning houdini recently, and I have to agree. In terms of nodes and simulation, Houdini is still lightyears ahead of blender. I say this as someone who loves blender and views the programs as complementary. But still, I was shocked at how deep Houdini is. With that said, learning Houdini is an unrelenting gauntlet. Blender isn’t exactly easy to learn but it’s a walk in the park compared to Houdini. Even something as simple as creating a material and assigning it to an object is an exercise in frustration.
zuInnp 3mo ago
I am using Blender since my Master thesis in 2017. It is impressive how much has happened. Also giving some money to them because they don't get that much donations (if you compare it to Thunderbird for example).
- p-e-w 3mo ago
  Wait, Thunderbird is getting more donations than Blender? I was under the impression that Thunderbird is on life support, while Blender is everywhere.
  - wccrawford 3mo ago
    A quick AI Google search and some fact-checking later, and yeah. At least as of 2 years ago, Thunderbird was getting 3x the contributions that Blender was. It just goes to show you how badly managed Thunderbird is, since Blender is doing so much more with the money. I'm more and more disappointed with Mozilla all the time.
    - thaumasiotes 3mo ago
      Thunderbird did manage to buy out K-9.
      - jamesfinlayson 3mo ago
        Oh did it? I remember using K-9 on my Android phone years ago and being pretty happy with it.
        thaumasiotes 3mo ago
        Yes, K-9 has been shut down and Thunderbird for Android is what used to be K-9.
    - virtualritz 3mo ago
      It couldn't possibly be that Blender simply has much more volunteer contributions? Since hacking on a 3D DCC in your spare time may be more than three times as enticing to people than doing the same on an email client? I'd wager Occam's razor favors this explanation.
kdheiwns 3mo ago
The most impressive thing about Blender is how it feels like early 2000s-era creative software. And I mean that in a good way (blender was actually awful back then, but it's great now) It opens instantly on my computer. It's fast. It's lightweight to the point my fans don't even spin up no matter what I do. It's customizable. It does everything I want to do and it never gets in the way of me trying to do my job. Meanwhile Photoshop these days randomly shows fucking popups about features and begs me to use its cloud scam, it's slower than it was 20 years ago without offering significantly better features, and the UI has somehow gotten worse when it was fine before. Blender does everything right. All I want is someone to take Blender's design philosophy and make a 2D image editor for desktop. Or hell, everything. I'm sick of bloat and BS in every damn app these days.
- dominick-cc 3mo ago
  I have an older version of affinity photo that feels like this, but the new ones use cloud features I don't want so I don't upgrade
- BostonFern 3mo ago
  It’s not open-source, but I enjoy using Affinity, especially the updated version after it was acquired by Canva.
- pilgrim0 3mo ago
  Blender does open in a blink, it is scary how good it is. I share the exact same perception as yourself. In comparison, sometimes I need to use Fusion 360, and its performance is abysmal. I wish I could do parametric design in blender
  - tjoff 3mo ago
    CAD Sketcher add-on adds parametric design to blender. Haven't used it but probably not ready for real use.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92QmjS-xDaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92QmjS-xDaI https://hlorus.github.io/CAD_Sketcher/ https://hlorus.github.io/CAD_Sketcher/ Though people are so eager to be locked into Fusion 360 I will never understand. Especially when Freecad is so much better than it used to be.
lobo_tuerto 3mo ago
Look at that wow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqfLYIJMv7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqfLYIJMv7I
- simonw 3mo ago
  Thanks for that link, I really enjoyed that. I had no idea quite how varied the work people were creating with Blender was these days.
- dmsehuang 3mo ago
  holy. this is a pretty cool video. I am learning how to use AI to vibe coding blender videos and this is like very good!
  - gchamonlive 3mo ago
    How well do agents interact with blender? Do they modify files directly or through an API/mcp?
    - voxic11 3mo ago
      There is a popular mcp interface but having them write blender scripts is also pretty usable.
      - gchamonlive 3mo ago
        Nice. I'm currently slowly studying how Godot works and I'll next try to see if there is a usable workflow for designing assets in blender and using them in Godot.
    - dmsehuang 3mo ago
      I have not started with blender yet. So far, my experience is with manim. and claude is actually not bad at it. give it a prompt and it can come up with a good scene design and then translate it into manim code. I still need to tweak the layout of the texts and the pace of the video and other "taste" part. I am thinking to apply similar strategy to blender. but I need to learn the basics of blender first.
baisampayans 3mo ago
This on a M5 Max machine with 40 core GPU and 48GB ram is pretty fast. Preview cycles directly on the canvas without much delay. Can't say the same on my older M1 Ultra machine. Blender has come a long way and is very impressive how it is evolving in such a good way.
- jonhohle 3mo ago
  I worked on a short this past year, primarily on an M1 Pro 32GB. This was mostly compositing a single visible model into a scene and modeling shadowcatchers, lighting, holdouts, etc. Modeling was typically fast, but I was surprised at what tanked render times and how there was little ability to debug what that was. A modifier here, a filter in the compositing graph there, and something that started as a 10s/frame render jumped to multiple minutes with no way to easily identify the culprit other than a binary search through half a dozen configuration panels. That and the lack of easy portability (say modeling on my Mac and then handing off to a more powerful (or less utilized) desktop for rendering), made the learning curve steep. I’m a novice and barely got the things done that I wanted to do, but was happy with the output. Maybe I’ll do more in the future, but finding tutorials for beginners for the latest interface was also challenging.
  - brcmthrowaway 3mo ago
    There's got to be a profile tool somewhere right?
  - mixmastamyk 3mo ago
    Can’t render a scene from a command line? Should be doable for anything running on Unix. Need to have the assets available however.
bob1029 3mo ago
Nothing feels better than mastering a specific workflow in Blender. After using visual studio all day, it's like a breath of fresh air to click through a scene and have the tool respond like it actually cares about UX.
- agumonkey 3mo ago
  I've always been confused how all the CGI world is helping you get into flow with complex data while IDEs felt so heavy and glitchy.
- amelius 3mo ago
  > Nothing feels better than mastering a specific workflow in Blender. But nothing feels lousier than coming back after a few months and finding out that you've forgotten how the workflow goes.
  - kroaton 3mo ago
    And that's when you learn Houdini and open up a workflow from 2008 and it still works the same, despite SideFX pushing out an insane amount of features every release (look at their SneakPeaks).
ksec 3mo ago
Slightly Off topic: For those working inside the industry, Is the professional space still dominated by 3D Studio Max and Maya? I just checked Lightwave 3D and Cinema 4D is still getting updated. Just found out Zbush got bought by Cinema 4D. And Foundry decided to wind down development of Modo. A lot of these names were big in late 90s and early 00s. I am wondering if everything is still pretty much the same. Speaking of 3D Modelling software I am still pissed the whole CGtalk forum got deleted and decades of community knowledge wasn't even backed up or sold.
- jayd16 3mo ago
  I wish Blender was more popular but for the game industry I still think Maya and even Houdini are more common in my circles. That said, Blender is respected. I think it'll get there but still has to battle through momentum.
- lvl155 3mo ago
  It’d pretty much Houdini plus render engine of your choice. Blender will eventually get there especially if someone rolls out an AI module.
- dagmx 3mo ago
  The commercial Autodesk apps still dominate, as do Maxon apps like C4D for motion graphics and zbrush for sculpting. The big problems are that license cost doesn’t outweigh the pain points. In production I can get support from Autodesk for specific bugs without rediverting my production resources to fixing it. Blender has no C++ API and even the Python api is not stable version to version. Studios live by maximizing their competitive advantage and that takes the form of extending the DCCs with custom pipelines and high performance plugins. With blender I’d have to maintain a full fork. Also blender’s ghost UI system is significantly worse than Qt. It also means I can’t share the Qt tools I built for the rest of the apps with blender. And while Ton was still CEO he heavily told studios he didn’t want their business. He believed blender shouldn’t be part of a pipeline but be the whole pipeline. These were his explicit words in a presentation blender gave at SIGGRAPH. For background, I was a lead engineer in the film industry and still am quite involved with industry development while also contributing to blenders code base. My partner also works for one of the big animation studios. I think blender is great and it’s seeing adoption professionally but there’s a lot of fundamental things that need solving before it displaces the current status quo DCCs.
huflungdung 3mo ago
[dead]
lvl155 3mo ago
Even if you never use Blender, I highly recommend you to donate to the organization if you happen to donate to non-profit tech organizations/projects.
aitchnyu 3mo ago
As a Python fan, the mention of a node-based physics engine was a jumpscare.
jokoon 3mo ago
Blender is certainly a great software, but there are still remains of bad UI choices, for example how zooming works https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/644/why-does-the-zoom-sometimes-stop-at-a-point https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/644/why-does-the... They improved the UI already, but maybe they could improve it a little bit more. And this is not the only frustration, I constantly have to ask around for little things like that. Also important to know, but late blender versions don't support old GPU, which is a bit sad: I can't use late blender version on my old thinkpad which only has a graphics chipset.
- neonmagenta 3mo ago
  Blender is one of the most infuriatingly un-intuitive UIs I've ever experienced. It's always having to be used with it in one screen, a myriad of guides/forums/etc on the other.
  - kilpikaarna 3mo ago
    Do you have a preferred 3D (polygon) modelling/graphics tool where you feel like you don't need to keep up guides and forums? I've been hearing this complaint since Blender 2.48 twenty years ago, where it might've had some merit. But even then you could still pick it up in at most a few weeks with focused study, and the biggest non-intuitive (in terms of adherence to things like OS guidelines etc) and Blender-specific features and workflows remain the same to this day, and the interface overall is remarkably consistent and effective once you get used to it. The only thing I can see that comes close to doing the same thing in terms of a general/integrative/swiss-army-knife-of 3D content creation suite are to this day Autodesk Maya and 3ds max, and maybe increasingly UE and Unity. I wouldn't exactly say you can just "intuitively" click around in any of those and high-quality results come out by default. Other software may be better at specific things and perhaps offer a more focused UI for some subset of tasks, sure, but at that point you're using the wrong tool sticking with Blender. But in basically all cases, as soon as you're doing anything moderately complex, you're constantly referring to the manual/LLMs/tutorial videos. This stuff is just difficult, man, and most of the difficulty is even orthogonal to the software itself!
raincole 3mo ago
As someone who spent quite some time (>1000hr) in Houdini, I really wonder what's the secret behind Blender's rendering engines and why SideFX failed to catch up. Cycles are so much faster than Karma on my machine. Eevee can get impressive results in real time while Houdini's real time viewport is bare bone.
- agumonkey 3mo ago
  Interesting, maybe major customers are insisting on other features ?
  - raincole 3mo ago
    I suppose that's the main reason as Houdini's real customers are those who can afford huge render farms. Even before Karma, Houdini's renderer (Mantra) wasn't known for its speed. That's quite a bummer for me, an indie user. With the foundation Houdini has established, they probably could've released a real time viewport composition before Blender. But at the end of the day it doesn't make a lot of business sense for SideFX to care about users like me.
- swerner 3mo ago
  Cycles is getting direct code contributions from all major hardware vendors.
- greenknight 3mo ago
  The thing is, Cycles is fully open sourced... so there is no real secret behind it!
- kroaton 3mo ago
  They've been investing heavily into this over the last 2 releases, but it's just that SideFX is a really small company. I think they have 50 people or so right now. Karma is way more accurate than Cycles, but slow. Karma XPU is a mixed bag.
- summarity 3mo ago
  The question is why don’t they integrate cycles? I mean I have a random app for home planning on macOS and even that comes with Cycles as the rendering engine. Can’t be that hard.
socalgal2 3mo ago
I love that Blender exists and I donate to it at a high-ish $$$ level monthly. That said, I can't help but feel something is wrong with 3D asset creation in that becoming an expert at Blender or 3DSMax, Maya or literally any other 3D creation software, it's a multi-month if not multi-year project. There are 1000s upon 1000s of options buried all over in nested upon nested options. Maybe AI will solve this. You ask for or sketch what you want and it does the 3000 steps to create it for you. There just has to be a better way than what we have now. It (3d asset creation) practially hasn't changed much since ~1995. If you compare 3DSMax 1995 to Blender, with few execptions, you'll find them very recognizable. Yes, there are amazing features that have been added but still. It's quite a slog to get good at, not just artistic good, that's a whole extra level of training, I just mean good at knowing where and how to use the software. I wish I had an idea for how to make it easier.
- uncivilized 3mo ago
  Why does it have to be easier? It’s like asking for soccer to be easier so you can play in the World Cup.
  - pilaf 3mo ago
    Soccer is hard because it's competitive though. Kicking a ball around and putting it between two posts is easy enough, but it gets hard as soon as you have someone trying to do the same in the opposite direction better than you. Tools should be as easy as they can afford to be without making serious compromises. I have no idea how much room Blender has for becoming easier, but if there is any it should be taken.
    - uncivilized 3mo ago
      Sure kicking around and putting it between the posts is easy enough, now try it with full power in a specific corner. Blender is much easier to use than the pre 2.78 days, but that doesn’t mean one can just build animation without developing skills.
    - unsignedint 3mo ago
Farfignoggen 3mo ago
Blender SYCL Back End question, is there any potential there to get Polaris and Vega iGPUs/dGPUs working for GPU accelerated Cycles rendering via SYCL? And so AMD's abandoned Polaris and Vega for ROCm/HIP support but what about SYCL and that Accelerator ecosystem that's more cross platform in the same manner that OpenCL once was with regards to GPU compute!

419 points by makizar 3mo ago

I don't use Blender, so my admiration is from a distance but: Wow - what an impressive project. At least if I understand it correctly, this is a real pro-level piece of free and open software that's equivalent to thousands and thousands of dollars in closed-source commercial software.

keyle 3mo ago
Yes, it's had a lot of money put through it since its early days, with quirky shortcuts and quirky features. Imagine if they made Gimp good, this would be what blender became in 3D. They've done it right, with a foundation and it appears to run like clockwork. Feature wise it now rivals with some pretty expensive alternatives. Open source; can win!
- Joel_Mckay 3mo ago
  https://krita.org/en/ https://krita.org/en/ It is also free. =3
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- KPGv2 3mo ago
  > Imagine if they made Gimp good, I have a vague recollection that twenty years ago GIMP paid some designers to come up with a great UI, but once the design was ready, GIMP was like "nah we don't like that" and kept their bad UI. I do image stuff so rarely that GIMP is fine because it's free. But its UI is so bad. I don't know about now, but I remember a few years ago someone pointed out that GIMP had over a million dollars in a Bitcoin wallet and hadn't touched any of it in like a decade.
  - bigyabai 3mo ago
    For minimal edits, Pinta does the job IMO: https://www.pinta-project.com/ https://www.pinta-project.com/ Gimp still has a lot of good features that I find myself crawling back for, on bigger projects. But Pinta has that good ol' fashioned Paint.NET feel to it that a lot of people still strive for.
    - mghackerlady 3mo ago
      For even more minimal edits, I still use xpaint
Joel_Mckay 3mo ago
[flagged]
- cheschire 3mo ago
  I use blender constantly to make things for 3d printing and I haven’t spent a cent on it or any plugins I use for it. So for anyone on the fence about picking up blender and reading this comment above, no it doesn’t require hundreds of dollars of plugins to be useful. Not for every use case.
  - Joel_Mckay 3mo ago
    Every use-case differs. I like Blender even when they break my hobby projects every update. OpenScad and FreeCad also works for 3D cad files. However, many people that own 3D printers will never sculpt, re-mesh, or cad up their own objects. =3
    - cheschire 3mo ago
      FreeCAD is great if someone mainly wants to print functional, usable parts. That’s totally valid and honestly even more powerful than Blender for that use case. Autodesk Fusion (prev. Fusion 360) is also a popular option. I use blender because I also like to do a lot of 3d printed art, and as you mentioned, that sculpt tooling is one of many fantastic tools for that purpose. Also LLMs know a lot about Blender, making it very easy to describe what I want to do, and then get a walk through of how to do it with Blender.
      - Joel_Mckay 3mo ago
        We found most of this devs work was popular with artists. May be worth a look. https://bartoszstyperek.gumroad.com/ https://bartoszstyperek.gumroad.com/ LLM are sometimes good at organizing the awful documentation for Blenders ever permuting API, but will not help you get better creatively. If you are interested in geometry nodes, than this channel offers a lot =3 https://www.youtube.com/@TheDucky3D/videos https://www.youtube.com/@TheDucky3D/videos
sakjur 3mo ago
Its history is also one of perseverance. Blender was never a runaway success story, but rather a matter of becoming a little better every day and eventually getting a recognition for that.
- embedding-shape 3mo ago
  > Blender was never a runaway success story, but rather a matter of becoming a little better every day Also some extreme ups and downs along the way, almost succumbing at some point(s) and more along the way. It's a miracle it survived, a miracle performed by Ton Roosendaal most likely.
jijijijij 3mo ago
It's not just incredibly powerful software, it's also incredibly fun and intuitive to use (once the UI has clicked with you). There are still some areas where commercial competitors got edge, but Blender covers a wider base, is the more complete/universal software already. Lot's of people prefer Blender's UI. It's also rapidly developing, the competition is not. I am pretty sure it will become industry standard at some point. Maybe not for the big studios, who invested millions into custom pipelines, but anything up and coming. Role model FOSS project for sure.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3mo ago
  > I am pretty sure it will become industry standard at some point. I remember people saying this in 2004. Blender is widely used in "the industry" (whatever that industry is). What is has really accomplished in terms of "the industry standard" has, from my POV, been preventing a proprietary system from becoming the standard. That's what happened in the DAW space, where ProTools was the industry standard, and it has taken 20 years to get to the point where that hegemony is no longer as solid as it once was (thanks, Ableton!) There are several different choices for all the things Blender does, but the existence of a FLOSS tool that does them (and does them well) prevents any of the proprietary ones from being "the one".
  - jijijijij 3mo ago
    You are right, Blender doesn't just serve one industry. I had the movie industry in mind, because it demands the largest set of Blender's features. I believe Maya still has/had the edge in animation and particle stuff. Though, AFAIK the main reason is integration and custom tooling built on it, which makes switching to Blender less tempting than sticking up with license fees... which are rather negligible compared to overall operating costs. I believe, Blender is creeping in with smaller studios, especially anime/cartoon kinda stuff. I think one of Blender's biggest assets is its wide creative tool set. There is even a useful video editor included. Honestly, it's not far off from being the swiss army knife of digital creative work, a creative operating system. Maybe we get a DAW too at some point :D Anyway, I think that's why Blender will dominate. Anyone starting out got everything they need for "free" (with a consistent UI you only have to learn once), but they still won't outgrow the software professionally either, now. That's totally unique.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
ColdStream 3mo ago
Yes, but open source will never work!!! That is 1000 proof pure distilled sarcasm.
janc_ 3mo ago
The Oscar-winning animated feature movie “Flow” was made with Blender.
mghackerlady 3mo ago
I really hope a similar revolution comes to photo and video editing. While there are plenty of really good FOSS video editors (including the one blender has), none of them are truly professional level. For photo editing, the GIMP is pretty much there, but it's old and crusty and maintained by a handful of people

unshavedyak 3mo ago

For those of you who get value out of Blender please consider donating: https://fund.blender.org/ https://fund.blender.org/ :) It's a wonderful project. Even small amounts help. Thanks!

cheschire 3mo ago
Done. I was feeling bad for saying how often I used blender without paying a cent not 20 seconds earlier in this very thread. Then I saw your message. The fact that Apple Pay is an option made it take only another 20 seconds for me to throw some money at a great project.
- jijijijij 3mo ago
  Thanks for the Apple pay hint. That was just what I needed to get me over the mental threshold. It's been literally two clicks.
  - iamflimflam1 3mo ago
    Same here. I don’t use blender very often. But it’s in my regular toolbox. Hopefully my $25 will help.
- jambalaya8 3mo ago
  One of my adopted "kids" I taught years ago picked this up at 17. He is 26, now. He "borrowed" the software to start (fair enough; it was a friend's license and not used at the same time), and didn't pay for a copy of Blender until he had a career path in mind and used Blender regularly. A monthly thing makes no sense; just letting hobbyists dabble until they are in a place to pay used to be a lot more normal. They ought to make the entry for paying a bit less heartburn-inducing, though.
  - homarp 3mo ago
    >borrowed the software >it was a friend's license >didn't pay for a copy of Blender just for the record, everyone can download, for free, Blender from https://www.blender.org/download/ https://www.blender.org/download/ for Win, MacOS or Linux

timonoko 3mo ago

[dead]

rafaelmn 3mo ago

404 link ?

pcdavid 3mo ago
https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2/ https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2/

IshKebab 3mo ago

The demo reel for this release is seriously impressive. The video editor is also starting to get good. Still pretty buggy though.

LoganDark 3mo ago

URL is now https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2/ https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2/

cheschire 3mo ago

If you’re getting a 404 from OP’s link, the URL was updated on their site: https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2/ https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2/ Hopefully a mod sees this.

dang 3mo ago
Changed from https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2-lts/ https://www.blender.org/download/releases/5-2-lts/ above. Thanks!

maqp 3mo ago

What's the ideal route for someone familiar with 3ds Max to learn Blender? I feel a bit stuck with my proprietary skillset.

embedding-shape 3mo ago
Do tiny projects in Blender and just trudge through the horrible experience of having to look up a bunch of stuff. I also moved from 3ds Max to Blender, but back in the Blender 2.7 days, I'm sure it's easier today. Basically take whatever you'd do in 3ds Max normally, commit to doing in in Blender and prepare to Google/Ask an LLM "I can do X in 3ds Max 2025, how can I do the same or equivalent in Blender 5.2?" A LOT. Nothing beats practice :)
- Gigachad 3mo ago
  IMO it’s probably better to start following at least one tutorial video which will walk you through most of the common actions and UI.
  - embedding-shape 3mo ago
    Different minds learn best different ways I suppose, I could never go through a "tutorial video" for any visual programs, always done it "the hard way" by basically looking up action by action. But again, YMMV of course.
    - Matumio 3mo ago
      Yes, but I think for Blender specifically this is the hard way. After a video tutorial I always concluded that I had a few really clumsily ways to work around my lack of knowledge. Some workflows really need an expert demonstration, or you won't even know what is possible. (I do pause the videos to look up the docu.)
    - Gigachad 3mo ago
      The problem is you will develop an incomplete understanding, using a ton of weird workflows, and missing tools that are super useful that you didn't know existed. Just pushing through one end to end tutorial will introduce all the main concepts than asking gemini for bits and pieces won't get. It's not as satisfying as doing your own project but pushing through at least one of them is well worth it.

embedding-shape 3mo ago

> Node-powered physics Ah man, been waiting so long for this, finally! The integration with sound to geometry nodes is also great and will be a lot of fun for music videos. Every day Blender inches closer to Houdini, and I for one am very happy about it :) Really like the polished changelog notes they've done for quite some time as well, used to be a huge hassle to actually understand what changed and it's a breeze now.

tecleandor 3mo ago
An Animusic revival? :)
sm-silversight 3mo ago
>Blender inches closer to Houdini Yeah but the distance is crossing the atlantic. I saw this as a blender user who glimpsed houdini a bit. Damn that's a cool program.
- embedding-shape 3mo ago
  > Yeah but the distance is crossing the atlantic Indeed, a far way to go. But I also remember discussing the Blender UI/UX with people back in 2.5 days, and we were all like "Yeah, the UI is something else, but it is what it is, maybe some day" and look at it now, it's a night and day difference. I have no doubt in Blender's ability to continue iterating over decades to reach something amazing, they've already proven this clearly :)
  - sm-silversight 3mo ago
    I agree.
- CooCooCaCha 3mo ago
  I’ve been learning houdini recently, and I have to agree. In terms of nodes and simulation, Houdini is still lightyears ahead of blender. I say this as someone who loves blender and views the programs as complementary. But still, I was shocked at how deep Houdini is. With that said, learning Houdini is an unrelenting gauntlet. Blender isn’t exactly easy to learn but it’s a walk in the park compared to Houdini. Even something as simple as creating a material and assigning it to an object is an exercise in frustration.

zuInnp 3mo ago

I am using Blender since my Master thesis in 2017. It is impressive how much has happened. Also giving some money to them because they don't get that much donations (if you compare it to Thunderbird for example).

p-e-w 3mo ago
Wait, Thunderbird is getting more donations than Blender? I was under the impression that Thunderbird is on life support, while Blender is everywhere.
- wccrawford 3mo ago
  A quick AI Google search and some fact-checking later, and yeah. At least as of 2 years ago, Thunderbird was getting 3x the contributions that Blender was. It just goes to show you how badly managed Thunderbird is, since Blender is doing so much more with the money. I'm more and more disappointed with Mozilla all the time.
  - thaumasiotes 3mo ago
    Thunderbird did manage to buy out K-9.
    - jamesfinlayson 3mo ago
      Oh did it? I remember using K-9 on my Android phone years ago and being pretty happy with it.
      - thaumasiotes 3mo ago
        Yes, K-9 has been shut down and Thunderbird for Android is what used to be K-9.
  - virtualritz 3mo ago
    It couldn't possibly be that Blender simply has much more volunteer contributions? Since hacking on a 3D DCC in your spare time may be more than three times as enticing to people than doing the same on an email client? I'd wager Occam's razor favors this explanation.

kdheiwns 3mo ago

The most impressive thing about Blender is how it feels like early 2000s-era creative software. And I mean that in a good way (blender was actually awful back then, but it's great now) It opens instantly on my computer. It's fast. It's lightweight to the point my fans don't even spin up no matter what I do. It's customizable. It does everything I want to do and it never gets in the way of me trying to do my job. Meanwhile Photoshop these days randomly shows fucking popups about features and begs me to use its cloud scam, it's slower than it was 20 years ago without offering significantly better features, and the UI has somehow gotten worse when it was fine before. Blender does everything right. All I want is someone to take Blender's design philosophy and make a 2D image editor for desktop. Or hell, everything. I'm sick of bloat and BS in every damn app these days.

dominick-cc 3mo ago
I have an older version of affinity photo that feels like this, but the new ones use cloud features I don't want so I don't upgrade
BostonFern 3mo ago
It’s not open-source, but I enjoy using Affinity, especially the updated version after it was acquired by Canva.
pilgrim0 3mo ago
Blender does open in a blink, it is scary how good it is. I share the exact same perception as yourself. In comparison, sometimes I need to use Fusion 360, and its performance is abysmal. I wish I could do parametric design in blender
- tjoff 3mo ago
  CAD Sketcher add-on adds parametric design to blender. Haven't used it but probably not ready for real use.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92QmjS-xDaI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92QmjS-xDaI https://hlorus.github.io/CAD_Sketcher/ https://hlorus.github.io/CAD_Sketcher/ Though people are so eager to be locked into Fusion 360 I will never understand. Especially when Freecad is so much better than it used to be.

lobo_tuerto 3mo ago

Look at that wow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqfLYIJMv7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqfLYIJMv7I

simonw 3mo ago
Thanks for that link, I really enjoyed that. I had no idea quite how varied the work people were creating with Blender was these days.
dmsehuang 3mo ago
holy. this is a pretty cool video. I am learning how to use AI to vibe coding blender videos and this is like very good!
- gchamonlive 3mo ago
  How well do agents interact with blender? Do they modify files directly or through an API/mcp?
  - voxic11 3mo ago
    There is a popular mcp interface but having them write blender scripts is also pretty usable.
    - gchamonlive 3mo ago
      Nice. I'm currently slowly studying how Godot works and I'll next try to see if there is a usable workflow for designing assets in blender and using them in Godot.
  - dmsehuang 3mo ago
    I have not started with blender yet. So far, my experience is with manim. and claude is actually not bad at it. give it a prompt and it can come up with a good scene design and then translate it into manim code. I still need to tweak the layout of the texts and the pace of the video and other "taste" part. I am thinking to apply similar strategy to blender. but I need to learn the basics of blender first.

baisampayans 3mo ago

This on a M5 Max machine with 40 core GPU and 48GB ram is pretty fast. Preview cycles directly on the canvas without much delay. Can't say the same on my older M1 Ultra machine. Blender has come a long way and is very impressive how it is evolving in such a good way.

jonhohle 3mo ago
I worked on a short this past year, primarily on an M1 Pro 32GB. This was mostly compositing a single visible model into a scene and modeling shadowcatchers, lighting, holdouts, etc. Modeling was typically fast, but I was surprised at what tanked render times and how there was little ability to debug what that was. A modifier here, a filter in the compositing graph there, and something that started as a 10s/frame render jumped to multiple minutes with no way to easily identify the culprit other than a binary search through half a dozen configuration panels. That and the lack of easy portability (say modeling on my Mac and then handing off to a more powerful (or less utilized) desktop for rendering), made the learning curve steep. I’m a novice and barely got the things done that I wanted to do, but was happy with the output. Maybe I’ll do more in the future, but finding tutorials for beginners for the latest interface was also challenging.
- brcmthrowaway 3mo ago
  There's got to be a profile tool somewhere right?
- mixmastamyk 3mo ago
  Can’t render a scene from a command line? Should be doable for anything running on Unix. Need to have the assets available however.

bob1029 3mo ago

Nothing feels better than mastering a specific workflow in Blender. After using visual studio all day, it's like a breath of fresh air to click through a scene and have the tool respond like it actually cares about UX.

agumonkey 3mo ago
I've always been confused how all the CGI world is helping you get into flow with complex data while IDEs felt so heavy and glitchy.
amelius 3mo ago
> Nothing feels better than mastering a specific workflow in Blender. But nothing feels lousier than coming back after a few months and finding out that you've forgotten how the workflow goes.
- kroaton 3mo ago
  And that's when you learn Houdini and open up a workflow from 2008 and it still works the same, despite SideFX pushing out an insane amount of features every release (look at their SneakPeaks).

ksec 3mo ago

Slightly Off topic: For those working inside the industry, Is the professional space still dominated by 3D Studio Max and Maya? I just checked Lightwave 3D and Cinema 4D is still getting updated. Just found out Zbush got bought by Cinema 4D. And Foundry decided to wind down development of Modo. A lot of these names were big in late 90s and early 00s. I am wondering if everything is still pretty much the same. Speaking of 3D Modelling software I am still pissed the whole CGtalk forum got deleted and decades of community knowledge wasn't even backed up or sold.

jayd16 3mo ago
I wish Blender was more popular but for the game industry I still think Maya and even Houdini are more common in my circles. That said, Blender is respected. I think it'll get there but still has to battle through momentum.
lvl155 3mo ago
It’d pretty much Houdini plus render engine of your choice. Blender will eventually get there especially if someone rolls out an AI module.
dagmx 3mo ago
The commercial Autodesk apps still dominate, as do Maxon apps like C4D for motion graphics and zbrush for sculpting. The big problems are that license cost doesn’t outweigh the pain points. In production I can get support from Autodesk for specific bugs without rediverting my production resources to fixing it. Blender has no C++ API and even the Python api is not stable version to version. Studios live by maximizing their competitive advantage and that takes the form of extending the DCCs with custom pipelines and high performance plugins. With blender I’d have to maintain a full fork. Also blender’s ghost UI system is significantly worse than Qt. It also means I can’t share the Qt tools I built for the rest of the apps with blender. And while Ton was still CEO he heavily told studios he didn’t want their business. He believed blender shouldn’t be part of a pipeline but be the whole pipeline. These were his explicit words in a presentation blender gave at SIGGRAPH. For background, I was a lead engineer in the film industry and still am quite involved with industry development while also contributing to blenders code base. My partner also works for one of the big animation studios. I think blender is great and it’s seeing adoption professionally but there’s a lot of fundamental things that need solving before it displaces the current status quo DCCs.

huflungdung 3mo ago

[dead]

lvl155 3mo ago

Even if you never use Blender, I highly recommend you to donate to the organization if you happen to donate to non-profit tech organizations/projects.

aitchnyu 3mo ago

As a Python fan, the mention of a node-based physics engine was a jumpscare.

jokoon 3mo ago

Blender is certainly a great software, but there are still remains of bad UI choices, for example how zooming works https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/644/why-does-the-zoom-sometimes-stop-at-a-point https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/644/why-does-the... They improved the UI already, but maybe they could improve it a little bit more. And this is not the only frustration, I constantly have to ask around for little things like that. Also important to know, but late blender versions don't support old GPU, which is a bit sad: I can't use late blender version on my old thinkpad which only has a graphics chipset.

neonmagenta 3mo ago
Blender is one of the most infuriatingly un-intuitive UIs I've ever experienced. It's always having to be used with it in one screen, a myriad of guides/forums/etc on the other.
- kilpikaarna 3mo ago
  Do you have a preferred 3D (polygon) modelling/graphics tool where you feel like you don't need to keep up guides and forums? I've been hearing this complaint since Blender 2.48 twenty years ago, where it might've had some merit. But even then you could still pick it up in at most a few weeks with focused study, and the biggest non-intuitive (in terms of adherence to things like OS guidelines etc) and Blender-specific features and workflows remain the same to this day, and the interface overall is remarkably consistent and effective once you get used to it. The only thing I can see that comes close to doing the same thing in terms of a general/integrative/swiss-army-knife-of 3D content creation suite are to this day Autodesk Maya and 3ds max, and maybe increasingly UE and Unity. I wouldn't exactly say you can just "intuitively" click around in any of those and high-quality results come out by default. Other software may be better at specific things and perhaps offer a more focused UI for some subset of tasks, sure, but at that point you're using the wrong tool sticking with Blender. But in basically all cases, as soon as you're doing anything moderately complex, you're constantly referring to the manual/LLMs/tutorial videos. This stuff is just difficult, man, and most of the difficulty is even orthogonal to the software itself!

raincole 3mo ago

As someone who spent quite some time (>1000hr) in Houdini, I really wonder what's the secret behind Blender's rendering engines and why SideFX failed to catch up. Cycles are so much faster than Karma on my machine. Eevee can get impressive results in real time while Houdini's real time viewport is bare bone.

agumonkey 3mo ago
Interesting, maybe major customers are insisting on other features ?
- raincole 3mo ago
  I suppose that's the main reason as Houdini's real customers are those who can afford huge render farms. Even before Karma, Houdini's renderer (Mantra) wasn't known for its speed. That's quite a bummer for me, an indie user. With the foundation Houdini has established, they probably could've released a real time viewport composition before Blender. But at the end of the day it doesn't make a lot of business sense for SideFX to care about users like me.
swerner 3mo ago
Cycles is getting direct code contributions from all major hardware vendors.
greenknight 3mo ago
The thing is, Cycles is fully open sourced... so there is no real secret behind it!
kroaton 3mo ago
They've been investing heavily into this over the last 2 releases, but it's just that SideFX is a really small company. I think they have 50 people or so right now. Karma is way more accurate than Cycles, but slow. Karma XPU is a mixed bag.
summarity 3mo ago
The question is why don’t they integrate cycles? I mean I have a random app for home planning on macOS and even that comes with Cycles as the rendering engine. Can’t be that hard.

socalgal2 3mo ago

I love that Blender exists and I donate to it at a high-ish $$$ level monthly. That said, I can't help but feel something is wrong with 3D asset creation in that becoming an expert at Blender or 3DSMax, Maya or literally any other 3D creation software, it's a multi-month if not multi-year project. There are 1000s upon 1000s of options buried all over in nested upon nested options. Maybe AI will solve this. You ask for or sketch what you want and it does the 3000 steps to create it for you. There just has to be a better way than what we have now. It (3d asset creation) practially hasn't changed much since ~1995. If you compare 3DSMax 1995 to Blender, with few execptions, you'll find them very recognizable. Yes, there are amazing features that have been added but still. It's quite a slog to get good at, not just artistic good, that's a whole extra level of training, I just mean good at knowing where and how to use the software. I wish I had an idea for how to make it easier.

uncivilized 3mo ago
Why does it have to be easier? It’s like asking for soccer to be easier so you can play in the World Cup.
- pilaf 3mo ago
  Soccer is hard because it's competitive though. Kicking a ball around and putting it between two posts is easy enough, but it gets hard as soon as you have someone trying to do the same in the opposite direction better than you. Tools should be as easy as they can afford to be without making serious compromises. I have no idea how much room Blender has for becoming easier, but if there is any it should be taken.
  - uncivilized 3mo ago
    Sure kicking around and putting it between the posts is easy enough, now try it with full power in a specific corner. Blender is much easier to use than the pre 2.78 days, but that doesn’t mean one can just build animation without developing skills.
  - unsignedint 3mo ago

Farfignoggen 3mo ago

Blender SYCL Back End question, is there any potential there to get Polaris and Vega iGPUs/dGPUs working for GPU accelerated Cycles rendering via SYCL? And so AMD's abandoned Polaris and Vega for ROCm/HIP support but what about SYCL and that Accelerator ecosystem that's more cross platform in the same manner that OpenCL once was with regards to GPU compute!