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Blender is fucking amazing. I recently rediscovered it. You probably know it as a 3D editor / renderer. What it actually is is a fully programmable environment

Blender is fucking amazing. I recently rediscovered it. You probably know it as a 3D editor / renderer. What it actually is is a fully programmable environment. You can program EVERYTHING in Blender. You can run it in a command-line mode, while still being able to program everything. Give it a try. A new version just came out a couple of days ago.

greggman 11y ago
Not to discredit Blender but FYI, Maya has been a programmable environment since it came out. Effectively Maya is a core program written in C++ that then executes ~1500 Mel scripts to implement itself. Everyone of those mel scripts is editable. Every command can be scripted. Every command goes through it's command line. You can see them being executed as you choose features in Maya. I don't know where Maya got it's inspiration but I'm guessing blender got theirs from Maya. Maya is still heads and tails beyond blender AFAICT. PS: Just tried the latest version of blender yesterday. All I wanted to do was make a cube, scale it to the shape of cereal box, apply the transformation, then texture the 6 sides. It took > 1hr to figure out how to move UVs. The supposed keys listed in whatever 6 tutorials I found didn't work. I don't believe it's that unintuitive in pretty much any other modeling package. In most you just pick some vertices and a gizmo shows up letting you manipulate the vertices. That's true in 15+ other modeling packages I've used. Using Blender feels like using some 1980s modal modeling package. It would be nice if they graduated to the mid 90s at least yet it's 2015
- dTal 11y ago
  >Effectively Maya is a core program written in C++ that then executes ~1500 Mel scripts to implement itself. Everyone [sic] of those mel scripts is editable. Every command can be scripted. Every command goes through it's [sic] command line. You can see them being executed as you choose features in Maya. I don't know where Maya got it's [sic] inspiration but I'm guessing blender got theirs from Maya. Sounds like Maya took inspiration from Emacs!
- boomlinde 11y ago
  I suppose they both owe their inspiration to AutoCAD, which has been using AutoLISP well since the 80s.
  - greggman 11y ago
    I don't know autocad well. What distinguished Maya is that the app is made from scripts. There's lots of apps that have a scripting language but usually it's tacked on for user scripting. It's not there to implement the actual app. Example 3DSMax you can turn off the scripting it will still run just fine. Maya doesn't function without scripts. It IS scripts.

greggman 11y ago

Not to discredit Blender but FYI, Maya has been a programmable environment since it came out. Effectively Maya is a core program written in C++ that then executes ~1500 Mel scripts to implement itself. Everyone of those mel scripts is editable. Every command can be scripted. Every command goes through it's command line. You can see them being executed as you choose features in Maya. I don't know where Maya got it's inspiration but I'm guessing blender got theirs from Maya. Maya is still heads and tails beyond blender AFAICT. PS: Just tried the latest version of blender yesterday. All I wanted to do was make a cube, scale it to the shape of cereal box, apply the transformation, then texture the 6 sides. It took > 1hr to figure out how to move UVs. The supposed keys listed in whatever 6 tutorials I found didn't work. I don't believe it's that unintuitive in pretty much any other modeling package. In most you just pick some vertices and a gizmo shows up letting you manipulate the vertices. That's true in 15+ other modeling packages I've used. Using Blender feels like using some 1980s modal modeling package. It would be nice if they graduated to the mid 90s at least yet it's 2015

dTal 11y ago
>Effectively Maya is a core program written in C++ that then executes ~1500 Mel scripts to implement itself. Everyone [sic] of those mel scripts is editable. Every command can be scripted. Every command goes through it's [sic] command line. You can see them being executed as you choose features in Maya. I don't know where Maya got it's [sic] inspiration but I'm guessing blender got theirs from Maya. Sounds like Maya took inspiration from Emacs!
boomlinde 11y ago
I suppose they both owe their inspiration to AutoCAD, which has been using AutoLISP well since the 80s.
- greggman 11y ago
  I don't know autocad well. What distinguished Maya is that the app is made from scripts. There's lots of apps that have a scripting language but usually it's tacked on for user scripting. It's not there to implement the actual app. Example 3DSMax you can turn off the scripting it will still run just fine. Maya doesn't function without scripts. It IS scripts.