And the user interface is all OpenGL... man I can't imagine how much time it would take to write a decent user interface starting with nothing but OpenGL. Like just rendering text to the screen is a pain. And it's so snappy and responsive and it looks sooooo good. Definitely not a one man project, there's just no way.
Rolling your own UI in openGL is very doable and can make a lot of sense for any application that will require non standard custom widgets. Use your preferred truetype rendering library to generate your text textures, blender uses freetype I think. Widgets can all be done with vectors and gradients, start with functions that create primitives such as rounded boxes or different line types and build from there.
There’s so much more than that though. You need to build your own accessibility tree and hooks into the OS’s assistive tech infrastructure just for a start.
Or you can just not do that, which is what Blender does.
To be fair, there's not all that much use in Blender for folks who cannot see a screen clearly.
Assistive tech isn’t just screen readers. But yeah, Blender specifically is a visual design tool, I’ll give you that.
I know it's not just screen readers, but what a11y concerns would make sense for blender? It barely uses audio and what it does probablycanbe covered by external tooling. For visuals... the only things that occur are probably covered by Blender's UI scaling/zoom. But I could easily be forgetting something or ignorant.
Edit: Oops, somehow forgot input - but there again, I would natively expect most things to work via keyboard/mouse emulation, and beyond that you'd probably need custom integration, but it's got the Python hooks to facilitate that.
What comes to mind is someone with a tremor that is unable to use classic pointing devices and might have better luck using tab/arrow-key navigation to move through the buttons/menus/etc. From my cursory examination of the product I don't see much support for keyboardnavigation, though as a professional tool I'm sure there's a plethora of keyboardshortcutsthat one could learn.
Good point, I'd never noticed that before - menus seem fine once you get them open, but I can't find a way toopenany menu without clicking, and ex. the preferences pane does seem completely impossible to navigate via keyboard. So yes, I agree that that appears a downside to their own toolkit.
Though I think all/pretty much all menu items can be accessed by pressing space and then typing the name of it. (If you use the setting space for command search.) There will be an auto completion list and it remembers the last action. So that is even better than what many other GUI applications do, where you have to search for ages in deeply nested menus for the action that you know how it is named, but don't know where the hell it is hidden. Quite frankly every program should have that feature.
FWIW you need to implement that yourself with basically any advanced enough toolkit. Even in HTML-land, any list widget worth it's salt is handling keystrokes itself.
Is Blender accessible this way? Or is it, as they said, just an OpenGL surface with some widgets painted on?
My apologies for the word "just" doing a lot of work in that sentence.
https://devtalk.blender.org/t/blender-and-accessibility-for-...
As a multi platform OpenGL app everything we draw is quite hidden from screen readers. Without cross-platform open source libraries available I can’t think of a feasible way of interacting with existing screen readers.
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/301899/blender-a...
Yeah, it's doable in a few months of doing nothing but that. ;D
But then again you may be a much more productive programmer than I.
For a side project? I could never do it, not with everything else I got going on.
Having done both web and gl ux for a living, I think you might be overestimating the complexity of a gl implementation and underestimating the complexity of meeting the same specs using a web implementation.
While not quite the same thing, if you have the time, dip your toes into some immediate mode UI, for example imgui. It is enjoyable not a grind.
Do you think wasm has any chance of replacing the whole html/css stuff with just webgpu in a canvas? I have been playing a bit around with wgpu in rust and I can compile the same project either as a native binary or a .js that just renders to the browser. It seems to work pretty cool. Photoshop seems to be runable in the browser now, and I've seen a lot of other cool stuff, but things like fluid simulations seem to still be very laggy.
Rendering everything into a canvas will realistically mean total lack of accessibility features. Also you won't be able to use the DOM inspector. I don't think that would be an improvement at all. If one could work with the DOM via Wasm (plus source maps so you can still use the debugger) it might be something.
webgpu in a canvas
Internally that's what Chrome/Firefox are, they render much of html/css on the GPU using OpenGL/DirectX/Vulkan/Metal.
Do you think wasm has any chance of replacing the whole html/css stuff with just
No, you also need the DOM to enable frameworks like React which are used by a large number of sites.
Oh yeah, sure my friend. You're going to implement
* text entry (right to left as well as left to right)
* file browser
* treeviews that scale to 50k nodes or 10x that
* menus
I hate so much how it breaks many conventions. For example, when you right click, the menu opens onPress instead of onRelease.
I wish they had at least a setting to change that.
I've not used blender but it seems to me that Chrome is doing that too (at least it's doing that on my machine )
I think it's UX that commonly works differently in consumer software vs pro software. I think parent is talking about professional software.
Pro software made for speed and efficiency, you usually want to be able to do things quickly, even if sometimes people not used to the software might screw up. Holding right-click, selecting menu item and releasing I think is one of those things.
In consumer software, users would be confused because maybe they long-press the right-click, drag the mouse a little while holding down then releasing, and the menu would just appear and disappear. Confusing UX for most users, I bet.
It looks like Chrome is doing the pro software then.
Parent said blender was opening the menu onPress, which according to your comment is OK for pro software, Chrome is also doing the menu onPress
Maybe it depends on the platform? For me, on Windows with Chrome, it only opens the context menu once you've stopped holding down the button. In Blender (on Windows), the menu opens as soon as you hold the button.
I think I've seen that on some Linux distros. But on Windows, chrome works onRelease (like all built in windows programs do)
Hum that might explain the situation here. I'm on Ubuntu with KDE
Did you get those the right way round? All other software I tested opens menus on button press. IIRC, Blender defaults to opening menus on button release, adding unnecessary latency and making it feel slow. You can change it, but you have to go through the whole Keymap Preferences and find every menu and change it individually, so it's annoying.
On my Windows machine, all the "native" software like the file explorer and so on, opens when releasing the right click. Blender 3.6 opens as soon as you press the right click (allowing you to "drag" the cursor to the menu option and releasing it there)
That's the traditional Mac way. e.g. historically you would "pull down" on the menu bar at the top of the screen. You would click and hold, and slide the mouse down, releasing the button to choose an item. If you were to just click on a menu, it would quickly open and close again. I want to say it's typical for Linux desktop environments to open contest menus on mouse down, as well, but don't recall offhand.
Blender dates back to 1994, when many modern conventions weren't really a thing yet (Windows 95 didn't even exist)...and they have put a lot of time into modernizations in recent years. Back when I was dabbling in Blender, in the early 2000s, Ctrl+S was the keyboard shortcut for "erase everything and create a new scene."
It makes it way faster when you can right click, hold, and release on the item in one smooth motion. I believe most pro software is like this, it's hardly breaking convention.
I understand why some people like it, and yes a lot of software does that as well, but in my case sometimes I accidentally end up pressing some menu option because I'm not perfectly steady. That's why I'd like it to be an option.
If your choices are Motif or the Athena toolkit, rolling your own UI is an understandable choice.
They should roll it out in to a separate library. Call it the Blender Toolkit, or BTK.
I think there have been attempts.. but it's too deeply married to the rest of Blender for it to be worth extracting I think.
BTK has a nice ring to it -- and it's an even more brilliant public relations disaster than the name "GIMP"!
What kinds of widgets would Dennis Rader have in his "Bind, Torture, Kill" tookit? ;)
It couldn't be any worse than Motif.
BTK would also imply the existence of:
BLIMP: Blender Image Manipulation Program
Oh the humanity!
BLOME Desktop: Blender Object Model Environment
I would totally be down for that.
They're actually porting everything over to Vulkan now. That, and Apple devs are also working on maintaining and developing a Metal backend.
Vulkan is a drawing API, not a GUI toolkit.
Well, they basically wrote their own GUI toolkit. And IMO a very good one, with tiling windows and everything is nicely scaleable. I especially like the command search with space and little things like dragging over a column of checkboxes to toggle them all.
when the whole application is OpenGL it makes perfect sense. Just like how the interface to managing sql databases is done using SQL tables.
Unlike most open source projects, Blender started its life as a professional piece of software by and for artists who had to deliver commercial projects on a dead line. First as an in house tool for an animation studio, and later as a commercial software product. It only became open source later in its life cycle after the commercial Blender company went bankrupt. It has also been headed by the same lead developer from its earliest days as an in-house tool right up until today. All these things really shine through and make it quiet unique among open source applications.
This is an innocent misrepresentation of Blender's development history. While nothing you've said is false, Blender has been open source for more than 2 decades. It began that portion of its life as something of a mess, with a truly Byzantine user interface that made even trivial tasks troublesome, and lacking a vast majority of the features it's now known for. Getting it to its contemporary state was a long and painful process, including at least two major front-end overhauls and who-knows-how-many under-the-hood, and a commendable (though not unimpugnable) humility from developers who (finally) found the wherewithal to put the user experience before FOSS dogma or their own ambitions.
That's what separates it from most open source projects: not that it started as a commercial product, but because its designers and developers stowed their egos and worked diligently on creating a solid piece of software (and documentation and community and support) for a long, long time. In this way, it surpasses even many of its commercial contemporaries, which are driven by a profit motive to become increasingly paywalled and enshitified.
>This is an innocent misrepresentation of Blender's development history. While nothing you've said is false, Blender has been open source for more than 2 decades. It began that portion of its life as something of a mess, with a truly Byzantine user interface that made even trivial tasks troublesome, and lacking a vast majority of the features it's now known for. [...] That's what separates it from most open source projects: not that it started as a commercial product,
I think your minimization of its original commercial nature with additional facts about the UI is also an innocent misrepresentation.
Even though the 2003 Blender didn't have the optimal UI, what the commercial investment did for Blender was put enough value into software such thatit had a headstart and momentum for subsequent investment from corporate donors/sponsors and volunteersto create the later UI overhauls. The substantial €4.5M business investmentset the stagefor the later developments. That it happened 20 years ago isn't the key. What's key is thefinancial investmentto help motivate 20 additional years of work.
Compare that to the open-source development of Octave (a MATLAB alternative) where the developer is lacking money and is looking for employment:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13603575
Observers can say Octave is not as polished as MATLAB. But a similar hypothetical investment of €4.5M of 20 years ago might have helped give it the "Matthew Effect" like Blender got. That the hypothetical Octave v2023 has a revamped UI compared to Octave v2003 would not remove all the causal effects of that hypothetical investment.
>Even though the 2003 Blender didn't have the optimal UI, what the commercial investment did for Blender was put enough value into software such that it had a headstart and momentum for subsequent investment from corporate donors/sponsors and volunteers to create the later UI overhauls. The substantial €4.5M business investment set the stage for the later developments.
It did not, because Blender went 7+ years without substantial improvements to its modeling and rendering tools and interface. It was a zombie, with a lot of resources wasted on the now-defunct game engine. The pivot away from what it had been is what made Blender what it is today.
>yterdy: Blender went 7+ years without substantial improvements to its modeling and rendering tools and interface. It was a zombie, with a lot of resources wasted on the now-defunct game engine. The pivot away from what it had been is what made Blender what it is today.
>crote: Just because they shoveled a lot of money into it, doesn't mean they actually created a great product.
I'm citing these 2 comments because it's another example ofmentioning observations that can be true-- but are still not a good explanation of _why_ Blender's level of polish is different from other open-source projects.
You guys are emphasizing theartifacts of the softwareas the proof of Blender's unique situation. Instead of the artifacts, I'm emphasizing the _community_ and _why_ they're invested in Blender tomotivate the workon the subsequent artifacts (e.g. revamped UI) that you're referring to. The explanation of the community momentum starts from thebusiness investment. In this framing, it doesn't matter that Blender v2003 wasn't great software. What matters is that v2003 (with whatever flaws) --attracted enough community-- to keep working on it (and eventually "pivoting") for 20 years.
I go back to this you claimed as the key reason :
>yterdy: , but because its designers and developers stowed their egos and worked diligently on creating a solid piece of software
That would be a more convincing argument if the developers used the 2002 crowdsource moneyto build a clean-room rewrite from scratchinstead of buying the existing codebase to get the millions in sunk development work at a steep discount. E.g., if what truly matters is the humble developer egos rather than the value of the exiting codebase, then there was no need to buy the old codebase. Just advertise the 2002 crowdsource money as paying for humble diligent developers to build a new 3D modeler from scratch. But that's not what happened. Both the crowdfunders and the original developerswanted that old codebase that was already paid for by business investmentsas a starting point. Even though the later v2.5 was a big rewrite, that doesn't change how the community thought of the v2002 software. It already has theinterest level and evangelism to attract future workleading to the 2.5 rewrite.
If Blender was "zombie" software, _why_ were people working on "bad software" to make it better? Work backwards from that. Consider the motivations and interests. Saying"Blender v2003 wasn't great"doesn't really explain things.
MATLAB is a mess that's in use solely due to history, network effects, stockholm syndrome and vendor lock-in. Octave is doing laudable job in the latter, but I fully expect it to die out after MATLAB whimpers away. And I don't think the GUI is much of a priority for Octave.
The €4.5M business investment in 2000 was to make it a freemium product. This obviously failed, which is why the community was able to acquire the rights via a €110k crowdfund. Just because they shoveled a lot of money into it, doesn't mean they actually created agreat product. Blender wouldn't have been open-source today if the investors didn't decide to shut down the (quite incomplete) project due to disappointing sales.
The next substantial investment was a €1.2M grant in 2019, and it was adirectresult of the development of 2.80, both the new GUI and other improvements. It suddenly became an actual viable alternative to commercial products, making it worth investing in. These developments only happened due to the hard work of mostly volunteers, and a lot of donations from primarily the community.
What's I really love about it now is how deeply and sincerely it's integrated with Python. That didn't used to be the case originally, but I believe it happened kind of early on, so it's had a lot of time to mature, and there's all that RNA/DNA stuff to automate Python bindings. I'm working on learning more about that stuff myself! Do you know any more of the history, trials, and tribulations of that?
I do not, but thank you for bringing it up. The free extensibility of the core software is related to its Python integration and a major part of Blender's current success. Some essential add-ons have even become part of that core software over time.
It would definitely be nice to know more about that history, though.
That's what separates it from most [...] projects: [...] and worked diligently on creating a solid piece of software (and documentation and community and support) for a long, long time.
I'm starting to believe more and more that this is the essence to most things that look beautiful/simple/elegant.
and a commendable (though not unimpugnable) humility from developers who (finally) found the wherewithal to put the user experience before FOSS dogma or their own ambitions.
That's just what I was getting at when comparing Blender to GIMP in this other discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38235871
All of these ideas could be applied to Gimp too, of course, but I've found the Blender developers to be much more open to entertaining other people's ideas and contributions about user interface design than the Gimp developers, who have been historically NIH-limited and stubborn (especially about changing the name to something less offensive to the general public). At least Blender already supports pie menus well, and changed the default mouse bindings in response to user demand, and has made huge strides in usability lately. At this point I think it would be much easier to just add a great image editor to Blender, integrated with its video editor, than try to change the minds of the Gimp developers.
[...]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38232543
>Blender has something else. Loads of money compared to Gimp.
Blender EARNED every cent of its loads of money be being RESPONSIVE TO ITS USERS.
Interesting but the special part about blender is the open source part, they managed to keep it alive, revamp the UI fully and bring on new and hard features on a regular basis. I don't remember another foss project of that kind.
krita.org is a similarly polished and professional open source project, but I agree these types of projects are the exception rather than the rule (though I suppose the same could be said about most products).
Krita is nowhere near the level of Blender. It is more on the level of Inkscape.
As a hobbyist digital painter and 3D artist who has used both Blender and Krita, I strongly disagree with this. Krita is simply best-in-class at digital painting on a PC. Both are exceptional pieces of software.
It did take me a week or two to adjust to Krita’s hotkeys coming from a lifetime of Photoshop, but the software in the end is leagues better for painting.
Would you consider Audacity another example? (I'm one of the original authors.) It survived for ~20 years as a community-supported project - it was popular but clunky and limited in many ways. Since being acquired by Muse the UI has been cleaned up and modernized quite a bit, while still keeping it open-source.
KiCad is slowly inching in this direction! It used to be an absolute pain to use 3-4 years ago, but it has significantly matured since then.
With the death of EAGLE it's rapidly becoming the obvious choice for all hobbyist use, and it is powerful enough for quite a bit of commercial work too. It definitely isn't at Altium's level yet, but unless you're designing something like a motherboard you probably won't be missing much.
Blender only became successfulwell afterit was made open source.
As a commercial project it was a failure. It only became successful due to two decades of open-source development, and the willingness of its users to invest in it - even if only to stimulate the development of a competitor to expensive proprietary software.
Blender only became an even remotely viable option in 2011, after being open-source for 9 years. Its popularity only really started in 2019 after a massive UI rework made it actuallynice to use. This and related changes led to Blender receiving a $1.2M grant in 2019, leading to other companies re-evaluating it and awarding even more grants.
If anything, compared to today's successes its initial proprietary development should be seen as nothing more than a historical curiosity.
Blender received huge infusions of cash before 2019.
Back in the mid 2000s, I was on the "FOSS talk circuit" in Europe talking about Ardour. Blender stuff was often happening in the room next door (way more people ... graphics ... sigh :)
Blender got huge grants from both the EU and also, I think, Apple back in the mid-to-late 2000s that in retrospect look critical in boosting them out of their somewhat "stuck" development status.
Thank you for writing Ardour. Lovely piece of software
Blender has such a rich and amazing history! I used it for some hobby projects many years ago, but the UI was very complex and the learning curve was high. Recent versions have greatly simplified the UI and the features feel on par with many of the proprietary industry tools. The future definitely seems bright.
It's not a historical curiosity. The decisions needed to make an architecture viable on the long term happen early on and need to be sustained as code is being developed.
A lot of that comes down to days structures used, system modules, abstractions, If that's done right, it's possible to make a good UX later.
That's very hard in modern software processes which emphasize short term spirits.
Wasn't the user interface fundamentally changed after the open source release because it was so cumbersome to use?
Not for a while. The first revamp was 2.5, then another big one with 2.8, which was the starting point for the current UI, in 2019.
(That's a "yes". Blender 2.4 was an in-house gamedev asset authoring tool that was open sourced, Blender 2.8+ is very different and apparently pretty pro-level.
Most of this istechnicallytrue but not really relevant, and no, this is not what makes it stand out.
Very little of what constitutes modern Blender came from NeoGeo/NaN. The original software was uncompetitive and unremarkable. In fact, Blender had to change most of its original UI conventions to feel less alien for CGI professionals. (because the original paradigm was from the ancient times before the commonplace UI conventions)
What made it stand out in the open-source community is devs using it for actually creating something (best investment!), positioning it at the intersection of interests of non-competing companies that need to get shit done, and also attracting a massive army of game modders.
It feels like I'm using an Adobe product or similar.
So it's slow, bloated, and crashes regularly?
So it's slow, bloated, and crashes regularly?
I think Adobe has really improved the last decade or so in this regard.
Blender is really amazing and just seems to get more powerful every year.
I think Adobe has really improved the last decade or so in this regard
Nope. Been using Photoshop since version 1, AfterEffects since its inception (by a company called Cosa AFAIR) and InDesign since version 1. 30+ years give or take.
There all indeed so slow and bloated that they feel mostly unusable to me today.
And it's the opposite. It got to this over the last 10–15 years. Except Are. That was always slow but for motion graphics it's hard to get around it.
All the freelance VFX artists I know use old versions of PS and Ae.
InDesign is so buggy that I switched to Affinity three years ago.
Only younger people, who never experienced the snappy desktop systems & software of the 90's or early 2000's, think the state of things today is somehow normal.
The solution is to just to avoid adobe stuff as much as possible. A lot of what would be done in photoshop can be done in nuke and after effects can just be thrown in the trash when using nuke.
I spend a good amount of time in Photoshop and I disagree that it’s slow and bloated, in general.
I know after a new version a year or two ago some actions were noticeably slower, but I complained to the project manager on Reddit on the specifics and it got tightened back up pretty quickly.
Also, anyone using old versions of Photoshop are missing out. Both the new Remove tool along with the generative AI fill are absolute gamechangers.
improved the last decade
I was experiencing less bloat and crashes in versions before Creative Cloud.
> I think Adobe has really improved the last decade or so in this regard.
Theymassivelyincreased the complexity of their products after introducing the Creative Cloud. It's an absolute mess that can cause delays in Microsoft (!) just to make the new Windows release work with it. And Photoshop in particular has the byzantine PSD format that requires them to keep old versions of the code to read old versions of the format.
Adobe software in general resembles Windows nowadays - they are trying to modernize it but legacy decisions keep them from doing too much, as they can't break backward compatibility, their entire business model depends on keeping the users locked in. As a result, their old software is a terrible mishmash of UIs from different eras.
Also, it won't shut up about it's couple AI utilities.
Have you tried the AI Feedback Utility?
They have quite a list of sponsors:https://fund.blender.org/
Like EPIC giving them 1.2M:https://www.blender.org/press/epic-games-supports-blender-fo...
Is the €134k/mo figure including all corporate sponsors? Approximating that as one developer salary per month then what they've continued to accomplish is still very impressive.
No one developer gets paid €134k/month in Europe. Average salary is probably more like €65k/year across the EU.
I was going to ask if all Blender developers were in Europe but was able to answer my own question fromhttps://www.blender.org/development/top-27-committers-2022/
It does appear that the majority of top contributors are from European countries but overall pretty diverse: China, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Brazil, Egypt are represented as well.
That said, if I revised my comment to say two developer salaries per month, or 3, 4, etc. it is still impressive in my view.
> I'm amazed at how professional and finished Blender is for being an open source project. It feels like I'm using an Adobe product or similar.
The "open source" label applied to Blender today inadvertently minimizes thecommercial originsof it.
Blender's development has a unique (accidental) history that other open-source projects can't replicate deliberately:https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/getting_started/ab...
In summary:
- Blender was originally paid commercial software that attracts venture capitalists to invest €4.5M and funds the salaries of 50 people to work on it
- The VC investors later sell it at a loss for €100k back to the original team to release it as open source.
Because many users of Blender are unfamiliar with the timeline of its development, they wonder why other open-source software like Gimp "isn't more polished" like Adobe Photoshop. Well, Gimp never had investors write off €4.5M of development on it.
That was literally over 20 years ago. The majority of Blender's development has taken place while it was open-source; most of the features it's known for did not exist in the commercial version.
Haven't used it in ages, but Blender did not feel like an Adobe product when it was first open sourced. IIRC its UI was considered notoriously unintuitive.
With selling it as OSS, they only wrote off 4.4M euros. So given the situation it was still a better option for investors.
I'm amazed at how professional and finished Blender is for being an open source project.
I'm amazed at how much prejudice people still have about open source projects.
When you compare it to GIMP, it's night and day. Not only is Blender open source, itisprofessional software.
Yup. GIMP feels like it's being developed by a bored engineer in their spare time to play around with image editing algorithms. Blender feels like a professional workhorse you can build your whole business around.
Yeah, Blender is maybe the best open source software I use. I don't feel a need to use any other 3D modeling software, it's so robust and works so well (from what I can tell, I'm still mostly an amateur and have barely scratched the surface of Blender still).
What did you use to get started?
Every other year I follow that "make a realistic looking donut" tutorial but mine always comes out lumpy and misshapen.
I started using Blender to do modelling 20 odd years ago when I was still in school finding my direction in life. The graphics design path didn't stick, but Blender integrated with Python to allow automations, which I learned along the way and it put me firmly on the path of software development, where I still happily am, still programming (some) Python. Funny that I have my career partly to thank to the software choices of fellow Dutchmen.
The difference between Blender and Adobe is that the Blender folks actually give a shit if their product is good.
The short movie is looking amazing:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9lj-c29dxI
Brooooo how do you even. I wish I had that time it takes to get this good at Blender. I might actually end up releasing some solid indie games.
Demoscene people are the guys I'm most jealous of. Not some linux kernel maintainer of some fancy filesystem. Nah, but the things that can transport you into an entire new universe in your head.
My favourite Blender Studio short:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cMxraX_5RE
This makes me laugh so hard, it's so trippy
Oh wow, I thought I'd seen them all, but somehow I missed this one. Thanks for sharing, I think that's my favourite too now!
Brooooo how do you even. I wish I had that time it takes to get this good at Blender. I might actually end up releasing some solid indie games.
Keep in mind that the Blender Open Movies are made by professionals who've been doing what they been doing for a long time, and there is a whole team making those, with roles specific to the area.
I don't think you could single-handedly create something like that at the same timescale as they created it. They basically have made a proper studio at this point and they're fine-tuning the workflows and processes of Blender by doing these movies.
So don't feel bad if you never would be able to create this alone, it is a team effort after all.
I still have dreams of being a 20x Engineer.
I can be a 5x when Ireallylove what I'm doing and I'm surrounded by fantastic people that I love being around. But I think I need another 10 years of experience to get to 10x, then maybe another 20 years to get to 20x.
Having been a trader, regular guest on coding and Protracker parties, yep those were the days.
I guess shadertoy and similar are where the Demoscene spirit lives on.
I'm a noob and I when kid asked me for help with Halloween costume I dug in making each triangle by hand, moving each vertex by hand, basically huge slow pain. Then I found the "remesh" button and the push/pull tools which felt like a superpower.
If you want an actual answer, you don't do it by yourself. I counted 50+ people credited. But if you want to start to play a part in doing it, basically just learn a lot of math. My gf is a technical director at a large animation studio and she got in by being an expert in linear algebra and spending a ton of time studying animation textbooks/tutorials/etc.
That said, the market is evaporating. Almost everything has moved to India and there are barely any jobs left in USA, and those that do exist are being fought for by the many folks who have been recently laid off stateside. Sounds familiar...
This is amazing, it reminds me of Wile E Coyote cartoons which were always my favorite.
Thank you for posting this :)
There's a new Wile E Coyote movie coming. It was scrapped initially but due to backlash from fans, it was revived today.
You're welcome :) I would totally watch it if they created an animated series out of it.
I love it. Though I'm really going to miss seeing screen grabs of Big Buck Bunny astheplaceholder image in media-adjacent projects.
dooooooo dooo dooooo, doooooooo doooo doooooooo doooo
There have been a lot of these (they're basically always dogfooding the next one, i believe). Is there something special about Big Buck Bunny and Wing It?
I like the reference to ”…the big redshinybutton…” in Space Madness
Not yet released. Will we have that for every major project now?
It's been tagged, so I assume this page is just lagging a little. That said, it could have waited....
Yeah, especially since Blender puts a lot of effort into their release websites.
Have what? Release candidates?
A race to prematurely submit not-yet-released software.
Will we have that for every major project now?
Don't we already? Pretty sure it happened for recent freebsd and Debian releases, at least
Would really love to see more resources be put into smoothing out the workflow of the video editor.. even just quality of life features such as "always showing waveforms" and auto-snapping clips when you cut would make a drastic difference and make it highly competitive with Premiere because you already have a world class 3D suite built in.
Its interface is pretty horrible but it's serviceable for basic video editing, and parameters can be keyframed, so that's something. The issue is that the video editor uses the same UI philosophy as the 3D editor... and it feels awkward. Same with the 2D editor, Grease Pencil.
I don't think it would ever be able to compete with Premiere or Da Vinci Resolve, unless they put significant resources on that stuff.
There is no better free alternative for non CAD 3D modeling, sculpting, texturing or 2D animation AFAIK. There are alternative rendering engines though.
For video editing, compositing there are free alternatives that are much better than what Blender has.
What is the current leader for compositing in the open source space?
Probably Natron. Although, Blender is certainly catching up.
It's okay-ish for projects that involve planned, pre-rendered scenes of pre-determined length.
For anything involving live-action clips (using it for "talking head + b roll".. tutorials, documentaries etc) mainly could use the features I noted above.
More workflow polish the better, though. Makes it good for a wider variety of video types.
Blender 4.0 RC1 would be a fitting headline....
I think the point is that it's no longer RC as of today. Someone else said that that page is lagging a little bit.
...but it is because there is no release yet.
"please use the original title, [...] don't editorialize."
There's no official RC1 build for download either, and hasn't been from the first of Nov (when it was supposed to be available).
I've been looking every few days from the 1st of Nov, and theRelease Candidatedate on the projects page was pushed back to the 8th, but not updated since then.
The official Projects page still lists the Blender 4.0 goal as only "92% Completed":
https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/milestone/7
There's nothing on the Blender Blog about an RC1 being available for testing:
http://web.archive.org/web/20231114142752/https://code.blend...
Nor is there any mention in yesterday's weekly Devtalk:
https://devtalk.blender.org/t/13-november-2023/31960
If therereally isa 4.0 release that's available now, then they've seriously gone wrong with the communication parts of their release process. :( :( :(
I’m hoping for a built-in resource sharing mechanism. I have a dual 4090 server accessible but right now all I can do is run blender on it. I’d love a way to just transparently use its resources while working on my machine.
Seems I’ll have to keep waiting.
dual 4090 server
What do you mean? 4090s don’t have SLI.
You don't need SLI to render with dual GPUs in cycles.
I'm not sure waiting will change anything, usually you save the blend file somewhere and a render cluster picks it up for render. Blender already supports everything you would need to set this up and there are already tons of cloud services and third party solutions for that.
The control scheme in Blender is so foreign to me.
When they support rmb + WASD to fly around maybe I'll be able to use it heh
Fly/Walk Navigation[1]?
[1]:https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/editors/3dview/nav...
Slightly unrelated, but is there anything that can be scripted using code for making animation ?
Blender can be controlled using Python, so yes.
blender has tightly integrated support for python scripting.
This seems a bit premature. The announcement page isn't up yet and the download link still points to 3.6
HN:
Ahead of schedule
Under budget
Never wrong
Karma whores do this all the time. It used to be a big problem in /r/firefox for a long time, and somehow stopped happening eventually.
Just flag it and move on.
As a noob who's still finding his way around, space to search menus looks great.
https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/commit/35d3d525...
Someone should make a video on this feature. I also am a noob who is lost in a sea of options when starting up blender.
Here’s the Blender 4.0 content reel while you wait for the site itself to update
https://youtu.be/eoY1Mc70uTo?si=ttU7szWsbWNXwLEz
The new features overview
https://youtu.be/LcQkk7NbOoY?si=ldo4tKz2WonBSe0h
The introduction to Node Toolshttps://youtu.be/Y8Udi1AkdGY?si=95AKQ0tUg4FJSLpM
Any alternative platforms to watch those videos?
There are Builds that are listed as "Blender 4.0.0 - Stable" in various formats and for all platforms on the Daily Builds page:
https://builder.blender.org/download/daily/
But i don't know whether those are the ones that will go official.
The release page is now live athttps://www.blender.org/download/releases/4-0/.
Amazing that even blender.org isn't immune to the hug of death (though probably from more than just HN)
I recently started doing basic modeling work for my small hobby projects. I'm amazed at how professional and finished Blender is for being an open source project. It feels like I'm using an Adobe product or similar. Big props to the team behind it, you're awesome.