Nice. I often forget just how much is happening in the blender world, it's come so far over the years. I know version numbers change but I remember when there was a hope that maybe by v3 there'd be a raytracer.
There were some worrying times but the community "buying" of blender marked a huge change, and it's great to see that the community is still thriving.
I had originally intended to go into 3d modelling, but the python scripting side of blender was what got me into programming. I still think having something visual is a great way of learning to program. Errors are either often very obvious or at least amusing.
So blender stopped me from pursuing 3D art as a career, but in a good way :)
Wow, man. How have I not heard of this software sooner?!
EDIT: Your downvotes are ridiculous. I'm not being snarky or karma-whoring. I really am happy to learn about Blender. All of the free versions of proprietary 3D software packages have awful licencing models and operating system support. A cross platform 3D modeling and animation suite that runs on linux, for free is kind of awesome!
It's a reasonably well known tool among most 3D artist communities. It does something of everything at this point. The downside typically stated is that the UX for modelling workflow in particular is alienating, and most folks have trouble coming to grips with it. Commercial and proprietary packages often edge it out on certain features, and there is tooling path-dependency in industry work that has given Autodesk a position similar to Adobe's position with Photoshop, only with an added layer of fragmentation across products due to buy-outs of competition. Regardless, Blender does get stronger every time I see it, and it's had more and more uptake.
(What I tend to do when I need a 3D thing is to model it in Wings3D, which is also free, and then import the OBJ to Blender to do anything else.)
Blender's UX may be unconventional, but there are some really good ideas in there.
My favorite is the space bar menu. Hit space bar almost anywhere and a menu pops up. Type in a search, e.g. "cube" and it will fuzzy find "add a cube". Almost all actions are available this way.
When I have been using SketchUp, an app widely considered easy to use and approachable, I always get lost in the menus. You never know if something is behind the right click menu or the top menu bar. I'd much rather press the space bar and type in a search.
Blender's biggest issue is that it is very different from the more established 3d modelling apps. It makes migration more difficult.
I use SketchUp for woodworking plans, because it handles real world measurements and has smart snapping features. For more artistic modelling, I go with Blender.
If you like that text menu you might want to play around with RhinoCAD. You can do all of your work from a command line, so the workflow feels powerful and snappy. The drawback is that there is no fuzzy search like you mention so you need to know commands before executing them
See, I don't really agree with your comment re: workflow. At work, I see Maya artists using 3D Studio Max and artists from both those camps using Modo. They ALL struggle when switching between programs. NO program is automatically easy or comprehensible - artists have their muscle memory and changing that takes real work.
It's true that some programs have a slightly better import path into e.g.: games engines, but "slightly better" not "perfect" or amazing better than others.
This is often true, but do you seriously think "Wow, man. How have I not heard of this software sooner?!" is worth registering an account for and posting? You don't even say thanks to the submitter.
It's a useless post for anyone who doesn't come to HN to read about what software you are personally un/aware of.
Posts like "+1" or "Thanks" or "this" or "woah" (without any other content) are probably better expressed by just upvoting the post you're grateful for/agree with.
Since you complained about downvotes, your post is now one the most upvoted in the thread with 10+ karma. That's ridiculous.
Ohhh, don't do that. I thanked a submitter once because I enjoyed their post and nobody had commented, and that earned me downvotes and a patronizing response about why such things aren't welcome here.
Yeah, but if he's going to the trouble of signing up here just to say how he didn't know about the software before, the least he could do is say thanks to the one who helped him find it.
because when you google it you just get results for the kitchen item. there are 1 billion possible unique word combinations in the world, were the creators that lazy in naming this? /s
It's not even necessary to do that; I don't know what he's talking about. I just typed "blender" into Google now. 93,000,000 results, of which this is the first:
First result, blender.org (with search box and six links from the site below it); second result, "Blender on Steam"; third result, Blender Wikipedia page; fourth result, Blender subreddit.
I'd be more annoyed/confused if I wanted the kitchen item.
original poster. i take what i said back and misspoke. i am building my own search engine and am annoyed because blender 3d appears when i do searches for 'blender' and expected the kitchen item result.
I expect you need Google's Internet-wide tracking and profiling before you can tell if a particular user is a 3D geek or tech person and therefore wants Blender 3D rather than a place to buy blenders.
Too bad that the blender website has neither a "blog" section nor an RSS/Atom feed. I would love to keep being informed in a low-traffic way (once a week, or even once a month) about the latest cool features, development and movie projects of the blender community.
Thanks for pointing that out! :) While of course showcasing the community is great, doing it just based on commits inherently skews towards developers and ignores others like designers, translators, documentation writers, community people etc.
Just added Mike and some others of the list to our Open Source Design collective at https://github.com/opensourcedesign – if you want to be part of it as well let me know. :)
This page is so cool, not only it gives tons of credit and visibility to developers but also motivates new people to contribute. We needed this kind of exposure in every open source project.
I have been interested in learning a piece of 3d modeling software for a while, but choosing a program is pretty difficult since there are a lot of programs with non-obvious differences and there doesn't really seem to be one standard. Blenders main feature seems to be that it is free. Maya has more features and is more of a "full stack" 3d program but is apparently pretty messy and difficult to learn. Modo is a more streamlined version of maya. C4D and houdini are more for motion graphics than for anything else. Solidworks and autocad are really only for product design. I have no idea where 3ds Max fits in. 3dcoat and zbrush are for sculpting instead of modeling. And then you also have to choose from a ton of renderers.
You are a bit mistaken on your information. Just dive in with Blender and go for it. Blender is full features and open source allowing you to add-on. Maya also allows to add-on. Modo doesn't support good animation yet, so it's just modeling right now still. 3ds Max is like Blender and Maya.
I love Blender, even though I don't use it. I have contributed to the project. I like to follow its progress. But I have to say, that is the worst laid out article I have ever tried to read. I don't know why there are numbers in parentheses after each of the contributor's names, and I don't know how to follow the two column format. If you had a heat map of my eye movement, it would be totally random, showing saccades in every direction all over the page.
the most amazing thing i've seen so far was at SfN a couple of months ago, someone cobbled together a plugin that processes MRI and other neuroscience data within Blender...think 3D projections and other slickness. I have to dig up the paper/reference...
There were some worrying times but the community "buying" of blender marked a huge change, and it's great to see that the community is still thriving.
I had originally intended to go into 3d modelling, but the python scripting side of blender was what got me into programming. I still think having something visual is a great way of learning to program. Errors are either often very obvious or at least amusing.
So blender stopped me from pursuing 3D art as a career, but in a good way :)