Just playing with it now. The new geometry nodes are the beginning of something big... a more procedural approach to modeling. Perfect for natural distribution of things like rocks and plants.
Our department (art and design) moved from 3ds Max to Blender last year, and have not looked back. The rapid pace of development is testament to the fact that Blender now has more than twice as many full time devs working on it than Max.
I really hope that Autodesk starts feeling some pressure from FOSS and cools off on the blatant anti-consumer moves. The whole "now you have to pay us $XXXX/year in perpetuity or you lose access to all of your business files" has killed a lot of the goodwill they once had.
I hate what Autodesk has become. I'm in the A&E industry and Revit has become a monstrosity of a monopoly. The industry as a whole has seen decent revenue growth, but almost no profit because Autodesk is siphoning it all into their coffers [1]. I wouldn't mind too much, but you don't really get any benefit from their new subscription model. They release very few new features with every release and there's bugs in their software I've been dealing with since 2016. There are some software alternatives but it's very difficult to get a whole design team on board with trying something new.
I don't know the industry that well, but do use Fusion 360 and am annoyed by them. I think they have this problem where people that make money by doing CAD use Solidworks, and so only hobbyists want their products, and hobbyists don't have any money. Thus they are having to tighten the screws on hobbyists to stay in business, and it just doesn't work, because like I said... hobbyists don't have any money. You can't get blood from a stone, no matter how hard you try.
I have been tempted to buy it, honestly, but it's a little bit too expensive. I use it for 3D printing, not milling, so I don't feel like I should have to pay for those features. So instead, I am gritting my teeth for the day that I have to jump to some open-source CAD tool, which will be annoying to relearn, but ultimately probably not a big deal after I pick what to use.
If you (or anyone reading this) goes for freecad and gets stuck on something, just know that at this point it's to be expected but there are many people online (myself included, email's in my profile) who are happy to help. You can generally make what you need in freecad as long as it's simple but the learning curve is terrible. You might think you have a dozen ways to make a part (and in other cad packages that would indeed be the case) but there are only two that'll actually work. It's an incredibly frustrating software package but at least you're not at the mercy of an inevitable autodesk screw tightening.
Oh good to know. I have only used FreeCAD to make simple gears to 3d print and found it an relatively easy experience (compared to Blender). Can't relate to power user frustration yet if I ever do, it's good to know there are people I can reach out to. Thanks in advance.
Is there a good AutoCAD alternative for linux (FOSS)? Haven't worked with *CAD a lot, but probably will have to in near future (long story), and i need some basic cad drawings.
LibreCAD is the closest I've found for my use case. I strictly used AutoCAD for making architectural floorplans. I used the relative ("@") command heavily and LibreCAD has the same feature. The UI also feels somewhat similar. LibreCAD still lacks powerful grouping and block functions, and text could be better when compared to AutoCAD's DTEXT/MTEXT. It's one of those FOSS projects that feels like there's a lot of potential, similar to Blender before its big overhaul last year.
I've been hating Autodesk since they killed Softimage. For a while I moved to modo but the Foundry is beginning to look more and more like Autodesk for anything that isn't Nuke. Today I'm a happy Houdini and Blender and sometimes Cinema 4D
Yeah it’s a real problem for the industry. Revit has become this “standard” but its totally closed without running their systems. Something really needs to give.
That's just not going to happen, it's in their DNA (and the DNA of many of the small companies they borgified over the years).
It's going to make them die, but it's going to take a loooong time (a generation of users who only know theri product and physically can't learn anything new will have to retire).
At least in my sphere it's also that the only competitor people see is Solidworks which they've had somewhat less than great experiences with, and more importantly, which is susceptible to the exact same issue on Dassault's whim.
All of the drafters I work with are unhappy about the subscription licensing, know we're getting shafted from it, and wish there was a viable alternative. Maybe if Microsoft or some other tech giant decides to sponsor both opencascade and freecad we'd have something usable in a couple of years, but as it stands freecad is both the closest thing to and a _long_ way from even resembling a competitive product.
Yeah, the state of this space is a wasteland, I agree.
And freecad, ugh, sorry to be negative, but ... people in this thread are complaining about how bad the Blender UI was back in the days (not the case any more) ... they should try the freecad UI, it's truly, truly terrible ... if there ever was an app that deserves the label 'Kitchen Sink', freecad UI is it.
My first run in with Autodesk was when we were looking to buy compositing software to replace our aging Shake. Around 10 representatives from Autodesk came to our school to pitch Flame as a solution. It was clear that none of them knew the software very well. However, they were very adept at bad mouthing the competition, to the point of telling untruths about them.
The team from Nuke consisted of one former Nuke developer and his wife. It was clear that he was a fan of the software as well as a user. Guess who got the contract.
I am so pumped for geometry nodes (and the broader effort, "everything nodes"). Tools like Houdini have been doing this for years and the stuff you can build with it is just... wow.
Looks like the nodes selection for this first iteration is a little bare, but that's okay. Gotta start somewhere
Same here! I'm a programmer who dabbles in graphics so having a procedural workflow feels very natural to me and I love the direction geometry nodes is heading. Exciting times ahead!
Agreed, the support is a little bare currently but from what I understand the hard work has already been done and we should see lots more coming down the pipeline soon.
I love Blender and use it at least once a week for animation purposes. I also use Houdini but less often. Something Houdini still is the king at is performance for large scenes and usage of the GPU for simulations. Blender is moving closer and closer to a node model like Houdini, which is exciting to see because it makes me think that performance will be much easier to fix as well. The inspection, logging and debug tooling in Houdini is also better than in Blender, although Blender beats Houdini in extensibility and hackability.
and momentum .. while Houdini has a glorious past it's a pro tool in a niche space; blender is the trendy open source liberating kids creativity all over the planet. I'm not pro blender but that's a potential scenario.. so far they managed to grow the task force and keep it cohesive and productive.
The rapid pace of development is testament to the fact that Blender now has more than twice as many full time devs working on it than Max.
It’s been a long road and for a long time it wasn’t obvious that blender would succeed. Just goes to show if you stick with an open source project over the long haul good things can happen.
Also check out the addon Sverchok, I think at the moment it is still much more powerful than the new geometry nodes, basically a full-blown Grasshopper (from Rhino3D) alternative. Would be nice to see it added into the main program at some point.
so as a heavy maya user, the two things I've missed in blender are fine little QOL improvements and big systemic issues.
the collection of features in blender are second to none, and I've enjoyed learning them a lot, but I really wish some of the overall consistency of maya really keeps me away (same hotkeys across the entire app for one thing, multiple overlapping well thought out methods of interaction with systems... and of course "everything is a node" )
another thing that stands in the way is how easy maya is to understand as a beginning coder, every action is echoed perfectly in the script editor, easing the creation of code that simply does a series of action and anything more complicated is fairly simple. admittedly that's currently a MEL only advantage but I'm really hoping bifrost and other future maya extensions help that continue.
all that being said I'm heavily rooting for blender to succeed, both for spurring autodesk into adding some well needed features, and just to having another wonderful 3d package.
We moved away from the Blender keymapping. Use instead the 3rd party 'proper' keymap. Very compatible with keymaps of other software. The default Blender keymap is insanely quirky, and as you point out, inconsistent.
The one bummer that I noticed with geometry nodes is hitting apply on the modifier. There's another way to tell blender to ACTUALLY render them that I'm blanking on right now, but it is annoying that didn't make it into the initial release.
Once again Blender is killing it! I find Blender to be one of the best examples of how FLOSS software can be substantially better than their proprietary alternatives.
Blender is an exception to the rule, and a rolemodel. For example, FreeCAD and KiCad are OK, but not as nice (especially re FreeCad) as paid alternatives. GIMP isn't on the same level as Photoshop.
I tried designing a relatively simple assembly in Freecad recently (again, as I've come back to it multiple times), and remembered how uniquely terrible some the design decisions have been. I mean, fundamentally user-hostile approaches to the most basic functionality, like rotating a part requires a left mouse + center mouse press in order and sketch lines not being created with center points. And when a user tried to give them feedback (someone else, not mine) civil feedback on the forum about it got a dev response of "Those are just our quirks, go back to Solidworks if you don't like it." I did end up having to fire up my Windows machine for Inventor.
I'm sure it has some level of feature parity with commercial CAD buried somewhere, but it's so hard to get to even on the new 0.19 pre-release that I genuinely wouldn't try to put it in the same conversation as Blender or KiCad as open alternatives to commercial software. It's just not there.
> like rotating a part requires a left mouse + center mouse press in order
That behavior is controlled by the Mouse Model [1] which can be changed with a selection menu in the bottom right of the window, or by right clicking anywhere in the viewport. I generally use Touchpad. While the default behavior is not desirable for you or me, it is based on a sort of standard interface type, so it's desirable for some. It could be possible to start a discussion about changing the default, but I just wanted to mention that this behavior is not set in stone.
> civil feedback on the forum about it got a dev response of "Those are just our quirks, go back to Solidworks if you don't like it."
Yes, this can be very frustrating to me sometimes too seeing people dismissed this way. There are several issues at play in the forums. Besides the most obvious one of expert blindness from people who have been using FreeCAD as it evolved, you have the problem of people who have the time and ability to help newcomers but not necessarily to fix tough underlying problems. At some point a certain jadedness creeps in and their desire to help can actually be harmful.
Hopefully after some time you'll be willing to give FreeCAD another shot as it is improving rapidly, although the problem space is so big it can seem to happen in spurts.
I appreciate your feedback on this--I did end up finding the Mouse Model documentation after a bit, but I think there was some frustration built in on my end by that point.
I'm certainly open to trying it again in the future, and honestly do hope that it becomes a feasible alternative at some point. In fact, I think think that for certain tasks, it's not that far away, but I think that some of the UI decisions, whether from expert blindness as you've pointed out or other reasons, will keep coming up as a point of friction for even moderately experienced CAD users from other programs unless there's a deliberate decision made to try to make the defaults and jump-right-in process more familiar to those coming from the existing options.
It's exactly what I want of a CAD tool: a parametric solver with a 3D UI and 2D sketches. I haven't really have an opportunity to use it a lot since I discovered it, though.
Solvespace is incredible for those with a more programmer-y mind and workflow, however it lacks more "advanced" features that sadly don't seem to have any momentum for implementation (at least last I checked) like chamfers/radiusses, helixes, and some other navigational and organizational features.
It's a fantastic platform though and I encourage all engineering/CAD nerds to try it out. It bridges the gap between writing OpenSCAD and using a full fledged CAD software perfectly.
Helical features are supported in the latest Solvespace release (3.0pre3). There has been some discussion of how chamfers, fillets, and draft angles might work, but the concensus has been that they would be tricky to add, and are not a priority for release 3.0.
When you say rotating a part do you mean rotating the view or using the draft rotate (or some other workbench's rotate) command?
FYI if you use the draft workbench you can snap to midpoints and then convert the autocad-equivalent draft workbench sketch to an inventor-equivalent part design / sketcher workbench sketch. You can also use the symmetry constraint in the sketcher workbench to constrain a point to the center of a line.
If you get familiar with it you can technically model almost anything you want[0], but if you want to go back and change a feature (which is kinda the entire point of parametric cad) it'll likely destroy your part if you're not using the topological naming branch. Freecad realistically needs 5-10 more years to get basic feature parity with professional CAD from the early 2000's and then another release or two focused entirely on stability.
[0]: Their opencascade geometry kernel has some moderately serious deficiencies for complex operations/objects, the assembly workbenches are just now approaching the point where they're stable enough that you can use them without having to rebuild your assembly every week, and while the new TechDraw workbench theoretically gives you the features you need to make manufacturing drawings (which is really the end goal for any professional CAD package, those are what you need to get your parts made) in practice it's too buggy to use with even simple assemblies.
Library management quirks aside, KiCad is pretty close to competitive unless you need simulation or other cutting edge features. If you're familiar with it and know what you're doing it'll get you where you need to go.
Also check out realthunder's freecad fork, they've made some good progress on topological naming (with the effect of keeping models far more stable through minor changes). It's still unusable for all but the lightest duty professional work but it's an improvement.
Didn't they address that sometime in the past two years? I remember updating KiCad and having some issues with the parts libraries, but after that it seemed as good as I could expect it to be.
I use it very, very rarely so really don't remember more than that.
It has gotten better and IIRC is supposed to continue to improve this year with v6, but it's still fragmented, clunky, and lacking features for professional use.
Footprints and schematic symbols should belong to a parent component class with provisions for inventory tracking, etc. Their library manager works fine for hobby level work but if you're doing production you'll have to have a separate component management process that you integrate yourself.
What they have is fine, it works, but it's a far cry from what you get with siemens eda (mentor graphics) or altium.
I have! About a year ago -- it has great library management, and is overall a very good effort that could take over KiCad's place over the next decade if they stagnate.
My criticism is mainly that the PCB layout tools were still buggy. I believe it is/was using some of KiCad's router code, but it took more work to get a layout done than doing the same thing in KiCad would. It also tended to get glitchy with increasing layout complexity. The schematic editor is a lot slower than KiCad's and not as feature-rich.
The GTK widgets look and work very nicely on gnome-based environments but have issues on kde / windows. To be fair that's a GTK issue and not a Horizon issue, but unless Horizon has changed a lot lately I'd have a hard time recommending it over KiCad right now for professional use.
I _really_ like KiCAD, it's my preference for anything simple because I absolutely love the workflow compared to Allegro or Altium (especially Altium). I actually really enjoy the library management as well.
That said, anything using an HDI stackup or a reasonable number of differential or matched traces, KiCAD becomes a struggle. Even simple things like a single pair can be pretty tricky if you have space constraints. These features are pretty fundamental for modern PCB design.
It seems like KiCAD v6 will be making a lot of progress to manage more complex stackups and impedance control, so I'm very excited to try it.
I'd also vouch for Krita. While I'm not a fan of it's window or layering system I think it has a nice balance of features compared to other digital painting software like Paint Tool Sai, Fire Alpaca, Corel, or Photoshop. I made the (mostly) full transition to it earlier last year and don't regret it.
I sort of disagree on Photoshop, most of the love for Photoshop seems to be just lock in to its existing work flow. I have not used Photoshop before using gimp, and for my use cases Gimps multiple window interface seemed to me the more usable interface.
Due to the subscription model, the UI is getting actively WORSE as well. You have to push new features to justify a subscription, and most of those seem to be taking the form of useless UI clutter and cruft. There hasn't been a truly valuable new feature in PS since around the CS2 days IMO.
Of those three, I think Firefox is the only one that could be said to be on par with their commercial counterparts. Inkscape is powerful, but the UI isn't very responsive or intuitive. LibreOffice is slow and buggy whenever I use it.
+1, thank god we've finally come to acknowledge and accept that Gimp has never been and will never be a professional alternative to Gimp for many users.
Out of curiosity, what proprietary alternatives have you been using and in what professional capacity?
"Substantially better" is a fairly large claim.
To be clear, I use Blender and regularly use Maya, Houdini etc and I think all of them, including Blender have so many pros and cons, that I'd hesitate to say any one is better than the other in general.
Yeah Eevee and grease pencil are the two standouts.
To your list of subjective metrics I'd also add scalability and performance. Also maybe pipelineibility. Each DCC has very different characteristics on those as well.
Blender has always had a decent source of funding compared to other open source projects, the ability to have full time devs has made a huge difference. Their open source media releases were also a huge success because they pushed the program and feature set to what people actually need when doing real work. Really an awesome project overall.
Well, that's all by intention. GIMP and Inkscape have always avoided trying to find that sort of funding: inkscape even allowing their lead developer to be hired away without making a fight for it at one point. It's why I have been trying to copy blender's model for Krita since forever.
What is Blender's funding model? I recall that its initial open source release was essentially crowdfunded before that was a trendy thing, but I haven't been keeping up with how they've been funding continuing development. They seem to be doing pretty well at that, so I'm curious about where the majority of revenue is coming from.
This is true, however, the commercial version bears almost no resemblance to what we have today. The open source community bears the lions share of the responsibility for how blender looks today.
It's not real Open Source if the community pays for it?
Studios en-mass deciding to fund a shared, Libre resource that anyone can use so that every studio can all benefit and get better features at a faster pace is basically the dream for most Open Source efforts. There's nothing for anyone to be ashamed about from that model, it's good for Open Source to be funded by the players who are most invested in having a really good industry standard available to everyone.
The point being these are snowflake projects, only kept running thanks to some companies pay checks, the large majority of Linux users pays zero anything for desktop software.
Donations and patreon like schemes hardly allow to pay for a mortgage, supermarket, healthcare, transport every single month.
> only kept running thanks to some companies pay checks
I don't understand what you're getting at.
You're arguing that user donations and patreon schemes don't pay enough, but there's something wrong with Blender being funded by the companies that use it?
The companies paying for Blender are a substantial portion of the community. They're funding a common resource that all of them share, and that common resource is being made available to everyone, decreasing the barriers of entry for new talent to get into 3D modeling, increasing the quality of potential hires they can bring on because of its wide availability, providing a common target for addons and tutorials, and providing those same studios with a Libre base that they can build on top of if they need to. This is exactly what is supposed to happen in Open Source, people pay for it because it's a common resource that they care about. That's why companies are investing into it.
What is the funding model for Open Source that you consider legitimate? Pulling in enough money to full-time hire an entire development team doesn't count because you don't like the primary user base? Pretty much everything that Blender is doing here is a success and more Open Source projects should be looking at their governance model and learning from it.
I don't understand a viewpoint that says that Patreon and individual-funded projects are uncompetitive and unsustainable, but also that corporate-funded projects with large donors don't "count" as Open Source success stories. It feels to me like you're defining Open Source as a project with zero funding, and then complaining that it has zero funding. Is Matrix a snowflake project? Is Krita? Is Linux itself?
And anyway, all of this ignores the facts that:
A) Even outside of corporate donations that make the majority of its funding, Blender has also been comparatively way more successful than other OS projects at getting individual user donations (I even donate to Blender just as an individual), because they approach PR and community in a really smart, engaging way that drives enthusiasm. And
B) Blender's funding model has nothing to do with the original thing this thread was talking about, which was just that FLOSS software can be of comparable or better quality than its commercial alternatives. You're kind of jumping around, from first arguing that Blender doesn't count because it started as commercial software, and now arguing that Blender doesn't count because it has funding and that's not typical for other projects.
If FLOSS software overall can pull off commercial competitiveness in many cases underfunded, that's almost more impressive. Imagine how good the Open Source ecosystem would be if we as individual and corporate communities started funding more stuff to the same level as we fund Blender.
If the companies sponsoring Blender, many of which already customers from the commercial days, withdraw their support tomorrow, in a couple of years Blender will turn into another Gimp, as everyone switch to something else to pay their bills.
What I learned from my zealot FOSS days, is that trying to sell FOSS desktop or developer tools is hardly any different from trying to make a living as street musician.
It is cool for a while, eventually it turns into survival, as bitter Winter arrives.
> If the companies sponsoring Blender, many of which already customers from the commercial days, withdraw their support tomorrow, in a couple of years Blender will turn into another Gimp, as everyone switch to something else to pay their bills.
And if the companies buying Slack suddenly stop buying Slack, it will also die. The observation that all software development requires an investment of resources is not a FLOSS-specific observation, and it's not particularly relevant to the conversation about whether FLOSS software is regularly competitive with proprietary alternatives.
It's not really an insight to say that if you starve developers they'll stop developing. We all know that already. And it's also true of every commercial product. When a community switches to another product, the original product withers because it lacks support. That is a correct observation, but what does that have to do with FLOSS? That's just a general principle that applies to everyone.
I don't see you arguing that Slack doesn't count as a competitive product because most of its individual users and small communities use the free version, and some day the big corporations it relies on for the bulk of its revenue might switch to Matrix/Element instead.
> many of which already customers from the commercial days
This is also just not true. Blender's current funding exists because they put in the work to get completely new grants and investments from major game studios like Epic, Ubisoft, Steam, and Microsoft, as well as from hardware manufacturers like NVidia and AMD. Blender's funding has solidly increased from its early days.
Blender is not just sailing on its previous commercial support from its previous commercial days. It didn't get grants in those days, companies generally don't give massive no-strings-attached grants to commercial products. Modern-day Blender has greatly expanded the support it has because the people managing its funding/organization are very smart and have put a metric ton of work into understanding and innovating on existing Open Source PR and community management models.
This is part of why Open Source maintainers and organizers should be paying so much attention to what Blender does, because it is genuinely doing an excellent job selling the idea of a community-supported Open Source standard to large companies.
----
Stepping outside of the conversation, just to reiterate one more time: the fact that FLOSS tools are regularly competitive despite receiving on average much less support than their proprietary alternatives is a sign that there is something very cost-efficient about the FLOSS development model, and that pumping more funding into it might be a better use of resources than buying commercial products.
You can argue all you want that Open Source is not sustainable, but there are still a lot of Open Source projects that are of competitive levels of quality compared to their proprietary alternatives.
Could the funding situation be better? Yes. Does the funding situation mean that those projects somehow don't exist, or that they're not currently of comparable quality to their commercial alternatives? No.
It's getting pretty hard to manage for me, the poor maintainer :-). We've always put all our income into paying for development (and hardware, and sprints), so right now on Saturdays I'm being my own secretary/HR person/admin person. It used to be that my Saturdays were for bug triaging...
Be careful of burnout, Krita is wonderful, and I think the community would far prefer a slightly slower pace of dev if it means that the lifestyle is sustainable for you.
Now admittedly it's a little weird since it's basically the underlying software that powers a commercial paid variant (MixBus), but it always had been FOSS from the beginning.
I hope one day there's a "Blender, but it's actually ZBrush" open source alternative to ZBrush.
Once you use ZBrush, you'll never want to go back to traditional CAD-style creation.
I won't claim that Blender can't solve it, but, the workflows are completely different. You end up thinking of models like clay that you can shape and paint, not triangles with textures.
Please, someone, somewhere, spend five years making that an open source project. (Realistically, it's a bit melancholy that such a project probably won't ever get made; there's no incentive to. ZBrush exists, and it has a fine price point. I just love thinking about all the algorithms under the hood that power the whole thing... It would be so cool to see the code.)
- Zbrush has an extensive ecosystem of bushes. There are specific tools for specific jobs, and (not having used Blender at all) I am skeptical Blender successfully replicated these workflows.
- Zbrush has modes that are extremely precise. For example, you can mask off a specific section of the mesh, similar to masking off a portion of an image in Photoshop. Except, in Zbrush, you can do it spatially -- it's not a "mask per triangle", but rather "a mask per pixel". You can literally slice a mesh in half, vertically, screen-wise, then hide one half, do some work on the other, then un-hide. It's an effortless flow that people use all the time.
- Zbrush is most natural to use with a tablet in one hand and a keyboard in the other. That video isn't using a tablet at all. Having a mouse interface just isn't appealing for artists. The reason I bring up this point, is because I can't overstate how natural it feels to use zbrush with a tablet –– you can bring up a "context menu" just by tapping a button on your pen, select a new tool by flicking your wrist slightly, and immediately begin using that tool. It's far more configurable than I'm describing here.
Ultimately, Blender has to serve too many masters. If you have to design a UI that can do anything, it can't do everything well. It must make tradeoffs. And these tradeoffs are reflected as reduced artist productivity, which is why many artists use Zbrush for their professional work – it's a tailored experience specifically for artists.
Now, all that said, I am impressed with what Blender can do. I like that it's open source. But, if you want to go toe-to-toe with the pros, the pros are going to point out exactly why the interfaces just don't cut it. If it takes 20% longer to accomplish X, those small costs add up. But there's also a "step change" that you get from the Zbrush flow that I don't think you'll get with Blender's interface. It's subtle, hard to describe, and honestly something you'd have to invest time in to understand.
Caveat: I've been out of the art world for around five years at this point, so feel free to ignore all of my points. But, I approach this from a gamedev studio mentality: from experience in the industry, I can say that Blender never once came up as a realistic option. It was 3ds max for a long time, then mudbox pioneered the sculpting concept (I remember Aron Zoellner from my first job going on and on about why Mudbox was so cool and a big deal), and then Zbrush totally dominated the scene. There are reasons for this, despite my inability to perfectly articulate them.
Scrub through https://youtu.be/EdEVj39ur-U?t=1545 and watch how effortless everything is. That artist is doing so many operations per second relative to your Blender video that it's hard to overstate just how much more productive they are. (I realize your video was an introductory example for Blender, but it's hard to imagine someone doing in Blender what that person is doing in Zbrush.)
> (not having used Blender at all) I am skeptical Blender successfully replicated these workflows.
I don't quite understand why to wish for something without having tried out what's there?
> That video isn't using a tablet at all.
What leads you to say that?
In the description it literally says: "I use a graphics tablet to paint with..." Did you read that as meaning that he doesn't use a graphics tablet to, say, sculpt?
If so, I think that's a misreading. I own a graphics tablet that I use with Blender in part due to Grant Abbit's (the presenter) advice that it's really a necessity when it comes to sculpting in Blender. :)
> – you can bring up a "context menu" just by tapping a button on your pen, select a new tool by flicking your wrist slightly
> If you have to design a UI that can do anything, it can't do everything well.
While that may be true, Blender's UI is more of a UI toolkit (in the not bad sense of the concept :) ) and the tabbed "workspaces" and/or "application templates" of Blender enable the UI to customized to the specific task at hand.
> Caveat: I've been out of the art world for around five years at this point, [...] I can say that Blender never once came up as a realistic option
Ah, okay, that's useful context--yeah, Blender today is not Blender from five years ago. :) The 2.80 release pretty much changed everything and there's been huge development effort in that time.
There's probably better examples of non-beginner focused sculpting in Blender but here's another teaching video from the same guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOSdRdeS5oM
Blender already has a pretty advanced sculpting system? And it integrates with everything else for retopo and such. I don't really do sculpting so I don't know exactly how it stacks up against ZBrush, but I know it's going for the exact same use-case and I believe it's well-regarded
Blender is actually quite good for sculpting and the features set got much better with the last few versions. I'd say it's a very very light version of what ZBrush can do. The only problem is that blender's performance aren't nearly as good. The moment you subd a model for sculpting, the viewport because laggy and that's bad you're trying to paint.
Nah, I was surprised. ZBrush has an extensive toolset specifically for creating machinima. You won't want to do CAD with it, obviously, but ZBrush isn't a CAD tool.
It's a common misconception that ZBrush is for organics. You can create some badass space marine type mechs.
I respect Blender and like it a lot. I just don't think it can do anything close to what you see in that video. But that's just, like, my opinion, man.
Artists love Blender, and that's good enough of a reason to stick with it. I was just hoping to see more of this style of modeling, since it was the only style that made intuitive sense to me personally.
EDIT: (Sadly, it looks like Eat3D is now offline. It was such a fantastic series. Perhaps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdEVj39ur-U&ab_channel=Chofn... "Zbrush Hardsurface Techniques" is a sufficient replacement though. Scrub through that, to random places, and you'll see exactly the sort of flexibility I'm talking about with ZBrush's flow.)
What I meant by 'mechanical parts' is not spaceships, but actual mechanical parts, like that you're going to send to a 3D printer or a 5 axis CNC machine.
Blender is actually good enough to handle this. Not as well as things like Fusion 360, obviously, but for simple parts, it works.
I think Blender might be the most complex and feature rich open source application in existence, period. (By "application" I mean a standalone product for end users with a GUI.)
The amount of support and updates Blender gets makes me extremely happy/confident in the amount of time I've spent with it over the years. New functionality tends to work really well with already implemented stuff and allows for a lot of cool experimentation.
In that regard I'm really looking forward to messing with the geometry node stuff. Based on videos done with beta version it seems like there is a gigantic amount of potential there.
Anyone know how Blender fairs with Linux & AMD GPUs? I'm in the market for GPUs and am super torn by AMD vs Nvidia. Not only is that a tough choice on Linux, but it sounds like Blender is simply much, much better on Nvidia.. at least for rendering.
Thoughts? My goal is of course to use blender to build stuff, but also render them out performantly.
I was in the same position as you a few months ago. I believe that currently Blender provides a much better workflow on Nvidia cards. The reason is simple: Optix. The speed advantage over CUDA (and openCL, of course) is really, really impressive. With Optix, I think I've seen the greatest performance improvement I've ever witnessed on Blender. Here is a Linux + Nvidia + Optix benchmark from 2019: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=blender-...
And with 2.92 it's even faster and it now supports CPU+GPU rendering with Optix. Unfortunately, AMD doesn't have such good Blender support. You're stuck with OpenCL and slower rendering time. You could try using their Prorender renderer, but to be fair, it's a closed source and non-native to Blender. I'd rather stick to Cycles+Eevee. I wish one day AMD will work with Blender to better support it, as I much prefer them as a company and I like their opensource drivers. But really, Nvidia RTX cards with Blender at the moment are fantastic.
Blender runs like a champ with my nVidia Quadro 3000M, though I've had no success getting Ubuntu or Blender to avail of the CUDA cores. Will check out OptiX based on your comment.
Blender System Preferences for CUDA, OpenCL, and OptiX all report "No compatible GPUs found for path tracing. Cycles will render on CPU." I'm using nVidia's proprietary driver
and NVIDIA X Server Settings reports 240 CUDA Cores. No Joy w/ nvidia's cuda packages, either. Blender's been running well on this workstation since ~2.7x for video editing work, so further system tweaks have been low-prio. Will revisit to look at OptiX.
Your card is based on Fermi, an architecture that's no longer supported by NVIDIA since a long while now (last drivers in 2018, you're on a legacy branch).
That means that apps using newer versions of CUDA will not work, and your hardware is also far too old to use OptiX.
Put in another way, your current GPU is slower than the one in a Nintendo Switch...
> Fermi ... (last drivers in 2018, you're on a legacy branch).
IYO, is there any value to using legacy nvidia-driver-390 over X.Org?
> apps using newer versions of CUDA will not work, and your hardware is also far too old to use OptiX.
Will look to see if apps I use avail of my CUDA cores, else I'd prefer to remove this sole proprietary driver from my old-and-busted workstation.
Thanks again for saving me time. I’ll re-de-prioritize further GPU config hacking, though if you have suggestions for a Nintendo Switch-to-FireWire 800 interface, please share.
> IYO, is there any value to using legacy nvidia-driver-390 over X.Org?
nouveau doesn't support compute at all on those... (as in OpenCL).
Also, as far as I remember, rechecking work on Fermi didn't seem to be implemented the last time that I played with one (it is implemented for the later generation, Kepler, though)
> Will look to see if apps I use avail of my CUDA cores
If your app is compiled against CUDA 8.0 or earlier, targeting compute capability 2.1, it'll work on Fermi. That excludes any kind of modern binaries.
(the newest compiler that CUDA 8 supported was GCC 5.3...)
More recent apps can either be built with an old compiler + C++ library... or use OpenCL instead.
Thanks again - I appreciate these details. Blender's not seeing cores available for OpenCL, either.
>> "No compatible GPUs found for path tracing. Cycles will render on CPU."
I'll research Fermi for OpenCL and Cycles Render Devices. Blender's working well, so I'll resist the urge tweak until that's no longer the case, and hope to spend more time exploring 2.92.
ProRender render quality was sadly sometimes pretty close to garbage. (I heard that ProRender 2.0 changed that, but didn't get the chance to test it yet)
When does Nvidia become a hassle? I've been using my 1060 on NixOS for a while with no issues so far. Everything has just worked. Are there edge cases i should consider?
Blender on Linux with AMD GPUs works great. The only difference would be that nVidia cards can use 'Optix AI Denoising' for denoising both in Cycles (raytraced) and in Eevee (real time rendering) which is much faster than the naive Cycles denoising (which often produces sub-par results) and the Intel Denoiser post-processing 'filter'. Although the latter produces much better results as it processes the whole frame at once, instead of discrete tiles.
tl;dr: (sadly) nVidia provides (at times _significantly_) better rendering performance than AMD due to OptiX denoising, which requires less samples per frame. CUDA vs OpenCL is - as far as I know - on par performance-wise.
I got into it by watching Imphenzia's 10 minute modelling videos (https://www.youtube.com/c/Imphenzia). It's low poly, if that's your style, but "extrude, scale, indent" is pretty powerful as far as low poly modelling goes.
Vertex, Edge, and Face Basic editing.
(Make the following without looking up tutorials)
Brick,
Cup,
Rubiks Cube,
Wooden Furniture (Stool, Wardrobe, Bed, etc)
I highly recommend this tutorial series. It is paid, but has great content and pacing and walks you through a lot of the stuff you need to be productive in Blender, but it's not free: https://polygonrunway.com/
The one killer feature I'm still missing from Blender is real-time simulation. I absolutely adore using Blender for hobby and art projects, but as a full-time robotics and computer vision researcher, Blender just still isn't quite there when it comes to being able to generate images in "real time" (even with Eevee) for robotics sim applications, and I'm still using hacked-together tools in game engines like Unity to achieve this and render images. Would really be great if the Blender Game Engine effort could continue as a part of the main branch, but I understand the need of a software to limit it's scope.
I'm in 2.92 now opening projects from previous versions and all is well so far.
Q: When the new-version splash screen asks to select new or use previous config, am I missing out on optimizations or new features by selecting previous?
- The render cache indicators in VSE are gone. The orange bar segments that show strip cache building is comforting while Preview FPS stutters. Confirm that caches are being built ... but in default /tmp/ vs what's in my previous config. Will start w/ a 2.92 config and update.
Tangent: 2.92 was in the Snap Store earlier this week and updated without hassle. Understood there are issues w Snap, but this was a good experience.
I was trying Blender like 15 years ago and I was unable to do anything. But lately, for three or four months I am working on a video composed of multiple 3D and 2D animated scenes and it is mind blowing how easy it goes.
I must say I'd never imagine to be able to do stuff I do. Blender is not only extremely stable, but also it is so easy to use. It is the finest software I have seen.
Is this the version that gets Apple M1 support? I know it’s on their roadmap and I thought it was 2.92, but I don’t see anything in the release notes. Might not be big enough to mention.
I saw it was 2.93 for arm support. I’m waiting to see how it performs. The word is that M1 is fantastic for real-time animation playback and physics sims but lags a bit in rendering. So I’m curious about the next m1 chips and arm support from blender.
I find Cinema4D’s UI and approach toward everything just brilliant. Tried using Blender 5 years ago and it was extremely unintuitive to use. UI consistency was all over the place. Has that changed since?
Let's put it this way. I've professionally used 3D software since SGI/Amiga days, day in day out. I used them all, pretty much. The great UI/UX unification that happened around early 2000s was great - that's the period when most of the apps standardized around (Q)WERT keys for example, etc.. I tried getting into Blender numerous times, but muscle memory just couldn't give into the weird UI. So I thought, because even before this great unification, I used all those different tools without issue. There was something about Blender that just wasn't compatible with my brain.. which worked for eons in all of those apps, day in day out.
Long story short, I've been professionally out of VFX/Animation for two or so years now, taking a break doing something else.. and recently I had to do a small type of work in 3D. Naturally, I lost access to most of my paid licenses during the period so I said, fuck it, let's try Blender again (2.8something). I kid you not, I managed to move my way around it on my own, with a bit of help of reading docs, and finished the actual work and be satisfied with it. I still did a little bit of work in Houdini, since I knew the tool better, but 90% of it was in Blender and it was great (Cycles is great too! We'll see about Eevee).
So, something happened, probably recently, where Blender morphed (UI-wise) into this love child of Cinema4D meets Modo kind of thing and one can get around it with no to little help, if you have prior experience with similar tools. I also picked those industry-standard navigation key/mouse bindings and everything's almost there where you expect them to be.
I would give Blender another try. After 2.8 was released they did a great job on the new UI. 2.9 is showing much more of what’s to come. The grease pencil is turning out to be an amazing tool. I’m going to see if I can recreate some of my vector works using the grease pencil.
I don't know. If the software you're writing has nothing to do with visualizing or simulating real world, probably not.
I myself somehow keep gravitating towards Blender for casual use, because every now and then, I want to do something in 3D. The last time was for VR (I also re-learned Unreal Engine for it), this time is for architecture visualization (in particular, I want to design the home office I'll be having once we move from the apartment we currently live in, and I'm half-hoping that beyond usual interior visualization, I'll be able to abuse Blender to do some lighting evaluation and maybe even airflow modelling).
In my mind, Blender represents one of those capabilities that computers have that could be useful for me personally, so I try to get at least passable proficiency in it. Same thing got me to learn the basics of Audacity, even though I have zero hobby or professional need for sound work (I mostly trim out sponsorship messages from youtube-dl'ed mp3s these days, so that my 22mo doesn't get trained to "like and subscribe" while listening to her nursery rhymes). And same thing dragged me into software development in the first place - I wanted to do stuff with computers (mostly making videogames).
I think Blender is the most exciting software being developed today. I really think we are on the cusp of an indie cg film/show golden age like what Hollywood has in the 70s and 90s.
The possibilities with CG are sky high but the barrier to entry has been equally so. Lots of money and man hours. But I truly think the next ten years will be exciting and that something like on the level of Star Wars will be made by a small team collaborating remotely.
Totally. I love his DIY attitude and dispelling the idea that it’s super hard to make ‘good enough” vfx shots. The way I see it, the missing component is acting, and sound design, music too, but you can really start to actually do it yourself. Like we are nearing the reality of a like DAW UI which plays stories instead of music. Exciting times.
For fun! I've been tinkering with it for a while, and I feel like it's a fairly accessible way for developer-types to be a little artistic.
There are also concepts in Blender (like the whole node system) that might inspire some creative solutions in your day-to-day programming. Also, if you're at all inclined to try make video games, you can make your own 3d models. It pairs nicely with Unity or Unreal for a relatively low-barrier-to-entry to build something small and fun.
Do you want to model things in 3D and render them? If so, Blender is a great tool.
I feel like this question is like going to an art forum and asking if you should learn Kubernetes. You could, but it's not going to help with your art.
Sorry about that. Honestly, nothing in Blender has helped me with anything related to software. Making 3D things and making software are two largely unrelated interests of mine.
I like that the UI shows me Python functions that I can use to invoke the menu item, and I have written some Python before (read an STL, do some transformations, write an OBJ; Blender was easier than cobbling together other tools to do that). My main takeaway that I apply to my own software is that if I know how to do something in the app, the apps should tell me what API method to call to do the same thing. (Google's Cloud Console does this!) And, that if I know the name of the command I want to run, I shouldn't have to poke through the menus to find it. (Blender fixed this with F3 global search. It annoys me to death in other apps like Fusion 360, where things move ever release and I have to search through every menu because the YouTube tutorial I'm watching is a week out of date.)
I've used Blender to build models for simulations and generated image/video data for training deep segmentation and image models, but it's all science related. Nothing that would help a software developer - I think that's too broad a label anyway.
The attitudes, outlook, habits of the Blender development community are healthy. Dwelling in that scene and bringing something of it with you to mundane work will make you something special.
It's hard to say. Blender has a very rich feature set and it's not easy knowing if it will be relevant for your role.
I picked it up as a hobbyist/artist and I really enjoyed it. I haven't used the modelling capabilities in my day-job, but I have used the video-editing capabilities to make instructional videos that were useful in my day-job. For that alone I'm glad that I picked it up.
I did the same, but then recently picked up Davinci Resolve which feels a lot friendlier to use. It also has a free/lite version, though it's not OSS like Blender.
Having been a Blender user for a while now, I have used it multiple times as an alternative to Illustrator/Inkscape for 2D graphics for my projects because the editing capabilities feel much more flexible to me. I have also used the drivers and constraints for modeling UI interactions. Also, the Python scripting can be very enjoyable. I have generated 3D audio visualizations for fun in the past.
So for me it's been both fun and useful to know Blender as a software developer, though not strictly required.
I started learning in November/December or so. It's a little tough to get over the initial curve, but the Blender Guru donut tutorial is really helpful, as well as the free beginner tutorial on cgboost.com.
Is it helpful as a software dev? Who knows, but it's been an enjoyable hobby for now. I particularly have enjoyed the motion tracking and adding some special effects to videos of my young daughter.
I personally am seeing a ton of activity in 3D powered web experiences. Eventually it will mix with webXR for the AR/VR devices of the future. If you are interested in these technologies, Blender will be one of the most important tools to know I suspect.
I've tried 3D modeling and failed to get anywhere several times. My only observation is that the mesh fairing example looks like a really cool feature. If 3D modeling "felt" like that, it probably wouldn't be so intimidating.
I'm curious, is there a lot of pressure to use the latest version of Blender? Back when I was a kid, I stuck with a certain version of 3DS Max to avoid exactly that type of problem. But I'm not familiar with Blender, so maybe it's not so straightforward just to stick with the old one you know.
As far as I can tell, there's no pressure at all unless you are asking for help with a problem that a newer version solved.
I love that they maintain a page with links to download all the older versions. Today's news reminded me to try one of the legacy 32-bit builds on my Puppy Linux netbook next time I'm playing on it, because Blender is a really fun tool once you learn the ropes, and has been since I started using it (2002-ish).
My issue is that the last year or two has seen a huge amount of technical improvements that I genuinely love.
Those improvements are combined with UI and workflow changes which are big enough changes that you can't fully copy over your old defaults.
I'm still using the new versions, and some of the workflow changes are genuine improvements as well. But I can mirror the GP comment of spending an hour googling something that I knew how to do by muscle memory in an older version. With the majority of results being older than a few months and not showing the current way to do it.
*Edit: in the time I wrote this comment the GP comment appears to have been flagged (I don't recall if it said anything overly mean or anything, that may have something to do with it if so). The concern about the UI and workflow changes is real and has been brought up for a couple of years now however ([1], among others)
> is there a lot of pressure to use the latest version of Blender?
Post 2.8, not hugely, AFAICT (outside of the desire to use new features). Older released versions are always available even back to SGI/Irix releases that are presumably primarily of historical interest.
The Blender team has an awareness of the potential disruption that arises from being forced to upgrade in the middle of a typical multi-year film/video project, so now explicitly cater for this use case with their new Long Term Support (LTS) versions pilot:
Our department (art and design) moved from 3ds Max to Blender last year, and have not looked back. The rapid pace of development is testament to the fact that Blender now has more than twice as many full time devs working on it than Max.