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.
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.