Hi guys, I'm the primary developer of libmv (http://libmv.googlecode.com) which is used for the motion tracking component in Blender. I also wrote some of the Blender-specific motion tracking code. What's in this release is not the final word; there's some exciting improvements in the pipeline. Let me know if you have any questions.
Keir, I've been following the progress of libmv for a at least 3 years now.
Seeing it inside Blender today is a real achievement. Congratulations and thanks for your efforts.
This summer, I used the "tomato branch" (Blender branch where motion tracking was developed) to track points in a landscape for a small project. It worked well but at the time the workflow to transfer 2D movement to objects in the scene was not obvious.
It feels great to finally get this shipped, so thanks!
There's no question that the workflow inside Blender is not optimal. Fixing this is planned for the 2.62 release. If you have specific suggestions on what you were expecting vs what was actually necessary, filing a report on the Blender bug tracker is a great way to get it addressed.
Wanted to type out "Thank you!" Really excited to use this feature! I would be interested to read a blog post from you on general insight on the technology, and maybe any general guidance.
I've worked with blender since 2001 (version 1.9.x, when it was still shareware), and its growth over the past ten years has been outstanding. I'm not a 3d professional but, instead, use it for all kinds of things: Demo and Mock animations / movies, creating icons for apps (almost all my apps' icons were created in Blender), cutting videos (iMovie is a great app, but for quick and short movie edits, the one in Blender is actually superior). It even has a built-in game engine and can be connected to various open source 3d engines. Blender is really powerful.
Blender is, in a way, similar to VIM or Emacs, in that the user interface is highly optimized for keyboard navigation. A lot of things can be done with the mouse and the keyboard without ever having to move through long and convoluted menus or hierachies.
It's also scriptable in Python. It's one of the first apps I install on my machines.
This is actually the first time I've heard of Blender, and...wow. Every once in a while the free software scene totally blows my mind, and these folks really seem to have the big-name tools in their sights.
It's been a long, long time since I understood 10% of what a production-class modeling and animation tool can do, but maybe someone here knows:
How does Blender compare to Maya, for example? What would this project need to achieve before folks would start switching?
Blender has been around for decades, and enjoyed a fair bit of popularity in the 90s when it was a great point-of-entry for budding 3D artists.
Since then, it's fluctuated in its rate of evolution relative to the industry standard. It always had cutting edge features, but they were trapped behind a troublesome UI, while the big competitors made their tools ever easier to use.
In recent years, the gap has been drastically closed due to a ground-up rewrite, completely new approach to the UI, and a tremendous effort to modernize.
Unfortunately, Blender still has a bad reputation, a legacy from the previous design. What's more, many studios and schools have firmly entrenched workflows, or depend on custom extensions written for a specific tool.
On the other hand, Blender seems to be enjoying popularity in the booming indie games community, where it integrates well with other free tools like Unity 3D.
With the new design, I wouldn't be surprised if Blender's best and most-popular days were ahead of it. I see share growth coming from individuals looking to make great graphics on a shoestring budget, as opposed to big studios or schools adopting it instead of Maya or Max.
I would argue that it is now roughly equivalent to those other tools in terms of features and usability. So, no real reason to switch (which requires expensive adjustments to existing workflows), but great incentive to adopt it in the first place (because it's free).
The scriptability of Blender has been a big draw for me. It's pretty deeply integrated with Python. One can even use it as an interactive 3D front-end for a substantial Python script. That is, let the script create and manipulate the objects, and just use Blender to view what is happening. In Blender 2.4 it was possible to keep a script continuously animating the scene, something I found tough to make happen after the 2.5 overhaul.
Blender 2.4 also let scripts create UI components, such as entire control panels to influence the running script. The last time I checked in 2.5, this was either not possible or not well documented. But I'm not up to date on this.
I'm also not familiar for comparison with the scriptability of Maya or other tools.
Maya has multiple scripting facilities. It has its native language, MEL, but for a long time it has also supported Python scripts, more recently with a new API. In fact, much of its GUI is built using scripts that come with it.
There is some lack of consistency between the different approaches, not just in the languages but in the presentation of the underlying data model, which isn't always helpful. Still, as a guy with a programming background, I actually found it easier to figure out how Maya works by playing with scripts and the underlying object model than by experimenting with the user interface. :-)
I think Blender really is different from other graphics free-software:
- It is baked by a very strong foundation.
- It is used by real studios all over the world (and more and more used)
- It is used by the scientific world a lot.
- The new release cycle is around 10 weeks. And every release ships with awesome features. http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Doc/Process/Release_Cy...
- the community is strong, big and active.
- it supports a lot of OS, and the experience is great in all of them.
- The foundation is very user focused :
* they create "open movies" to identify the needs and the weakness of the use of Blender is pro environement. You don't know about Big Buck Bunny (http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/) or Sintel (http://www.sintel.org/) ?
* they try to focus on real problems, not on eye-candy or extra-features that would impress but not be useful once.
I know some 3D guys who prefer the way Blender handles a lot of basic modelling tasks. Others prefer Maya. I get the feeling it's a lot to do with what you're familiar with these days, because they're both quite capable in terms of functionality but they both have quite powerful, complicated user interfaces.
Unless something changed very recently, Blender still can't use FBX files properly. That alone is a deal-breaker for a lot of projects because FBX is very widely used in the rest of the industry.
Also, for all the talk of community around Blender, Maya still has a far bigger user base and far more professional-level tools you can plug in if you need more than the standard offering.
On the flip side, Blender is free and Maya costs several thousand. And to get Maya you have to deal with Autodesk, whose approach to customer service appears to be that they don't provide any. And the last two major releases of Maya have been absurdly buggy, to the point that Maya 2012 is already on 4 hotfixes and counting.
Two basic things missing, from my notes at the time (1 year ago, don't remember which version, think it was the latest non-beta at the time):
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- Texture display in the viewport. Somewhat amazingly, Blender doesn't seem to support this. When you're doing UV editing, you can see the polygons that use the UVs you're editing mapped with the texture you've selected as being visible in the UV editor, but that's about it. The sort of textured display that I'd expect, where all polygons are displayed textured with the texture(s) from their material, doesn't seem to exist.
- No N-sided polygon support. Yes, seriously. Quads or tris or nothing! So I think there's a mode where it works like MAX, where it works in tris but hides some of the edges to fool you (N-gons I think they call it), but I couldn't work out how to make this happen. (And there's some guy rewriting the mesh editing core to support N-sided polygons, but it's not done yet.) This caused me a big problem: Blender kept getting in my way! No way to create a rectangle with 6 verts, that's going to get an edge in the next step that splits it into two, because Blender will turn the intermediate result into triangles, forcing me to clean things up -- an extra step, that I didn't want, nor did I need. Now, maybe there is some special tool that I should be using, that does this in a Blender fashion -- but, seriously, I don't care. I can do things my way in every other package.
>>>
Blender is one of the very few programs that has successfully moved me to tears of sheer frustration (funnily enough, I am very unlikely ever to try using it again), but plenty of people get on with it fine so it could just be me.
Regardless of my own inability to get to grips with it, I did think that the two limitations I describe above are kind of ridiculous for a 3D modelling package in 2010 - and I still think that. Every other package I've used just lets you jump in and create polygons with as many edges as you like, and shows you each material's texture in the viewport as you do it. Even if you can jump through some hoops to ge blender to do that too, that's too much - these things are basic features...
"What would this project need to achieve before folks would start switching?"
Nothing.
This is a full grown set of tools. So it's just a matter of taste.
I switched from 3DsMax to Blender. There is nothing missing. The footprint is very small and it is fast (startup time of 2 sec.). Plus developing addons in Python is very easy.
Also a lot of professional render engines are having plugins for Blender lately (Vray for example).
Before I got into web development I was involved in several open source blender projects, usually as a modeler (someone who creates the 3d objects, then passes them on to people who color animate and process them). I have used both maya3d (the oracle of the 3d modeling, powerful, industry grade software with a cost prohibiting casual experimentation) and blender, in addition to several other programs in limited amount.
Blender is everything that is right about the open source community.
The feature list is very comparable to commercial applications (which usually run > $500)
But one of the most important, and as far as I know, unique things about blender and the community are the open movie projects.
The Blender Foundation establishes clear and detailed roadmaps for features (something many open source projects struggle for). Then they take a small group of some of the best artists and programmers from the community, and pay them to create a open source project using the current goals in the roadmap. The most recent was Project Durian, which created the short CG film "Sintel" with a focus on developing blenders renderer to do high res (4k) renders, and the animation system to allow for crowds and complex animations. They also developed some sfx like fire and explosions. At the end, not only was the film released as creative commons, but all the files from the film were too, so the community could benefit.
Where did the money come from? Presales of the DVD, which contained all the special features and files, and was released before the movie was posted to youtube, giving a "sneak preview". One project serving as fundraising, community support, community outreach, tutorial/teaching, feature development, focus grouping, beta testing/dogfooding, and publicity. Success.
Here are links to some of the other blender open projects.
If you ever have the pleasure to meet Ton Roosendaal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ton_Roosendaal), the "benevolent dictator" running the Blender Foundation, you'll see where the drive to do all these well-organized, thought-through things comes from.
Ton is fantastic at making things happen, from setting up a movie project to coding in Blender (which he still does very much of) to organizing the three-day Blender Conference that every year lets a couple hundred Blender users and developers meet up in wonderful Amsterdam.
I'm watching Sintel now at 1080p. The quality is something I'd expect to see in a movie theater! Previously I've seen Big Buck Bunny, which my daughter loves. :) But Sintel blows it away.
That was the main focus of Sintel. There was a lot of focus on getting the renderer able to realistically handle 4k, which is a resolution standard (stands for 4k horizontal resolution). From wikipedia
As of 2009, the most common acquisition medium for digitally projected features is 35 mm film scanned and processed at 2K (2048×1556) or 4K (4096×2160) resolution via digital intermediate. Most digital features to date have been shot at 1920×1080 HD resolution using cameras such as the Sony CineAlta, Panavision Genesis or Thomson Viper. New cameras such as the Arri Alexa can capture 2K resolution images, the Red Digital Cinema Camera Company's Red One can record 4K, and Sony's F65 CineAlta camera can capture 4K and beyond to 8K 8768 x 2324.
So it is actually twice the resolution you would expect to see in theaters.
P.S. Don't show your daughter Sintel until you've watched it, it's actually fairly sad.
Great project. My granddaughter and I are learning to use it together. She knows that I worked in the entertainment industry for 2 years and when we were driving home from seeing "Puss and Boots" she wanted to know how to do 3d graphics (she is good with Scratch - a good start).
One tip: don't try to use it on a Mac without a 3 button mouse.
If effort/outcome ratio for blender is on the steep side for your granddaughter, have a look at Muvizu http://muvizu.com/, it's no blender for sure, but it makes getting started with timeline based 3D animation a breeze (pre-designed scenes, ready to go character animation, special effects, lighting, multiple cameras...), and it's free.
I just started messing with Blender a few days ago. It looks like they've cleaned up the UI a bit since the last time I looked at Blender. Here's a very nice set of getting started tutorials on Youtube. Very simple and straightforward.
3d modelling is not exactly noob-friendly, not in any software. Google's SketchUp may be a slight exception, it's pretty easy to draw buildings in it but once you start to do more complicated things, it too gets really hard, really fast.
Blender's new (introduced in 2.5) UI is pretty cool. They try to have all operations available through a widget in the UI (with a tooltip), a shortcut key, a quick launch menu and through a Python scripting interface.
My favorite feature is the quick launch menu. Hit spacebar and a menu pops up, type in what you want and and it searches for operations using a fuzzy text search. It's also nice to see that you can adjust parameters to your operation and see your results live. Previously you had to enter all parameters beforehand and couldn't see the results, now you can e.g. draw a sphere and adjust the number of vertices in it, when you see the sphere.
Blender's UI has gone through a vast improvement and it's great that the UI devs have done their job well despite all the bashing they've had - I'm sure they would have done a lot more if they would have gotten more positive feedback.
Back when I started using Blender, when it was still a proprietary shareware software, most operations were only available through keyboard shortcuts that were mostly not documented. That was not a barrier for me, I quickly fell in love with the software.
Now let's hope that someone has the time to translate (more of) the manual to the new UI.
You must have missed Caligari TrueSpace in your travels. I would dearly love to see basic modeling (including kinetics) made as simple and intuitive as it was in TS 3-6 in another package. (For that matter, I wish it had stayed that easy in the last version of TS.) The only real fly in the ointment was rendering, and the proprietary models didn't export well for texturing and rendering elsewhere. That said, I did a lot of technical illustrations in that package just about as fast as I could think them, and if you didn't need complex reflections with ray tracing (or luminosity rendering), the results were certainly good enough.
Well indeed, not very noob-friendly and not very respectful of UI conventions.
However, it is reckoned that once you get use to it, it is very efficient :
No modal screen. The screen is divided. You can adjust your workspace depending on your current task. Tweaking parameters is very easy thanks to well designed widgets.
If you try, remember that you should leave your left hand on the keyboard (like a fps) and use the keyboards shortcuts.
I don't know. A while back I learned the basics of Blender as well as 3DS Max; I personally found the former easier to pick up. Of course, I didn't do much beyond basics--I got distracted away from 3D graphics in general and never got back to it :)
I can recommend checking out Blender Cookie, it has a small series of "Get Started With Blender" video tutorials and a lot of in depth tutorials (of which a surprising amount are free to watch).
download.blender.org did not go down, so everyone interested in downloading even if the server goes down again the newest release can be downloaded from
