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?
BBB was the first one that was really famous for some reason, so I guess it has the benefit of familiarity. That's what makes it a good video equivalent to Lorem Ipsum I guess
I loved it, in my opinion the best one so far, but I've seen it around two months ago. I think previously these shorts were released specifically to highlight new features which got added to Blender on a mayor release, which doesn't appear to be the case with that short.
It looks so much better than average rig animation you see in most cartoons nowadays, but I still prefer hand-drawn animation. The bending/squeezing/rigging of assets still feels like a program's procedure rather than an artist's touch.
amazing to see the geometry node setups in the outro, the smoke trail from splines (3:38) so cool! And you can get the blend files yourself to learn exactly how they did it.
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.
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.
> 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 can be a 5x when I really love 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.
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~ [e: abroad] 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...
Almost everything has moved ~to India~ [e: abroad] 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.
This is simply wrong, and if anything the reverse is true: the jobs that had been outsourced to India are being brought back to the U.S. after several years of subpar work. See, for example, the most recent Marvel movies and TV shows. The abysmal VFX work was the product of outsourced VFX shops. You can bet your rear that Disney won't be repeating that mistake in the future.
Your comment about the market is incredibly wrong and jingoistic. The majority of popular feature and TV animation is made outside of India.
Canada is a larger competitor to the US market than anything else, and very few companies have Indian outsourcing for feature/TV animation. Its more prevalent for VFX jobs, but even then many studios still have a large presence in North America/Europe.
Studios like wild brain, titmouse etc are all North American based, while most feature animation is a mix of North America (Pixar, Dreamworks, Disney, Sony) and Europe (Illumination, Skydance)
I am sharing the lived experience of a person I am very familiar with. Do you have specific industry experience to back up your claims? If you know a place actively hiring technically minded animators, verily I say we would love to hear about it.
I know for a fact that several of the studios you list as "North American" have recently laid off almost all their animation staff in favor of Indian vendor studios. Not feature, perhaps. But TV people do work too. Or did, rather.
Yes I’ve been a supervisor in both feature film and vfx at major studios, as has my partner who currently still works in the industry. I maintain close ties with several major studios and am still a well known entity in the industry. I feel like I can speak with quite a reasonable level of confidence in this space
You made two claims, that the jobs have been laid off (correct) and moved to India (incorrect). The layoffs are parts of market changes due to the strikes and production cuts before then. The implication that it was caused and will lead to outsourcing is not borne in reality for feature/tv animation.
But yes several studios are hiring still. The job fair at the recent Spark conference in Vancouver had several studios open. Feature and Tv animation hasn’t seen the slowdown that other areas of the market have and will bounce back faster.
It is most certainly incorrect to claim that the jobs have not (at least in part) moved to India. It is also incorrect to claim that laid off workers are not being replaced with foreign vendor studios, largely in India. This is a 100% verifiable fact for at least one of the "North American" studios you mentioned.
It would appear you have taken your own experience, which I'm sure is vast, and made the mistake of assuming it applies to every studio. I can tell you that it does not.
I can also tell you that the job market is quite dry indeed, and that studios that were attempting to headhunt just months ago will now no longer even reply to applications.
I think you're greatly overestimating how many jobs have moved to India. The largest company to do so is MPC, but for feature and TV work, it hasn't really impacted job locality.
It appears you're taking your own internal biases about India outsourcing and applying it more expansively.
I didn't say the job market isn't dry. Again, I'm pushing back on the conflation of layoffs and jobs being offshored to India. Canada and Europe are much bigger source of offshoring for the US. However that isn't to say studios aren't hiring which was what you asked about, and I answered. It's definitely a lot lower, but it's not due to outsourcing. There's so many other factors that I already mentioned (lowered production, strikes) that play in first. Animation is affected to a much smaller degree and several studios in Canada are hiring in reasonable numbers at the moment.
You can do with that info what you will, but it sounds like you don't actually want to hear an answer that contradicts your own and are doubling down on something that is not borne out of the reality of where the work is being done right now. It's especially exasperating because you're not even involved in said industry, outside of your partner, whereas I am actively every day.
Largely, the main jobs that get outsourced to India is stuff like match move and rotoscoping. There's very little Core Animation, lighting or rendering work for most of the major studios done there, with the exception of MPC
Dreamworks has specifically stated that lighting and rendering work is being outsourced to India and that this was the reason for their recent laying off of their entire TV animation department (HUB). You act like somehow me directly knowing someone who was directly told this information by the people making the decision is somehow not a strong enough source? Compared to you who isn't in this country and previously stated you don't even work in the industry anymore?
They set up their Indian studios in 2008 and have had portions of their work done there and in China (now Pearl) for years now. They haven't increased that outsourcing within the last few years, and as I mentioned have been reducing it so your points regarding the current state of things isn't very valid. It also never resulted in job reductions in North America, but rather more films per year.
And so what if I don't work directly in the industry anymore? I'm very involved in it still, and my partner is still in the industry. And we did work in the US for several years, so your point is moot.
Is it possible that your girlfriend is not a reliable source of information here? Because I have multiple friends who are fairly senior at both DWA Glendale and Bangalore, and coupled with the news, you're clearly not lining up with anything they're saying. And if she's laid off, then she's no longer in the industry either, so you can't really claim that as a statement piece either.
I would really examine your own biases here as to why you're so hellbent on focusing on India here, and not any of the other countries that are actually taking the jobs away from them. Again, Canada is a MUCH bigger source of job diversion for the industry than India is.
Frankly I don't really care if Canada or India is the bigger outsourcing destination and I don't see why you're getting so hung up on the specific country. The fact of the matter is Dreamworks TV laid off their entire HUB staff in favor of Indian vendor studios (not Dreamworks Bangalore. Mikros is one example.), and there is no job market in America (look at the "Careers" pages for every American studio you listed).
I don't know why I'm debating this with someone who is so far removed from anything actually going on.
This is what's happening. These are the facts. If you refuse to accept them, that's your own internal biases, not mine.
You clearly seem hung up on one country over another, and continue to ignore the specifics of the situation or any nuance to the situation. I think that speaks volumes. Especially when Dreamworks TV has been heavily outsourced based since the beginning. Just look at how many of their shows are produced at Bardel in Vancouver.
Anyway, agreed there's no point arguing with someone who has no actual roots in this industry. Have a good day, I hope your partner finds work soon, but maybe don't place the blame where it doesn't belong.
You're hung up on India bro. I mentioned them in passing as that's where that specific department was laid off in favor of, then went back and edited that out when you commented the first time. You've been making this whole thread about India when the point is the job market. The country is incidental to everyone but you.
I've never been hit by offshoring but I have been on the other end of it. When I lived in a relatively affordable-workforce central European country we once had to do a knowledge transfer from our Canadian office which all got laid off.
We took all their work, the whole experience was bittersweet, some of the folks there took it well others less so. But I can say that the project itself was reaching a stagnating phase where not much new work needed to be done, and we were mostly doing maintenance/bug fixing. The company itself wasn't doing anything innovative either and there wasn't leadership to put the Canadian guys skills to good use.
Eventually most of those guys were hired by Intel and all got to work on exciting new technology that none of us were qualified to do.
I think this is more or less okay when it happens, if a company does massive layoffs I take it more as a sign that they are not producing much anymore. And when many companies fire tens of thousands of people all at once I basically take it as a sign that the tech sector as a whole is taking a big downturn. Maybe things will improve when we finally stumble upon some tech that needs developing that has a great potential to be profitable and takes a lot of people to develop.
Computer graphics is based on linear algebra. Behind the artists are lots of engineers and technical director jobs where you're building software tools, render engines or character rigs. Animation is a lovely meld of art and technology, and has been so since the very first animations existed. Its one of the reasons I really enjoy the field.
So one caveat I would mention is that you will likely earn more outside of the animation industry with those skills than within it.
With that out of the way, I think there are several avenues to get involved. Picking up a graphics engineering book, or learning OpenGL/Metal/DirectX will make you valuable as a realtime engineer.
But otherwise I would recommend finding an open source project and contributing to it as a way to build up the repertoire that you can use to apply for jobs with. Blender is an excellent place to start, but so are any of the projects under the academy software foundation at https://www.aswf.io
Getting more into the character animation side, you can look into Rigging, which is the process of setting up the armatures that move the characters. There are also things like simulation for cloth/hair etc...
Anything in tech would pay significantly better with the same skills. Graphics engineers are in high demand at many major tech companies like Meta, Apple, Google.
But film/games will still pay well. Just not as well.
As for needing a role, well it depends. Tech art is a very wide role with very little definition. But also those skills apply to engineering instead of tech art as well.
Engineers don’t need reels. Tech artists would if they’re more on the art side (shaders, characters) but less so on the tools side.
Helpful when writing shaders to describe surfaces and lighting, as well as working on the constraint optimization engines that go into physical body simulations.
Blender for 3D is what Postgres is for databases. It's really an exceptional piece of open source software and totally stands out. There's not many software projects like this.
blender has a python api and everything you can do in blender can be replicated with scripts. for a start you can draw geometric shapes to show variables and a for loop.
Not just “it has an API”, but it has the most discoverable API I’ve ever seen - if you go into the settings menu and enable “python tooltips”, then hovering over any button or input widget will give you instructions for how to activate or modify the value programatically :D
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.
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.
Blender only became successful well after it 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 actually nice 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.
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.
I still remember when I first discovered Blender. It was around the time Blender 2.8 had just been released with its new UI. At that point, some people still preferred using 2.7 because the new UI was too different for them. The first thing that blew my mind was the size of the download, which was around 50MB. I had expected to have to download much more than that, which is typical for creative, graphical applications. After using it for a while, I recognized how polished and powerful Blender is compared to other opensource projects I had used before such as GIMP. 3D is not my professional work, I use it as a hobby, and I've learned and created many 3D works that were only made possible because Blender is free. The community on YouTube and Stack Exchange is large and friendly as well. I just love Blender so much.
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.
Most of this is technically true 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.
Not really, I find the blender workflow is still very similar to the old 1.7, fits on a floppy disk, days.
It's the same modal editor with a million hotkeys and dense packed stacked dialogs, the most intrusive workflow change was when they swapped the default mouse keys.
Not to say the blender project has not done amazing work making things more discoverable. But as a occasional blender user from the sgi 1.X days. I suspect "the complete 3.0 overhaul making blender more standard" was more marketing than anything else. Blender had got a reputation has being hard to learn(all 3d programs are hard to learn). So while they did do a lot of work on the UI and it is much better, mainly it was loudly saying "we made the UI easier" and everybody sort of went along with it.
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.
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.
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 isn't on the same level as Blender, but it's not on the same level as other Open Source projects either. I'd put it in the same camp as projects like Ardour, and arguably above projects like Godot (although I'm sure some people would debate me on that).
It's an exceptional drawing tool that is well-suited for professional work and is headed in a really promising direction. It's got a couple of weaknesses (vector layers) but it really shouldn't be discounted as a professional-level tool.
Unless you're claiming that Inkscape is in the same position and has gotten a lot better than the last time I used it, which :shrug: could be true, I don't know. I'm not trying to bash Inkscape here.
I can vouch for Krita and Inkscape pairing well as vector art programs and even doing things that CSP, whose vector layers are pretty well liked, can't match. The issue is that drawing in Inkscape is a little bit broken(it can be done, but the current UX is death by papercut) - thus I approach it through the other program, which is basic but consistent.
So the workflow I end up using for digital inks is: Open both programs, sketch in Krita, copy-paste the vector data into Inkscape, stroke->path, then use tweak tool to sculpt the lines. This adds line weight in seconds-to-minutes. Alternately, I can apply path effects instead of stroke->path, if I want a more programmatic design. If I want to paint, I can copy-paste the shape back into Krita.
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.
no but he's right, there's a level of polish that was higher than average there too, i actually thought about it but couldn't remember the name when i wrote.
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.
(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.
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 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. That it happened 20 years ago isn't the key. What's key is the financial investment to 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.
This feels like a bit of an over-extrapolation. Blender succeeded in no small part because of investment.
As a commercial product, it failed. We shouldn't say that being commercial is a model for success, Blender tried being commercial and it didn't work. If it had stayed commercial and had not been Open Sourced, it likely wouldn't exist today.
As a side effect of its origins and what people saw as the opportunity behind the project, it then got a lot of investment, and it turns out that Open Source projects with heavy involvement from their userbase (and not just from programmers) and with heavy monetary investments and a positive community that gets excited about the project -- it turns out that yields exceptional tools. But it's not the commercial aspect that caused that, the investments caused that, and other Open Source projects could be given the same level of investment -- after all, many of them are as good or as competitive (if not more competitive) than Blender was when it was Open Sourced.
As an Open Source program Blender has introduced architectural improvements and structural improvements that rival its origin, and it was able to do that without going commercial, which is evidence that this kind of investment and funding can exist for a non-commercial project if a significant portion of a community and businesses think the project is worth funding. It is arguable that starting out as a commercial project helped fuel that optimism. But to say Blender owes its success to being commercial feels backwards. Blender owes its success to the fact that it stopped being commercial, which was (and is) a contributing factor to why people and organizations feel so good donating to it. Like if we're going to take a lesson away from Blender, that lesson might be, "want to compete with Maya? Dissolve your company and give away your code."
I very much believe that Blender wouldn't have a community today if it had stuck with its commercial origins.
>As a commercial product, it failed. We shouldn't say that being commercial is a model for success, [...] But to say Blender owes its success to being commercial feels backwards.
You're misunderstanding what my attempted explanation is about. You're arguing about reasons for Blender's success. That's not my angle.
My explanation is about something else: why Blender's level of polish (not "success") seems to be so advanced in relative comparison with other open source projects out there such as Gimp, etc.
In other words, people's expectations of open-source software usability/polish is so low that Blender's level of execution is surprising. This is the gp's particular wording I'm commenting on, >" I'm amazed at how professional and finished Blender is for being an open source project." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38262825)
...all those open-source projects (Gimp, SageMath, etc) that are GUI instead of command-line that people complain of not having the polish of their peers -- don't have Blender's unique accidental history of having the (failed) commercial product kickstart the momentum and evangelism of a community to make subsequent Blender versions eventually exceed the expectations of typical open source projects. The multi-millions gave it a unusual headstart that Gimp, Octave, etc do not have.
I do agree with the following parts of your comment which don't contradict my argument:
>Blender owes its success to the fact that it stopped being commercial, which was (and is) a contributing factor to why people and organizations feel so good donating to it. [...] I very much believe that Blender wouldn't have a community today if it had stuck with its commercial origins.
Sorry for the misunderstanding. Unfortunately, I sort of feel like I would disagree more with your statement now that I understand it better? :D
I think the majority of Blender's polish came after being Open Sourced, and I don't think that movement was kickstarted by its origins. I do think its origins arguably played a role in its investment, but early Blender had a reputation of being exactly like many other Open Source projects -- powerful if you knew how to use it, but unpolished and arcane and difficult to learn.
When I first ran into the Blender, its interface was the biggest criticism I saw online about the project. Wherever the momentum came from to say "we could refactor this and make it attractive to regular modelers" I don't think that momentum was present in its early days or right after it was Open Sourced.
I'm tempted to dig into the history a bit more now, because I bet if I went back in HN history to the early 2.0 days, I would find comments saying that Blender is just like other Open Source projects in that its too confusing and difficult to use. The interface was what everyone trashed about Blender.
Of course investment helped with giving Blender the ability to undergo those kinds of radical transformations, but the transformations were sorely needed and I'm not sure that its UI was what fueled that investment. I think both overstate the connection, but I'm more sympathetic to a claim that Blender's commercial origins fueled its architecture or resources than I am to a claim that it fed its interface polish or excitement about its interface.
----
Personally, I think the biggest contributor to Blender's interface is the fact that its community is made up of a ton of artists and not just programmers. Additionally, a lot of its investment is coming from studios -- notably not from a company catered to studios, but specifically from people who are using the tool in-house as they develop it. Greasepencil in particular is heavily influenced by this; the current rewrite for Greasepencil 3.0 is being pushed and developed by people who are intimately familiar with Greasepencil as a creative tool.
In theory, Open Source should be a much better match for this than commercial software, because commercial software caters to a client-base but is developed usually by a player outside of that space that is seeking to monetize it. Open Source often falls into the same trap, but at least has the possibility to be developed and driven and to have feature requests prioritized primarily by artists and community members who rely on the software rather than by a separate entity that is interested primarily in how the software is marketed or sold. That Open Source very often fails at this is (imo) more of a commentary on the lack of community experience and community investment that most projects have. Stereotypical GUI Open Source projects are very often the result of external efforts from people who are not trained in GUI work and who are not quite as closely tied to their users.
I'd bring up Krita as another example here -- Krita has no commercial origins (https://krita.org/en/about/krita-releases-overview/) but is miles ahead of Gimp in terms of building a polished interface that caters to artists. One immediately obvious difference is that Krita's artist community is heavily engaged in the project and in regular communication with the developers and regularly gets involved in feature development and prototyping and testing. <incorrect, see correction below>In fact, Krita started out as a fork of Gimp, and yet has surpassed Gimp in terms of ease of use and polish.</incorrect>
In a recent comment on one of my DSP plugin videos I directly addressed this:
"I think this is because plugins are made for people to pay attention to them and then buy more plugins. I just do patreon, so I make plugins to be used, and only by those who need them. They should be boring and never change, but the sound should be amazing and just immediately there so you can pay attention to the music, not the plugin, and then not have to buy more."
That's the secret to open source software if we choose to maintain it. There's a catch: OSS projects also gain mindshare through promotion and attention, putting them on exactly the same grounds as commercial software, and if you had an ideal project that perfectly met a need without drawing any attention to itself, that need would prosper and the OSS project would languish.
It's the old 'tiny piece of unsupported OSS software on which the world depends' problem. You absolutely can do that and the cost is that the project either languishes or fails (in the sense that it can't be maintained, not that it fails its task). Or you can lean towards seeking payback, in the form of money or in the form of attention, and it costs the users something but sustains the project more fully.
Krita was never a fork of Gimp (and that's not what your link says). The idea of a Qt wrapper around Gimp was a kind of inspiration for Krita in a roundabout way but the codebases are entirely separate.
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 a great 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 a direct result 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.
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.
>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 of mentioning 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 the artifacts of the software as the proof of Blender's unique situation. Instead of the artifacts, I'm emphasizing the _community_ and _why_ they're invested in Blender to motivate the work on the subsequent artifacts (e.g. revamped UI) that you're referring to. The explanation of the community momentum starts from the business 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 money to build a clean-room rewrite from scratch instead 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 developers wanted that old codebase that was already paid for by business investments as 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 the interest level and evangelism to attract future work leading 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.
>The explanation of the community momentum starts from the business investment.
Again, an emphatic, "No." Blender's massive improvements in the early-to-mid 2010s are what brought investment from outside sources, not the other way around. It was an artifact around which interested parties could rally; that says nothing of its value as an executable piece of software, but rather its value as a focus to fulfill a need, which could be freely used to fulfill it. Its commercial codebase was not valuable to anyone but the people who meant to work on it as an open-source project, and only because it could be picked-through, modified, even most of it scrapped if desired. This can be - and has been - done with software that descended from non-commercial codebases, because the motivation to create a polished product does not necessarily lie in a profit motive, and it definitely is not a product of some esoteric design homeopathy wherein that profit motive lies buried somewhere in Blender's code.
I think it's an insult to the hard work of the people who've produced the modern version of Blender that you insist on attributing the decisions they've made and implemented to some dedication to maintaining standards that did not exist for the product before they arrived.
What I will concede is that everything that has happened was necessary for Blender to be precisely what it is precisely at this moment, for better or worse. Including it's commercial history. I don't like that this conversation is becoming so contentious and I would suggest you think about what like concessions you can make to your counterargument before becoming married to a wholly antagonistic stance.
>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:
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Never did they ever say that would implement the UI of Blender (I assume that's what you were referring to) using OpenGL. I think what they meant was that implementing just a UI in OpenGL isn't as hard as the other guy thought
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.
I have an OpenGL personal project that I'm struggling with the UI on (using QT5 currently with GLCanvas with buttons around it). If I wanted to switch to a GL-only UI (and discard QT altogether), how would I add event listeners? I can get a borderless window as a GL viewport, but I don't know how to detect clicks and match them to which GL object.
You have a click at pixel 43, so what did you draw between pixels 40 and 50? That's what they clicked. You have to know what's on the screen, but you should know this, because you put it there. Or just use dear imgui.
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.
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 probably can be 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 keyboard navigation, though as a professional tool I'm sure there's a plethora of keyboard shortcuts that 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 to open any 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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 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.
Not version 1 but I've been on it since Photoshop 3 and have had the exact opposite experience. It was rough early on, crashed frequently and often. Got better around Photoshop 4/5 then had another rough period.
I've found the latest Creative Cloud versions to be the most stable. I cannot recall a single Photoshop crash.
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.
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.
Yep. In my experience CS1 and CS2 are somehow more responsive feeling running on now-ancient and comparably resource-bare hardware like PPC G5 or Core 2 Duo Macs than PS CC is on a modern armed-to-the-teeth workstation, which is ridiculous.
The bloat was ramping up pretty aggressively through CS3, CS4, and CS5 but the shift to subscription model really gave Adobe a license to not care about efficiency or UI snappiness.
> I think Adobe has really improved the last decade or so in this regard.
They massively increased 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.
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.
Wow, very similar story here. In highschool, I think I messed up a week of exams because I was too busy modeling a Fellbeast/nazgul from LoTR in Blender. I still have the model somewhere, copied over in 20 years of USB sticks and external HDDs.
Learned python for use in blender, am a software dev in robotics now, using a lot of python.
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).
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
> Gimp never had investors write off €4.5M of development on it.
Notably, there is literally nothing stopping other Open Source projects from being given grants of millions of dollars other than social convention.
We saw this with Godot after Unity. There's a coordination problem here, but we all mostly recognize that many of these fundamental tools would be better if we all collectively put our resources into an Open tool that is focused on serving the community rather than exploiting it.
It's just that without shocking events that prompt the bigger players to say, "you know what, heck this, let's just fund a good tool", it's very tough to get people to make that kind of investment, even though it would very likely be better for them and in the long-run more cost effective for them if they did.
I would argue that the majority of Blender's development (both architecturally and in terms of cost) happened after its commercial origins. But Blender continued to get investment because the community was invested in building a usable tool that wouldn't force them to deal with the crap of the other commercial products in the 3D industry.
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.
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 the Release Candidate date 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":
If there really is a 4.0 release that's available now, then they've seriously gone wrong with the communication parts of their release process. :( :( :(
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.
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.
It's kind of amazing how a single tutorial project became so universal. I wonder if there are any other disciplines / platforms / projects that are equally universal in their domain. Programmers have "hello, world," but it's awfully tiny by comparison.
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.
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.
Does Flamenco[1] not meet your requirements? Technically not built in but it gives a button right in the Blender UI to send render jobs to remote machines.
A bit tangential, does anyone know of a good resource for learning Blender, suitable for someone who has no real experience with 3D modeling/animation?
No. Unfortunately this is something they’re philosophically against as they feel you should just build from source if you need it. They’re worried it could undermine the spirit of the GPL if people were sharing compiled plugins instead
Is anyone here that might be a Blender contributor who could offer some insights or some tips on how to achieve the same spark with the Godot community? From the outside, the Blender community iterates very quickly, seem to work well together, and has figured out an approval process for integrating code that just works™.
From my understanding Blender started getting a ton of corporate sponsorship a few years ago, and that was when development suddenly went into overdrive
y'all need to revert some things, the subdivision modifier is fucked with creasing now, it just spikes everything out and it's retarded
another thing is the modifier tab, no one wants to click like 2 drop down menus just to apply a single modifier or search then type it in vs just 1 drop down and access to everything, just add a sideways scroll bar to it to add the extra new shit or down and up too this shit is ass
so far all the new shit i've seen has been horrible
