I suspect adoption will grow considerably. The previous interface conventions were unusual and clumsy, and were the primary barrier for those curious about switching packages.
I switched to Blender after using the beta for several months. I have put thousands of dollars into licenses for Modo and Maya over the years. I would much rather put that into Blender donations, now that I can actually use it. The things a good user interface team can do.
> The previous interface conventions were unusual and clumsy
Unusual, sure. Clumsy? not at all. It was extremely efficient and hyper-organized. The real problem was that it was different, and people just don't like change.
This new interface is great because it's easy to use for Maya/Max people, and it's still similar-enough to the 2.7 era so as not to alienate long-time users.
I would compare the Blender UI to Vim. Once you spend a bit of time with it you wonder why every other piece of software isn't this efficient.
I'd also go so far as to say that the 2.80 UI overhaul has slowed me down a bit. Things that were a single key stroke away are now an extra one or two. Menu items have been renamed and rearranged (often for the better) but now I have to go hunt for them and relearn them. If these help Blender become more popular, then that pain is worth it.
Oh I know. I’ve deliberately chosen to follow the new default. I’m one of those people who avoids customisation because I often have to work with students and remote machines.
I agree that even just following a few tutorials of Blender 2.79 was enough to make the UI understandable for most things. The problem the UI had was with discoverability. It was usually easier to find out how to do something from Google (especially YouTube).
I used Corel Draw, Photoshop, Maya, and I had a hard time getting to Blender. It's not that it's badly designed. It's just the conventions I have in my mind for other design softwares are no longer correct.
Every action I take, I can no longer be confident about my "guess" of what it will do. It's like the door handle problem, where you see a strange unlabeled handle and are not sure that you need to push or pull to open the door. Then you tried to push, since that's the convention for all the door in this building space. The door doesn't open. Then you tried to pull, and it works. Maybe pulling to open the door is better than the normal convention, but sometimes it's not worth it to sacrifice consistency.
I had a similar disconnect coming from 3D Max and Adobe. I couldn't get Blender to do anything as the user model seemed so different. I watched a few video tutorials and spent 1 hour a day for about three weeks and the light finally came on and now it is comfortable enough that I am able to translate my past 3D Max (and distant past Softimage and Vertigo) experiences within Blender 2.79. Still hunt around a bit.
It seems that the only way is to do a serious video tutorial series, something pro. Both 3D Max and Blender look huge things you cannot start learning on your own.
Admittedly it was 17 years ago, but I gave up my hobby of making maps for Westwood games because I couldn't figure out how to use 3dsmax. Of course, there weren't any YouTube tutorials back then.
A couple years ago, I learned to use Blender through cgcookie tutorials and googling. Nothing was easy, but everything made sense eventually. It really makes me appreciate the free tools and learning resources we have today.
It is supposedly like Vim, intentional or not. It's contextual (Vim: command mode, insert mode, Blender: object mode, edit mode, etc.) and reverse-polish (e.g. "UVSphere 16 16"). It is an efficient, streamlined and, honestly, superior interface.
You cannot explore it, and that's the problem. RTFM is required.
> it's easy to use for Maya/Max
When I was 14, with not prior 3D software experience, I first attempted to use Blender (it's free!). After maybe 20 minutes I gave up trying to add a sphere to the scene. I figured out the Max interface in less than a minute.
Change aversion is a factor, but it also alienated complete newbies.
> Unusual, sure. Clumsy? not at all. It was extremely efficient and hyper-organized. The real problem was that it was different, and people just don't like change.
When it comes to user experience, blaming the user is the worst sword to fall on.
If you think good user experience means making everything obvious or intuitive then Blender or Vim do not have it. But if you trade some learning time off, in not too long this translates to faster and more controlled end user experience which is also desirable.
Eh, there's a difference between "bad user experience" and "optimizing for the long term pro user at the expense of initial learning curve", I believe Blender falls into the latter category.
It was clunky, kind of like Gimp's UI, and felt like a remnant of the 90's. Usable, sure. Aesthetically pleasant? Absolutely not. Our tools should feel nice.
There's absolutely no comparison between the horror that is/was gimp and the previous blender ui.
Its true that the new ui is an improvement - it looks cleaner and I guess things like left click to select is more intuitive. But the old blender ui wasn't as bad as people make it out to be and lots of things that sucked before like the ui for for hair particles are still pretty bad in the new ui.
I would really disagree, the 2.5–2.7 UI was excellent. It was fast, efficient and extremely customisable to match the style of popular alternatives. The 2.4 era UI was a very different beast however.
The main issues new users have are often related to management of the deliberately non-modal UI which allows you to split the main window up in any way you like, kinda like tmux. With 2.80 tool sidebars now have big clear icons instead of rows of buttons with sometimes impenetrable words written on them.
Ultimately the 2.80 UI is much the same as the 2.79 UI with a more fashionable dark UI and a reworking of some idiosyncratic design choices (changing from right click select to left click select etc).
The old old Blender UI prior to 2.49 (in 2009) was clumsy and felt 90's. But the pre-2.80 UI was fine; very snappy to work with, just a little obscure in some cases.
You must have not learned how to use it then. That, or we have different definitions of the word "clumsy". It has absolutely nothing in common with Gimp, so that makes me wonder if you used it at all.
> Aesthetically pleasant? Absolutely not
That's subjective, but it did support themes and DPI scaling.
You could justify any ugly design under the "subjective" premise, even pink buttons on a #FF0000 background. But to anyone with good taste, it looks better now.
It was nevertheless already a massive improvement on the early stuff. My first introduction to blender involved three floppy discs, printouts of all the keyboard shortcuts sellotaped around the monitor, and lots and lots of colourful swearing.
It depends, even a decade ago the UI was an absolute disorganized mess. Sometime within the last seven or so years everything was completely reorganized into the beautiful interface we've come to know and love.
I’m an expert user of Illustrator and I found Blender’s core UI choices weird and clumsy in a way that paid 3D programs weren’t. Blender fundamentally feels like it’s designed by someone who’s never used another art program in their life.
Yep. I've used Adobe products (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects, Premiere), Sketch, old Macromedia products (Flash, Fireworks, Shockwave) I know how to use a number of different IDE's, and yet when I opened Blender, I had to watch a tutorial on how to do even super simple basic operations.
I suppose the question is if Adobe's choices are the optimal ones, or if there's other defensible choices.
I'm an occasional Photoshop and Illustrator user (longtime Fireworks diehard, though, RIP) and while some conventions make sense to me, there's plenty of things that I have to look up tutorials for, even if I've learned them before.
Sometimes it's not worth to optimize too farther from the current local optimum. UI designers have a "budget" for weirdness and unfamiliar conventions and must spend it wisely
As someone who left the 3d Industry a while back and rejoined it again, I have to totally agree. At the time, I was on 3ds Max, running on Windows. Things changed and I switched to OSX and never looked back. And then, Blender 2.80 happened. And wow, now I'm hooked. For the sake of a fair comparison and to see if 3ds Max really was the simple software it once used to be, I installed Windows again and played it for some time. Max has gotten advanced now (obviously), but also increasingly complex. The familiarity of 3ds Max 2009 edition was gone.
And so, I started investing time into Blender. I started out with something as simple as modeling a speaker box. It was such a joy. Still, it's not perfect. The camera movement is really terrible in comparison with 3ds Max. You can't create a camera from your current viewport view so easily like on Max and to manoeuvre the camera is such a pain in the ass. Still, it makes up for that in modeling. I'm enjoying 3d now again and even building a new rig to support my renders.
It would be great to give this feedback to the Blender team. Once you're used to something it can be difficult to see the parts where it is more difficult than it could be. So Blender needs continuous feedback from people who haven't used it that much before.
That's the curse of UI development: improvements often mean breaking user habituation. Given how difficult the old UI was to learn, this is totally worth it. Blender needs more mainstream users.
Their integrated renderers don't work on newer macOS versions with AMD cards unfortunately, no metal support. macOS id really a bad place right now if you're into 3D and want GPU rendering, not only because of Blender, but others like Cinema 4D aren't there yet either.
It's a big fail of the Apple management to not support the metal development for apps like Blender, they gonna lose a generation of creatives.
Doesn't anyone think that MacOS is pretty much abandonware at this point? I don't want to stir anything up but I don't believe Apple is putting too much effort into the OS at this time. When I boot my MacBook into MacOS (once a year, if that) I feel like I'm 10 years back in time (yes, I have the absolute latest version).
I think they're focusing most of their resources on ARM.
Not just the software, but the hardware is horribly crippled and outdated in the relentless pursuit of making a laptop the thickness of aluminum foil (or outrageously overpriced for a desktop cheese grater).
It makes them tons of money, their problem is that other things make even more money. Sadly their organizational structure is such that walking and gum-chewing is almost impossible for them, so even colossally profitable and beloved products can wither away from neglect.
This is why large companies need to be split at some point -- a $x billion market is enough to sustain a great company, but a $100x billion company will try hard to ignore it.
Of course, nobody can make software for iOS without at lesat interacting with macOS some of the time (even if you can do most things on another workstation OS).
Unsurprising, the last breakdown I looked had Macs only just ahead of iPads (not ipad/iphone, just ipads) - some of that will be the bump from the new mini (which I have and love, it's fantastic) but even so, you can see why it'd be the red-headed stepchild.
Yes but macOS is a large part of the appeal of getting a Mac in the first place and Macs have really healthy margins for the industry, ergo it's making money and isn't free as such. It plus seven years or so of upgrades are built into the price.
They also do not directly sell iOS or its upgrades but we'd hardly say iOS isn't making money.
Or, you know, if Apple put the smallest amount of effort into maintaining their OpenGL drivers. Why should Blender have to maintain multiple implementations of their renderer? Even if Apple supported it financially, having multiple implementations of Eevee would add development complexity and make it harder for the community to contribute features.
OpenGL isn't used for high quality ray tracing like you'd need for a 3D modeling tool like Blender unless you want to get hacky. The proper way to do it is with something like OpenCL or Cuda. Vulkan and Metal support compute shaders too.
Apple abandoning OpenGL sucks a lot, but them not supporting Vulkan is much worse.
Eevee is the real-time viewport renderer and uses OpenGL. Blender's path tracer is implemented with Cuda and OpenCL. Also OpenGL supports compute shaders FYI.
It's such stupid technical debt, they just aren't going to get lock-in from it like Microsoft did from DirectX. Sure, it was ready before Vulkan was, but the cost of rewriting whatever investments they have made in Metal must be outweighed by the long term maintenance costs. ugh
Awesome! Maybe some company like that could offer their driver for free to blender community, as a marketing strategy. I believe that even have some space to a sector giant (like autodesk) acquire this type of company.
I've worked (as an IT/desktop support person) with some of our animation artists, and I found ProRender was a very promising project which immediately failed for us with no real hope of recovery.
The issue that we had was that a lot of functionality that works in Cycles didn't work in ProRender, which would have required our artists to rework potentially large parts of their 3D scenes, and to also use different techniques to accomplish certain affects in the future (meaning many tutorials or examples might no longer match up).
I'm not sure what the specifics are, since I didn't really understand how 3D scenes are made, but basically something like some texture effects or something (??) weren't available in ProRender, and so those effects would have to be removed or redone. Unless they've changed something since then (added support for whatever it is), I think this will still be the same issue.
I don't think anyone who works in the industry thinks that OpenGL or DirectX (pre-12) are "fantastic graphical APIs" unless judging solely on install base.
Everything I've heard says that Vulkan and Metal both are far more efficient, let you get more out of the hardware with less CPU time, and can more easily support newer features.
OpenGL as a major target platform is dying, it's just a question of how long the tail is.
The problem is that Apple did not follow the natural death curve of OpenGL (which is generally in favour of Vulkan, and libraries built on it), they just completely stopped working on supporting new OpenGL extensions and versions since 2010 (!), and didn't have metal macOS until 2017.
Even from the perspective of bringing people smoothly to their proprietary API, they have failed miserably.
Film 3D is mostly Linux at this point. All the major VFX shops (like Weta) and animation studios (Disney, Pixar, etc) are on Linux for artist workstations. Apple stuff gets lots of use, but mainly iPads for story boarding and such.
Indeed, many bigger VFX companies are on Linux. However, smaller shops are mainly powered by Windows (or at least that's the case here in Finland). Building your production pipeline on Linux is something that not everyone is capable of doing and in many cases not even worth the r&d costs.
I've tried for ages (since 2010...) to get the VFX studios to work with me on making Krita good enough for their needs. I've visited dneg, worked with Intel and other parties, but in the end, the studios yell they want to get rid of the shared windows/photoshop pc in the corner office -- but don't want to put in any actual effort. In the meantime, we're getting there anyway.
Foundry's Mari [1] is pretty heavily used in bigger VFX houses for texturing and it is also available for Linux. Likewise, Allegorithmic's (now owned by Adobe) Substance is available for Linux [2].
I don't know who here is actively using or developing on the platform with that machine. If we had one here I'd be surprised. All that quote shows is that they are investing in Metal for Hydra so that other platform DCCs don't have to limit macOS usage for their integrations. Apple support wouldn't have any impact on our productions.
It is true that we have Mac systems here, that's no secret. But all 'real' film production work is completely Linux based with a completely custom infrastructure.
Pixar are a bit of an Apple offshoot in the first place though. They are very likely to get Apple kit substantially cheaper than most.
"Steve wasn’t capable of being friends. That wasn’t his personality. Besides the Apple stuff, I had a lot to do with his Pixar thing. I was contacted by the people who became Pixar–I knew them well, and they wanted to get out of Lucasfilm. They called me up and asked me for advice, and so I said, I can talk to Steve. I explained very carefully to him who these people were, and you shouldn’t fuck around with them, like he did with his normal employees. He did a good job with them. [Pixar] was the most honest billion he ever made, because he put a lot of his own personal money into nurturing those guys. They got fabulous. That was Steve’s best hour."
Pixar have historically been linked with Apple, though. I wonder if they're currently using the current 'trashcan' Mac Pro, which I imagine would be quite limiting.
> Pixar began in 1979 as the Graphics Group, part of the Lucasfilm computer division, before its spin-out as a corporation in 1986, with funding by Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs, who became the majority shareholder.
I don’t think Pixar’s Maya-like software ‘man v’ runs on macOS, at least it didn’t a couple of years ago (my ex was a TD at Pixar and used to complain about the old version of Linux they were on). I’m pretty sure the demos they showed were of their file format viewer which is a separate thing.
This is Apple marketing spiel. They probably got those testimonials after demoing some new products to executives for a day and then asking for a paragraph to put on a website.
(Also almost every single one of those is from a CEO or VP, not someone who's job it is to actually use these things.)
What software suites are these companies using? I know some of these huge companies have their own in-house stuff but are the big commercial modelling products supporting linux now? I wasn't aware there were really options aside from blender. Also kind of surprises me that artists would be happy on a platform where you can't fire up Photoshop to muck around with a texture map.
Pixar develops and sells RenderMan. The engine itself support Linux as the primary use case, but also Windows and macOS. They all support the same feature-set with the exception of Optix on macOS.
Back when I was doing a lot of 3D and other work that required Photoshop, I used a VM in Linux to make that work. This was back in 2008-2009 though, so I'm not sure if others do that anymore or just use a different PC, other software, etc.
Apple has always marketed their products as being for creative professionals, but has that ever actually been the reality? Feels to me like that marketing is really intended to hook non professionals into thinking that that's what they need to be successful.
3D motion design was actually quite Mac centric, because many people came into it from 2D graphic design where Macs are widely used. Folks just kept their old Mac Pros and went with fat GPU's for rendering in the last 5 years or so. But with Nvidia dominating in the GPU rendering space and Apples stance against Nvidia it's kind of a roads end for professional 3D people.
It's not that it would cut into Apples profits directly, but good artists and designers are taste makers, it hurts Apple as a brand going forward, 3D is only getting more popular with AR.
I'm running the 2.80 release candidate on my 5k iMac with an AMD card on 10.14. It doesn't support rendering on the GPU but the CPU rendering works just fine. I can't imagine the GPU is any faster than the CPU either, certainly the case for my 750M in my 2014 15" rMBP.
"The Blender Game Engine was removed." It's been a very, very long time since I played with Blender, but I think this is good news? The game engine thing never quite made sense to me.
Note that Godot is still not great at high-end 3D games because of various performance issues and missing features. (The reddit link explains how the Godot third-person demo is showing its weaknesses)
Fortunately, the next expected release of Godot (4.0) might be able to solve a lot of those problems. It's going to be ported to Vulkan, the renderer is going to be multi-threaded and optimized, and a lot of the lighting related functionality from major game engines is going to be implemented.
I've been a Blender user since 2.48 and it's so nice to see open source software getting so much better. Eevee is the biggest game changer for me, my workflow is much faster now that I can actually preview what my assets will look like in a PBR renderer, but even "small" stuff like workspaces made my workflow better. All in all a great release! Congratulations to everyone involved!
I wonder if there's a consumer perception around big file sizes for expensive software, e.g. they're getting more for their money.
The commercial 3D programs bundle a lot, including: extensive documentation, video training, example files, material/light databases, example textures and assets, 3rd-party software (e.g. additional renderers). Arguably those things do provide value.
I'd always wondered how they made money. I've had the (outsider) impression that Blender was substandard in comparison the the paid suites (3Ds Max, Maya) in part because of my interactions with GIMP—my impression has been its lower quality in comparison to PS is a result a of its lack of funding.
Could the GIMP foundation follow Blenders example or is it politically untenable?
I'm not sure about their revenue model but I completely concur with the GIMP experience. When I use it I feel like the wheels are going to come off, and they often do. Photoshop, while a bit bloated at 29 years old, is pretty amazing software.
I think the same thing every time I download it. I hope the Blender foundation is able to keep it that way, as things do tend to get more and more bloated over time.
Ton Roosendaal started out as a programmer on the Amiga. I'm probably somewhat biased here, but I expect that he has strong feelings about avoiding bloatware
I think it would be a good use of space to include some default assets (models, textures, etc.) for beginners to play with, even if it doubled the size of the download
I would make a "ultimate" flavor that comes with a kitchen sink for people who have no clue and would think a larger download is a sign of good software.
What is really funny, is that for blender, historically speaking, 2.8 is massive. Have a look at the file sizes of some of the early work - https://download.blender.org/release/
I was wondering if I should put a date column or if it would make it too wide. I'm away from the computer right now, but I'll put it in an hour or so.
EDIT: You know, it would probably be too wide. You can look at the dates in inflatableDodo's link (the parent post to mine). If I were to add the dates I would only be able to see the dates on my phone without scrolling horizontally. In the link, the dates are already listed in the same order so there isn't much to gain in adding them here.
As a kid, i used to muck around with a 3d modelling tool called anim8or - it was around 2mb. Seems that they're still around - (http://anim8or.com/). Current zip download is 4.7mb - No installation just an exe in a zip file. :)
Has anyone here used the Blender video editor? How well does it work?
I've been looking to get back into video-production in my free time, but on Linux the number decent video-editing solutions is limited. I'm looking into Lightworks, but I'd prefer something FOSS if at all possible.
Not FOSS, but I can highly recommend Davinci Resolve. I actually have come to prefer it over Premiere and Vegas which have been my favorites for over a decade now. Compared to those two, it just feels like a much more modern, well polished product. The stability is what has really sold me after having to save Premiere and Vegas projects after nearly every edit because I never knew when they would randomly crash. Its free license gives you just about everything you will need and the multiplatform support is great. I really recommend you give it a try and see how it suits you.
A newbie here who plans to learn basic video-editing. I am in a dilemma whether to go for Davinci Resolve or Adobe Premiere. While the first is free, I noticed there are very very few assets(LUTs, Lower-thirds, Transitions etc) that are freely available for DR. Perhaps because it is still in its nascent stage. Do you happen to know any resources to find such assets for Davinci Resolve?
It works pretty well. I've used it in the past to make youtube videos (i no longer do anymore). That being said, I ran into 2 bugs back in 2015 that haven't been fixed. The first was that videos > 3hrs long don't work with VSE. The video cannot be viewed/edited past the 3hr mark. The second issue is that the imported video will only keep the video and the first audio track it finds. This can cause issues if you say have the video audio on 1 track and the voice over audio on a second track.
With that being said, it is still a great tool for making videos.
Hmm, I wonder...is this video editor ffmpeg-based? That second issue sounds like the default behavior of ffmpeg. If I have a file with multiple audio tracks called "blah.mkv", and I run `ffmpeg -i blah.mkv -c copy blah2.mkv`, by default that will chop out all but the first track.
Shotcut is a relatively capable Linux-compatible FOSS video editor. It has animation support, video effects and text, and can export to anything that ffmpeg can.
Also worth noting: both ShotCut and KDEnlive have been receiving a steady stream of updates in the last couple of months. Lots of bugfixes and other little improvements.
I'll give it a shot tonight. I record in OBS and edit in Camtasia (since I have a license, but there is a bug with my webcam). Didn't know Blender had a video editor. I just got a Photoshop subscription, so I was considering looking at Premiere, but I think it would be overkill for what I'm doing.
I am extremely interested in this, especially if it can be integrated into a realtime capture and compositing workflow. Do any of y'all have experience with this?
In case someone from the Blender team is reading this could you share some pointers on how the ui toolkit for blender 2.80 is implemented? Any files to start reading / any design docs? Blender is one of the nicer opengl based guis I have seen and am curious to learn more on how its implemented (fonts for instance).
If you are into opengl guis, you can check ImGui, it is a joy to work with it. although it doesn't have any fancy font stuff afaik.
Also there is UE4 slate, which has a funny way of doing stuff.
I used to do a lot of 3d in the 90s so I'm extremely familiar with 3d modeling concepts. One day I decided to give blender a go after many years of hiatus and oh boy was it difficult to use even after looking up documentation. Nothing like maxon cinema 4d. Is blender built on preexisting 3d app UI convention? Or is it its own animal?
Blender dates back to the 1990s but it is its own animal, more or less. For documentation I would recommend going through the tutorials first, rather than trying to figure things out and searching for what you need. It reminds me a little bit of Vim in the sense that you switch between different modes a lot, and that's not exactly friendly if you're not used to it.
That said, I've never been proficient at 3D, other than a couple of level editors, so all 3D tools are hard for me to use. With my mediocre background and armed with tutorials, I didn't find it time-consuming to do some basic things like creating a mesh (lots of techniques to pick up here), creating a UV map, and baking a light map.
When I tried Blender a few years back there were lots of tutorials, but they were all in video format. For some people that's great; for some people that's useless. Has there been any improvement here?
Even aside from personal learning preferences, I suspect trying to learn a complex UI from a video is going to be a struggle if you're working on a single screen.
I've struggled with Blender so much that I do all my modelling with Unity's Probuilder[0] which I can get away with because I've got a low poly game. Super convenient.
Probuilder is actually at the top of my list of tools to try out other than Blender, since it seems to be specialized to create models with the level of complexity that I feel confident delivering. Thanks for the recommendation.
That said, I'm often working with an engine other than Unity, so I'm not sure how much Probuilder is an option.
This release is a pretty significant UI overhaul, as was 2.6 from memory but that was a good few years back. Probably worth giving it another shot with 2.8!
That in particular was my issue when I gave up learning to use Blender. There are tons and tons of tutorials, but Blender hits a big "randomize" button for its UI every time it updates. Nothing is ever where the tutorials tell you to find it. It likely isn't even grouped under the same menu heading anymore.
Stick to tutorials from the same 2.x line and there aren't many UI changes. They've had betas and release candidates for 2.8 for a while now, so there's already a pretty good body of tutorials available.
Outdated tutorials aren't totally useless, since they'll still give you an idea of how to approach a modeling problem. But the UI won't match what you're working in, so I certainly wouldn't recommend them for trying to learn the software.
There should be a lot of great tutorial content coming out now/soon. I know a lot of the big training vendors (e.g. cgcookie) have basically been building for 2.8...lots of new courses and old stuff getting redone and updated.
One major change in 2.8 is that it defaults to left-click for selection. At least from my experience, right-click selection was the big thing that made Blender feel very alien to pick up.
You could change it before, but defaults matter a lot for new users.
EDIT: I just tested it and I might be misinformed on this. Either it's still RMB selection or I have an old config that it loaded.
EDIT2: Load factory settings put me on LBM select. Yay!
I find blender to be one of the tools that is built to be fast, rather than friendly. It defaults to a minimal state and assumes you know how you want to set it up. Two things that will help you a lot is firstly, to go into preferences and enable pretty much every plugin that doesn't have an exclamation mark next to it and secondly, print out all the keyboard shortcuts and tape them to the sides of your screen.
Used Maya and cinema 4d for years.. just started switching to Blender because I heard the buzz around it.. and it is legitimately the biggest win for consumer open source software by a huge margin. Absolutely great product, I think I can get workflows as good or better than Maya out of this.. and Maya costs thousands of dollars a year.
I love Blender. I'm not an artist, even though I've made a few little things in it, but I still think it's an incredible piece of software and a shining example of what open source software can be.
One of the things about blender that was frustrating for me when I last tried it ~3 years ago was the inability to use a different python REPL (ex: iPython) or easily import the blender python libraries in a non-blender python process. Can anyone say if this has gotten better?
Almost all of bpy is a simple generated wrapper around builtin C functions but you can (or could, dunno how well its been maintained?) build blender as a python module to import into CPython. Some experimental CMake setting IIRC.
Depends entirely on how you use it. But for many many things it is already used professionally.
I used Maya as a 3D freelancer for some while and switched to Blender when Cycles got introduced. I never really regreted that decision. Odly enough the one point that I liked the most about Blender was its user interface – yeah it was weird, but it was consistent. If "g" moves things in the 3D window it moves things also in a timeline and in a compositor.
What does Blender need? I think 2.80 has done a lot of what the industry needs, especially in terms of 2D animation and performance improvements. My major caveat is, that Compositing with video sources is just slow.
When I see new releases of art/design/drawing creation products I always envy the artists that are capable of using them and create beautiful things. I've always been incapable of anything related to drawing.
I wonder if it is something you can learn by working on it or you just have to be gifted...
Art is a profession which can be learned, you dont need to be gifted or have any talent to start. But like with many professions, art takes time and people underestimate the amount of time which is required to get to a decent level (multiple years of practise and exercise).
I’m really happy to see this. There are so many segments that could benefit from Blender’s non-existing cost of entry that were running into too much friction with the user interface and general oddities of it’s interaction models, and this may help bridge that gap.
They have done amazing work in building their own UI framework. Perhaps one day they can make it available as a standalone library, for use as a crossplatform UI toolkit.
Congratulations to the Blender developers! This massive release has been years in the making. I remember watching an interview with Ton Roosendaal just before the 2.7 release (so 5 years ago? Back then they still thought the next version was going to be 3.0), and they were talking excitedly about this UI refresh as if it were just around the corner.
> Templates
> When starting a new file, there is now a choice between multiple application templates:
...
> Video Editing: for using Blender as a video editor.
Video’s a reason I’ve spent time with multiple previous Blender versions. Be great if this UI refresh + templated defaults create more traction for me and other video editors.
Indeed it did! Barely pressed the download button before it finished, and it's 2.80 as well, as opposed to the previous RC. Already updated on Steam too, that's quick!
Well look at that, couldn't find an Ubuntu apt repo I trusted -- ppa:thomas-schiex/blender appears to be often suggested but he has an open offer for someone to take over the repo admin, and I've no idea who he is.
I hate fragmenting my install routes though.
Fwiw the Steam install comes up as only 491MB for me. Also I see quite a few "bring back 2.79" comments whilst everywhere else I've looked had only been positive.
As a long time Vim user, the comments here actually encourage me to give it another try.
I once tried it on a tablet, but obviously I missed that it’s about keystrokes.
a while ago, before the North American Solar Eclipse, I needed to do some simulation work on my code that processed eclipse images so I made a toy solar system from spheres and used it to render views of the eclipse from locations on earth. Lots of fun. Huge learning curve, but still lots of fun. The only issue I had was I had to scale everything down 1/10th due to float precision issues.
Really wish I could run it on my my laptop with a Radeon HD 6750M, though. Instead it's just a blank screen with a spinner for a cursor, which isn't the greatest experience.
Sure, the minimum requirements are "GCN 1st gen and up", which came out after the 6750M, but other apps with GPU acceleration work fine with it, and Blender 2.79 also worked fine, so it's kind of shitty to miss out on all the amazing new stuff that got added to 2.80 =(
That “previous discussion” is mostly people confused about what is going on because that poster tried to steal their thunder by making the post before the actual release was announced. That’s not a useful discussion thread.
Encouraged by the "new, more intuitive UI" points I gave it another try. Background: I did lots of 3d coding and have used several 3d modeling packages, all a while ago. I've tried to learn Blender years ago and after lots of RTFM I could do some things in it back then, but I forgot all about that.
I still find the 2.80 UI unintuitive. Clicking now selects, which is great, but it's weird to me that clicking on the background and then dragging doesn't move the viewport but does a selection box. Neither ctrl-drag nor any other modifier and drag moved the viewport either. After some more trial and error, apparently swiping on the trackpad rotates the viewport and shift-drag moves it, but I couldn't figure out how to dolly after some more trial and error.
IIRC Blender is the only program where I couldn't figure out basic actions without RTFM. It's a bit better now, but that's still the case.
Don't get me wrong, it's really impressive that they're able to do such a big UI overhaul! But at least for me, it feels there's still a ways to go.
If you're using a Mac, or a laptop without a three-button trackpad or mouse, there is an option called "emulate three-button mouse" that lets you use alt+left-click as an alternative to middle-click. A little clumsy, but adequate for viewing files on-the-go.
In the new 2.80 UI, there is a set of colored axes in the top-right corner. Clicking and dragging on those rotates the viewport, and clicking on the ends of one of the axes aligns the viewport to that axis.
To the left of those axes is a hand-shaped icon. Clicking and dragging on this icon translates the viewport.
(I'm curious which programs you've used before. This is definitely the same way you navigate in all of Autodesk's products, and in SolidWorks.)
I suspect adoption will grow considerably. The previous interface conventions were unusual and clumsy, and were the primary barrier for those curious about switching packages.
I switched to Blender after using the beta for several months. I have put thousands of dollars into licenses for Modo and Maya over the years. I would much rather put that into Blender donations, now that I can actually use it. The things a good user interface team can do.