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Not just the software, but the hardware is horribly crippled and outdated in the relentless pursuit of making a laptop the thickness of aluminum foil (or outrageously overpriced for a desktop cheese grater).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.
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.