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Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

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Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#191

Post by nineteen999 »

nineteen999 wrote: post #186
erichocean wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got one of those suits and would love to give your Python code a try with UE4, if it's available somewhere.

It's here: https://github.com/dmo9000/blender-addons The addon script is ue4-neuron-mapper.py. Only tested with 2.7. You need to enable the addon as per usual along with UE4 Tools, and then once you have a model loaded and parented to the UE4 rig, and an Axis Neuron animation imported, it should be fairly easy to use. There is a "Bake Animation" control in there somewhere that should bake the animation out to an anim…

EDIT: it is also worth noting that I believe the Perception Neuron people released a new version of their UE4 plugin a week or two ago. It might be worth checking out yet whether they have improved the workflow or not since the previous version. I wanted the ability to edit the animations directly in Blender and so I wrote this plugin.

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#192

Post by jrockway »

chowells wrote: post #189
jrockway wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows has no lack of power. All this anti-cheating stuff is mostly a scam to stop the dumbest of the dumb cheaters and probably collect information from your computer that's useful to advertisers/investors/law enforcement agencies. If I wanted to aimbot in an FPS, I would just analyze the HDMI output from my computer (via an FPGA) and have it directly create the necessary USB transactions to move my mouse to the ta…

I think you're missing a major component of these deals restrictions: they also want to prevent running 30 headless VMs on a single computer all botting into games to grind whatever free content is available. This is actually a major component of bot use for f2p games. A lot of companies try really hard to prevent anything that looks like playing in virtual envs. Having these bots fill up your games and play terribly…

Ah, that sounds like a very fair argument to me.

I believe you can get pretty affordable Windows VMs these days, however. I'm not sure that blocking wine really accomplishes a lot. (There are also companies that sell access to consumer Windows PCs on consumer ISPs these days. If you don't play Hearthstone, you probably don't mind $10/month in free money for letting someone bot Hearthstone on your computer. And it's not like Blizzard is going to say "look, enough Comcast, shut these people down or else we lock all Comcast customers out of battle.net". It's pretty tough to run a gaming client these days, I would imagine. So so much stuff is totally out of your control. I do not envy their engineers at all!)

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#193

Post by lapnitnelav »

Jach wrote: post #78
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 30% became the industry standard not just for video games for a reason. Yeah, it became the industry standard because it rakes in mind-blowingly huge revenue for the app store owner, e.g. https://www.cultofmac.com/601492/app-store-google-play-reven... . From the article: " It’s no wonder Services — which includes App Store revenue — has become an increasingly important business for Apple as hardware sales have slow…

There are probably economies of scale, sure, which is part of why Epic can get away with a lower fee for now. But it's also just business. They know how much it costs without economies of scale, and that sets a floor. https://youtube.com/watch?v=stxVBJem3Rs Here's a talk from a very old indie company, there's one section talking about how they existed pre-Steam (and other stores they use since Steam's not exclusive)…

With the right time : https://youtu.be/stxVBJem3Rs?t=1564

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#194

Post by Slashbot »

well blender 2.80 ux is still garbage.. so lets hope 1.2m goes towards the developers who see blender ux as being garbage... they were meant to be doing this.. https://developer.blender.org/T54963

but they failed, and even if they ever do accomplish some sort of maya like greatness in keymap.. it still leaves the tooling, grid snapping and just general ux of doing things to be improved, and by improved i mean throw out some of there really shitty ux they've had for so long on tooling..

anyway don't get me wrong blender has some great addons, amazing gpu renderer (compared to autodesk wtf have they been doing) all the best things in maya were made years/decades ago...albeit those best things are still better than blender... but blender has been catching up relatively fast in the last few years.. autodesk better wake up, the subscription shit, the autodesk chrome infested background license shit thats always running and the fees for subpar improvements aren't worth it... blender some more maya init and it will be golden.

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#195

Post by Slashbot »

flyingfences wrote: post #157
thijsvandien wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something I missed? Could you be more specific?

They've decided to completely stop trying to support Linux even on games that already had support and are intentionally disabling any workarounds to keep them running.

wow thats pretty dumb of epic.. think they'd want to actually end shitting windows10, and support linux desktop better.

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#196

Post by pzone »

Elizer0x0309 wrote: post #42
binthere wrote: post #40

As someone who's done lots of Blender work as well as Maya and integrations with Unity and Unreal Engine, I still think there's quite a long way to go to make Blender a good option for game development. It's free, it kind of works but it's very painful when it comes to animation, texturing, and details. Right now, this is what I usually do: - Basic Modeling: Blender - Sculpting + Details: ZBrush - Painting: Substance…

Datapoint: I've had/have a really good experience with Blender. Countless opensource resources to fill any gaps in the export pipeline. Not to mention the relatively easy python api that gives you access to all the scene's data.

Blender's Python API, although cleaner and better organized than Maya's, only offers a sliver of Maya's functionality. Maya has a standard maya.cmds API for scripting which works similarly to how Blender's Python API. Maya also has a separate library maya.api.OpenMaya which is a wrapper around its C++ plugin api. Blender doesn't offer anything like this.

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#197

Post by opencl »

Tossrock wrote: post #190
soulofmischief wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maya is the much more popular program with artists for modelling and rigging This is the circular reasoning I'm trying to avoid. I'm not looking for any one thing either, I'm looking for any shortcomings OP can think of. I've used Blender+Unreal for a number of years and Blender itself for over fifteen years so I could rattle off issues I've dealt with in integrating Blender into the pipeline, but many have been de…

Not the OP, but I've used Blender and UE (though Unity more), and I would say the main problem with Blender is how undiscoverable the core actions in the interface are. I'm sure for you, as a 15 year user, the shortcuts are all perfectly ingrained, and you can crank out work very efficiently. However, if you don't already know all those shortcuts, it's very difficult to learn them, or even to learn what functionality…

2.80 is definitely a pretty big UI improvement, and the new EEVEE renderer makes it much easier to work with materials and preview how they'll actually look in game since it is functionally similar to modern game engines.

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#198

Post by rexf »

dx87 wrote: post #54
typenil wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm legitimately surprised to see so much good will towards Epic and Tim Sweeney here. I'm happy about their revenue share and was excited when they got started - until it became obvious that their tactics didn't align with their PR.

Yeah, their revenue share isn't about helping developers, it's about hurting Valve. When Epic pays a publisher for exclusivity, a lot of the time it's actually "sell it anywhere except Steam". Their deals still allow the developers to sell the game on stores that take the same 30% cut that Steam does. Plus there's the issue of a game being developed with Linux support, then Epic pays the publisher for exclusivity and…

EGS supports Windows & Mac. This link is directly from their home page https://launcher-public-service-prod06.ol.epicgames.com/laun...

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#199

Post by Impossible »

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #121
Impossible wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a future where in the long term Unreal Engine (and maybe Unity3D as well) is FOSS in the same way that browsers are. Epic's business model would have to move away from engine royalties, which currently depends on the success of their store or potentially lasting longevity and growth of Fortnite.

Unreal Engine kind of already is open source, for weak definitions of open source: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ue4-on-github

Unreal is source available, but not FOSS. There are a lot of restrictions in the license, sharing engine source without a (free) Epic login is against TOS for example, although you can fork the engine on GitHub and give other users that are part of the Epic organization access. I'm thinking a MIT (or some other permissive license) licensed UE.

Re: Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M

#200

Post by erichocean »

nineteen999 wrote: post #186
erichocean wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got one of those suits and would love to give your Python code a try with UE4, if it's available somewhere.

It's here: https://github.com/dmo9000/blender-addons The addon script is ue4-neuron-mapper.py. Only tested with 2.7. You need to enable the addon as per usual along with UE4 Tools, and then once you have a model loaded and parented to the UE4 rig, and an Axis Neuron animation imported, it should be fairly easy to use. There is a "Bake Animation" control in there somewhere that should bake the animation out to an anim…

Thank you!
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