Blender 2.90 • Hacker News Board

Re: Blender 2.90

#21

Post by polskibus » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 6:27 PM UTC

I'd love to see blender expand into precise modeling area more (CAD).

Re: Blender 2.90

#22

Post by mekster » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 6:28 PM UTC

How is blender compared to competitors? Are people starting to use it as a professional tool?

Re: Blender 2.90

#23

Post by alok99 » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 6:28 PM UTC

hellking4u wrote: post #15

This is great, but I have to say, I'm a bit concerned about multiple Intel tools (Embree, OpenImageDenoise) that are now integrated into Blender. The tools seem to depend on Intel MKL, which has famously been crippled on non Intel CPUs. The big concern, for me, is the wide usage of Blender in common CPU benchmarks, which potentially could give Intel an unfair advantage in those.

Neither Embree nor OpenImageDenoise use MKL. OpenImageDenoise does use a fork of mkl-dnn, now called one-dnn, but it has nothing to do with MKL.

Re: Blender 2.90

#24

Post by edflsafoiewq » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 6:29 PM UTC

ww520 wrote: post #5

That's great news. Glad to see Blender keep moving forward. One thing I wish they would add is to export the color information along with the vertices in the Wavefront OBJ file when exporting an model.

There is an "extension" to .obj where vertex colors are added to the v line, like

  v x y z r g b

But this stores a color per-vertex. Vertex colors in Blender, like UVs, are per-corner-of-poly. The ideal way to store vertex color information in .obj would really be

  vc r g b
  p v1/vt1/vn1/vc1 ...

As it is, exporting per-vertex colors would require splitting a vertex into multiple vertices, one per distinct vertex color that it uses.

Re: Blender 2.90

#25

Post by bootloop » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 6:29 PM UTC

I used Blender extensively the last few weeks for a prototype project. It's really a great piece of software but when it came to baking/texturing/painting my models (game assets using the PBR workflow) I grew more and more impatient with the build-in tools it offers .

So I gave up at some point and following some suggestions I finally tried Substance Painter to do these things (Industry standard). Using both tools in tandem was a real game changer for me. Definitely would recommend it if you want to speed up your process. I am sure all this can be done in Blender but it will be a pain to do so.

Some things I was missing within Blender:

- Baking and baking groups (it's extremely annoying to select all the objects each time but I have seen a few extension who help with this process)

- Painting on multiple layers at the same time (e.g. paint a PBR material on a PBR material)

- A non-destructive workflow with support for the above

Nevertheless I love Blender and I would like to be able to use their UI-Framework for my own applications because it works just great.

Re: Blender 2.90

#26

Post by valine » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 6:30 PM UTC

archgoon wrote: post #17

hellking4u wrote: post #15

This is great, but I have to say, I'm a bit concerned about multiple Intel tools (Embree, OpenImageDenoise) that are now integrated into Blender. The tools seem to depend on Intel MKL, which has famously been crippled on non Intel CPUs. The big concern, for me, is the wide usage of Blender in common CPU benchmarks, which potentially could give Intel an unfair advantage in those.

AMD can contribute their own tooling if they feel it's worth it. They aren't broke.

AMD helped pay for the development of the OpenCL backend for cycles. Before that cycles gpu support was limited to CUDA. They actually hired a developer to work on it full time.

Re: Blender 2.90

#27

Post by mhh__ » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 6:31 PM UTC

Having recently started trying to learn to make and setup game assets (I can do CAD but not rigging etc.), I was really shocked how much cleaner Blender is compared to Maya.

I'm aware Maya is more powerful for some tasks, but - considering that other Autodesk tools are not too bad - Maya genuinely nearly put me off doing it at all.

Re: Blender 2.90

#28

Post by arduinomancer » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 6:31 PM UTC

After trying blender for the first time the other day I was amazed at how good the interface is for an open source program, it feels really modern.

I'm used to open source programs usually having pretty janky/outdated interfaces.

Re: Blender 2.90

#29

Post by brundolf » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 6:32 PM UTC

It must be a really fun job to be the person that just makes all these different demo scenes to show off new features

Re: Blender 2.90

#30

Post by ur-whale » Mon, Aug 31, 2020, 6:36 PM UTC

polskibus wrote: post #21

I'd love to see blender expand into precise modeling area more (CAD).

Strongly agree, and I'd also wish they took a shot at the Architecture market (god knows Autodesk and Archicad sorely deserves the competition) but it's not easy to build a product that fits all possible uses cases, especially when the initial focus of the app was SFX and animation.

Specifically, for CAD, blender lacks IMO two fundamental things:

    - a strong NURBS engine, complete with filleting, trimmed NURBS, CSG, full brep, etc.. (something at least on par with OpenCascade).

    - a node-based (à la Houdini) modeling system to do full blown paramaterics. The current destructive + Undo/Redo model is simply not strong enough for serious CAD used.

For the latter, there are add-ons (e.g. sorcar, sverchok) that try to patch the gap, but they all feel like band-aids when you try to really put them to work.