Well that was fast considering how long the 2.8 lts release series took...
They messed up on the versioning; 2.8 should have been version as 3.0
Blender 2.90
61–70 of 92 posts
Re: Blender 2.90
#62Kudos to the team for the excellent work and for the flashy, yet useful release page!
Re: Blender 2.90
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
They got $1.2M from Epics megagrant last year, and has lots of people and companies donating. They are slightly above the goal of funding 20 full time employees. I'm happy that an open source software have been so successful. It's come very far since when I first used it, version 2.42 I think. Shoutout to those donating (and how to contribute): https://fund.blender.org/
Someday when I can afford to pause taking a paycheck for a while, I am going to figure out how to reproduce this sort of model for numerous other applications. At least, that's my dream.
Just make sure that millions of people use the application, that it's a niche application that no one else makes a competing version of at the same price point, and that giant corporations give you millions of dollars to keep making it. Boom, success.
Re: Blender 2.90
#64How is blender compared to competitors? Are people starting to use it as a professional tool?
I work in feature film and game cinematics, where Blender is still a toy.
An increasingly interesting toy since 2.80, but it'll take a killer-feature to tear a studio or artist away from their tool of choice. Houdini for FX is still unmatched, Maya for character animation is still unmatched, ZBrush for sculpting is still unmatched, and so forth. As of this writing, Blender does each of those increasingly well but not as well, and certainly not well enough to warrant a transition.
That said, ZBrush started as a really good hobbyist tool and grew from there. I wouldn't be surprised if Blender took a similar route.
Re: Blender 2.90
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
As a user of blender on AMD GPUs, they should probably put a little more effort in. Many of the shaders used to render scenes in cycles from 2.82 onward crash, and therefore make it impossible to use an AMD GPU to run cycles. I'm surprised they don't push their ProRender renderer into the main release. I can't tell if I like it or not
I tried to play with ProRender a while ago, because we had a few people working in Blender who had to suffer with lousy performance on Cycles on our iMacs, but because ProRender requires a bunch of different settings, our artists would have had to migrate existing projects, as well as (potentially) their workflow, to what ProRender supports.
I couldn't tell if that was "everything, but differently" or "most things, occasionally", or some other venn diagram of confusion, and they didn't have time to figure it out because they were busy doing actual work, so we just ended up paying some company that apparently has massive render cluster that you can rent out for basically pennies.
Re: Blender 2.90
#66I 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…
There's nothing wrong with using multiple apps to get what you want. That's what the pro VFX houses do
A typical pipeline might be Maya for modeling, ZBrush for sculpting, Substance Painter for texturing, Houdini for procedural/dynamic effects, Nuke for compositing, and Renderman for generating the output.
Nothing at all wrong about picking the best tool for the task at hand.
Re: Blender 2.90
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the oneDNN documentation[1]: > The library is optimized for Intel Architecture Processors, Intel Processor Graphics and Xe architecture-based Graphics. Now, whether "optimized" means tuned for Intel architecture, or crippled for other architecture, is something to be figured out. Given the precedent set by MKL, I wouldn't trust it to be the 'tuned' option. Someone who speaks C++ may be able to better discern if…
Full disclosure, I work with the team behind Embree and OIDN. I've never personally worked with oneDNN. I'll just say that we test our code on Intel CPUs (obviously) and therefore optimize performance based on those tests. We don't have AMD CPUs readily available to test with (as you might imagine). However, since all the code is open source, third parties often do benchmarks across platforms. Michael Larabel from Ph…
> We don't have AMD CPUs readily available to test with (as you might imagine).
I mean, it makes perfect sense to me that Intel would only care about optimizing (or even supporting) their software on Intel chips, but I'm sort of surprised that you don't have AMD systems to test on just to compare performance.
Wouldn't it be something that you (or management, or whoever) would want to know if you were about to release a version that had much worse performance on AMD systems because of a regression ("Intel is intentionally crippling AMD CPUs!") or much better performance ("Intel released a new update but it runs better on AMD at half the price lol")?
If it's a small team then you may not have the budget (or want to spend it on that), but surely it would be nice to know either way?
Re: Blender 2.90
#68We need more open source software modeled off of the blender system. Imagine if customers of all the major closed-software players also put aside some small amount of funding to support full time developers of open source systems. This benefits everyone, because it gives these customers some potential future leverage for lower prices, it gives the closed-software players some competition to keep them nimble, and it b…
In my experience, a lot of open-source systems are managed by terrible teams with their own priorities or ideas, regardless of what the actual community wants.
For example, The GIMP has been notorious for this for its entire history, and it still is[1]. I remember ages ago, the discussion basically went like this.
> "Thanks to The GIMP, people can ditch Photoshop and Windows and move to Linux and an open-source workflow!"
> "But The GIMP doesn't support a lot of features, like CMYK color."
> "Sure, but nobody actually uses CMYK color though."
> "Literally everyone who designs for print uses CMYK color, like print shops, magazine editors, etc., and that's a huge market."
> "Well it's open source, so if it's so important to you then fix it yourself!"
> "But I'm a photographer and magazine editor, not a programmer, so I'm just going to keep paying someone else for software I can use, instead of switching to a free version of something that literally refuses to add the features I need."
Cue tons of Slashdot comments talking about how non-technical people are so rigid-minded that they're not willing to learn anything new and just make excuses instead.
Blender is an exception, not just because it's an open-source success, but because it's managed by a team who are building it for the people who need it, and not just to stick it to closed-source companies by making a pale imitation of a production app, an all-too-common scenario in open-source development.
[1] https://medium.com/linux-gossip/the-gimp-has-a-marketing-pro...
Re: Blender 2.90
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
As a user of blender on AMD GPUs, they should probably put a little more effort in. Many of the shaders used to render scenes in cycles from 2.82 onward crash, and therefore make it impossible to use an AMD GPU to run cycles. I'm surprised they don't push their ProRender renderer into the main release. I can't tell if I like it or not
The most common reasons for crashes are outdated graphics drivers with bugs and/or hardware below the minimum requirements [1]. If you think you've found a bug in Blender please report your issue on the bug tracker [2] (Help > Report a Bug in Blender).
[1] https://www.blender.org/download/requirements/ [2] https://developer.blender.org/
Re: Blender 2.90
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
They got $1.2M from Epics megagrant last year, and has lots of people and companies donating. They are slightly above the goal of funding 20 full time employees. I'm happy that an open source software have been so successful. It's come very far since when I first used it, version 2.42 I think. Shoutout to those donating (and how to contribute): https://fund.blender.org/
I started using blender around the 1.6x mark I think, back in the 90s. It was the only 3D software I could afford (you could unlock features with a c-key back in those days, I still don't know what c-key means) that would also run on IRIX. I had an SGI o2 back in those days and no clue about how to use any of it. Blender was difficult to learn, but it was a lot of fun and thankfully the community was extremely helpfu…
> …it was designed to allow those who paid, faster access to new features. For whatever reason, the C-key was dropped, and eventually replaced by the requirement to purchase a Publisher license.