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Blender 2.92

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Re: Blender 2.92

#21

Post by TrevorJ »

pjmlp wrote: post #9
zingplex wrote: post #2

Once again Blender is killing it! I find Blender to be one of the best examples of how FLOSS software can be substantially better than their proprietary alternatives.

Blender was a commercial product that was latter open sourced and existing customers put the effort to keep the ball rolling. Good luck trying something similar for the desktop market starting from scratch as FOSS.

This is true, however, the commercial version bears almost no resemblance to what we have today. The open source community bears the lions share of the responsibility for how blender looks today.

Re: Blender 2.92

#22

Post by meshmonki »

codetrotter wrote: post #7
the__alchemist wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blender is an exception to the rule, and a rolemodel. For example, FreeCAD and KiCad are OK, but not as nice (especially re FreeCad) as paid alternatives. GIMP isn't on the same level as Photoshop.

However, Krita seems really good also. Probably on par with Corel Painter.

I'd also vouch for Krita. While I'm not a fan of it's window or layering system I think it has a nice balance of features compared to other digital painting software like Paint Tool Sai, Fire Alpaca, Corel, or Photoshop. I made the (mostly) full transition to it earlier last year and don't regret it.

Re: Blender 2.92

#23

Post by dagmx »

TrevorJ wrote: post #18
dagmx wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what proprietary alternatives have you been using and in what professional capacity? "Substantially better" is a fairly large claim. To be clear, I use Blender and regularly use Maya, Houdini etc and I think all of them, including Blender have so many pros and cons, that I'd hesitate to say any one is better than the other in general.

I would say that the realtime viewport (eevee) is now best in class. The rest is heavily dependent on opinion, familiarity and preferred workflow.

Yeah Eevee and grease pencil are the two standouts.

To your list of subjective metrics I'd also add scalability and performance. Also maybe pipelineibility. Each DCC has very different characteristics on those as well.

Re: Blender 2.92

#24

Post by tpxl »

a-saleh wrote: post #11

Damn, this looks nice! Especially the procedural stuff. I did use Blender roughly 10 years ago for school projects, and I would like to get back, anybody has a good tutorial lying around? :)

I got into it by watching Imphenzia's 10 minute modelling videos (https://www.youtube.com/c/Imphenzia). It's low poly, if that's your style, but "extrude, scale, indent" is pretty powerful as far as low poly modelling goes.

Re: Blender 2.92

#25

Post by sillysaurusx »

I hope one day there's a "Blender, but it's actually ZBrush" open source alternative to ZBrush.

Once you use ZBrush, you'll never want to go back to traditional CAD-style creation.

I won't claim that Blender can't solve it, but, the workflows are completely different. You end up thinking of models like clay that you can shape and paint, not triangles with textures.

Please, someone, somewhere, spend five years making that an open source project. (Realistically, it's a bit melancholy that such a project probably won't ever get made; there's no incentive to. ZBrush exists, and it has a fine price point. I just love thinking about all the algorithms under the hood that power the whole thing... It would be so cool to see the code.)

Re: Blender 2.92

#26

Post by brundolf »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #25

I hope one day there's a "Blender, but it's actually ZBrush" open source alternative to ZBrush. Once you use ZBrush, you'll never want to go back to traditional CAD-style creation. I won't claim that Blender can't solve it, but, the workflows are completely different. You end up thinking of models like clay that you can shape and paint, not triangles with textures. Please, someone, somewhere, spend five years making…

Blender already has a pretty advanced sculpting system? And it integrates with everything else for retopo and such. I don't really do sculpting so I don't know exactly how it stacks up against ZBrush, but I know it's going for the exact same use-case and I believe it's well-regarded

Re: Blender 2.92

#27

Post by qchris »

the__alchemist wrote: post #5
zingplex wrote: post #2

Once again Blender is killing it! I find Blender to be one of the best examples of how FLOSS software can be substantially better than their proprietary alternatives.

Blender is an exception to the rule, and a rolemodel. For example, FreeCAD and KiCad are OK, but not as nice (especially re FreeCad) as paid alternatives. GIMP isn't on the same level as Photoshop.

I tried designing a relatively simple assembly in Freecad recently (again, as I've come back to it multiple times), and remembered how uniquely terrible some the design decisions have been. I mean, fundamentally user-hostile approaches to the most basic functionality, like rotating a part requires a left mouse + center mouse press in order and sketch lines not being created with center points. And when a user tried to give them feedback (someone else, not mine) civil feedback on the forum about it got a dev response of "Those are just our quirks, go back to Solidworks if you don't like it." I did end up having to fire up my Windows machine for Inventor.

I'm sure it has some level of feature parity with commercial CAD buried somewhere, but it's so hard to get to even on the new 0.19 pre-release that I genuinely wouldn't try to put it in the same conversation as Blender or KiCad as open alternatives to commercial software. It's just not there.

Re: Blender 2.92

#28

Post by anthk »

pjmlp wrote: post #9
zingplex wrote: post #2

Once again Blender is killing it! I find Blender to be one of the best examples of how FLOSS software can be substantially better than their proprietary alternatives.

Blender was a commercial product that was latter open sourced and existing customers put the effort to keep the ball rolling. Good luck trying something similar for the desktop market starting from scratch as FOSS.

When Blender was commercial it didn't have half of the features from today.

>Good luck trying something similar for the desktop market starting from scratch as FOSS.

Krita.

Re: Blender 2.92

#29

Post by brundolf »

Daub wrote: post #3

Just playing with it now. The new geometry nodes are the beginning of something big... a more procedural approach to modeling. Perfect for natural distribution of things like rocks and plants. Our department (art and design) moved from 3ds Max to Blender last year, and have not looked back. The rapid pace of development is testament to the fact that Blender now has more than twice as many full time devs working on it…

I am so pumped for geometry nodes (and the broader effort, "everything nodes"). Tools like Houdini have been doing this for years and the stuff you can build with it is just... wow.

Looks like the nodes selection for this first iteration is a little bare, but that's okay. Gotta start somewhere

Re: Blender 2.92

#30

Post by systemvoltage »

I find Cinema4D’s UI and approach toward everything just brilliant. Tried using Blender 5 years ago and it was extremely unintuitive to use. UI consistency was all over the place. Has that changed since?
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