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Blender 2.92

blender.org

101–110 of 173 posts

Re: Blender 2.92

#101
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is actually quite positive.

It's getting pretty hard to manage for me, the poor maintainer :-). We've always put all our income into paying for development (and hardware, and sprints), so right now on Saturdays I'm being my own secretary/HR person/admin person. It used to be that my Saturdays were for bug triaging...

Be careful of burnout, Krita is wonderful, and I think the community would far prefer a slightly slower pace of dev if it means that the lifestyle is sustainable for you.

Re: Blender 2.92

#102

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…

CAD is to organic modeling what an IDE is to MS word. TECHNICALLY they do the same basic thing....but not really at all.

Re: Blender 2.92

#104
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…

Also check out the addon Sverchok, I think at the moment it is still much more powerful than the new geometry nodes, basically a full-blown Grasshopper (from Rhino3D) alternative. Would be nice to see it added into the main program at some point.

https://github.com/nortikin/sverchok

Re: Blender 2.92

#105
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…

And it’s a donation supported engineering project! They’re currently pulling in $154,000 a month in donations!

It is a huge inspiration to me for how open source could operate.

https://fund.blender.org/

Re: Blender 2.92

#106

Is there any point in learning blender as a software developer? I like it a lot but feel like the learning curve is too high and not worth it for me?

Having been a Blender user for a while now, I have used it multiple times as an alternative to Illustrator/Inkscape for 2D graphics for my projects because the editing capabilities feel much more flexible to me. I have also used the drivers and constraints for modeling UI interactions. Also, the Python scripting can be very enjoyable. I have generated 3D audio visualizations for fun in the past.

So for me it's been both fun and useful to know Blender as a software developer, though not strictly required.

Re: Blender 2.92

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, i lean Nvidia - because i hear more consistently that they behave well in Linux, and doubly so with Blender. AMD seems to either be more hit or miss, OR it used to be, and a lot of that is just a poor history. Either way the GPU buying landscape is difficult for me.

I was in the same position as you a few months ago. I believe that currently Blender provides a much better workflow on Nvidia cards. The reason is simple: Optix. The speed advantage over CUDA (and openCL, of course) is really, really impressive. With Optix, I think I've seen the greatest performance improvement I've ever witnessed on Blender. Here is a Linux + Nvidia + Optix benchmark from 2019: https://www.phoronix…

ProRender render quality was sadly sometimes pretty close to garbage. (I heard that ProRender 2.0 changed that, but didn't get the chance to test it yet)

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=blender-... and Ampere is _fast_.

Re: Blender 2.92

#108

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…

Can you tell me what stands out to you as different between ZBrush and Blender's sculpting mode? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3XtAFUWNuk I've never used ZBrush personally, bu from what I can understand they're a pretty similar workflow...

- Zbrush has an extensive ecosystem of bushes. There are specific tools for specific jobs, and (not having used Blender at all) I am skeptical Blender successfully replicated these workflows.

- Zbrush has modes that are extremely precise. For example, you can mask off a specific section of the mesh, similar to masking off a portion of an image in Photoshop. Except, in Zbrush, you can do it spatially -- it's not a "mask per triangle", but rather "a mask per pixel". You can literally slice a mesh in half, vertically, screen-wise, then hide one half, do some work on the other, then un-hide. It's an effortless flow that people use all the time.

- Zbrush is most natural to use with a tablet in one hand and a keyboard in the other. That video isn't using a tablet at all. Having a mouse interface just isn't appealing for artists. The reason I bring up this point, is because I can't overstate how natural it feels to use zbrush with a tablet –– you can bring up a "context menu" just by tapping a button on your pen, select a new tool by flicking your wrist slightly, and immediately begin using that tool. It's far more configurable than I'm describing here.

Ultimately, Blender has to serve too many masters. If you have to design a UI that can do anything, it can't do everything well. It must make tradeoffs. And these tradeoffs are reflected as reduced artist productivity, which is why many artists use Zbrush for their professional work – it's a tailored experience specifically for artists.

Now, all that said, I am impressed with what Blender can do. I like that it's open source. But, if you want to go toe-to-toe with the pros, the pros are going to point out exactly why the interfaces just don't cut it. If it takes 20% longer to accomplish X, those small costs add up. But there's also a "step change" that you get from the Zbrush flow that I don't think you'll get with Blender's interface. It's subtle, hard to describe, and honestly something you'd have to invest time in to understand.

Caveat: I've been out of the art world for around five years at this point, so feel free to ignore all of my points. But, I approach this from a gamedev studio mentality: from experience in the industry, I can say that Blender never once came up as a realistic option. It was 3ds max for a long time, then mudbox pioneered the sculpting concept (I remember Aron Zoellner from my first job going on and on about why Mudbox was so cool and a big deal), and then Zbrush totally dominated the scene. There are reasons for this, despite my inability to perfectly articulate them.

Scrub through https://youtu.be/EdEVj39ur-U?t=1545 and watch how effortless everything is. That artist is doing so many operations per second relative to your Blender video that it's hard to overstate just how much more productive they are. (I realize your video was an introductory example for Blender, but it's hard to imagine someone doing in Blender what that person is doing in Zbrush.)

Re: Blender 2.92

#109
I've tried 3D modeling and failed to get anywhere several times. My only observation is that the mesh fairing example looks like a really cool feature. If 3D modeling "felt" like that, it probably wouldn't be so intimidating.

Re: Blender 2.92

#110

I've tried 3D modeling and failed to get anywhere several times. My only observation is that the mesh fairing example looks like a really cool feature. If 3D modeling "felt" like that, it probably wouldn't be so intimidating.

You might want to try Zbrush (and free alternative like Sculptris). It really breached the distance between clay and 3D modeling for me.
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