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Cycles X

code.blender.org

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Re: Cycles X

#11

Post by ravenstine »

bredren wrote: post #6
ravenstine wrote: post #3

I've kept an eye on Blender for the last 15 years and tried it again recently after having almost exclusively used Maya. It's continually improved in just about every way, is relatively easy to use with just a trackpad, and it performs really well. In contrast, Maya is has more features overall but is... a piece of shit in many ways. It doesn't matter what hardware I've used; it's a rule that Maya has to crash random…

Thanks for this feedback. Maya has been around forever. I think I had the initial release crash on me when in the late 90s. I figured it was the warez back then! Would you mind sharing what kind of character work you've done previously (hobby or pro) and what types of topics or projects drive you to use Blender for conceptualization?

Probably not because it was warez. I know people who work with Maya in productions; everybody knows that Maya is crash prone to varying extents. It's the least reliable software I've ever used. It does a TON, and it's otherwise pretty awesome, but it's embarrassingly buggy.

I never really got to work with it in a professional space, but before software development I wanted to do character animation and went to school for it. Outside of assignments, I did a bunch of hobby projects both with just animation and sculpting. I was particularly interested in mixing CGI with live action, and there were some things I did with modeling and rigging things like monsters, filming footage, resolving camera motion, and compositing rendered animation into the video. Was both a lot of fun and horribly difficult. These days I it's much easier since software for resolving camera motion has improved by orders of magnitude.

There was a studio I worked at briefly, but it was a pretty crappy deal and I decided to just ditch that field for software development, which I am much better at anyway.

Re: Cycles X

#12

Post by brundolf »

Oh man, I am pumped about the viewport improvements. Whenever I'm working on a scene, tweaking lighting or shaders is really arduous because after every tiny adjustment I have to sit and wait at least a few seconds to really see what effect it had. These previews look amazing.

Re: Cycles X

#13

Post by rideontime »

weinzierl wrote: post #8
ravenstine wrote: post #3

I've kept an eye on Blender for the last 15 years and tried it again recently after having almost exclusively used Maya. It's continually improved in just about every way, is relatively easy to use with just a trackpad, and it performs really well. In contrast, Maya is has more features overall but is... a piece of shit in many ways. It doesn't matter what hardware I've used; it's a rule that Maya has to crash random…

> is relatively easy to use with just a trackpad The last time I tried Blender - which admittedly is a while - it was practically unusable with a trackpad. Has this changed?

It's surprisingly good on a Mac trackpad, with support for lots of multi-touch gestures. Can't speak for other OSes.

Re: Cycles X

#14

Post by valine »

brundolf wrote: post #12

Oh man, I am pumped about the viewport improvements. Whenever I'm working on a scene, tweaking lighting or shaders is really arduous because after every tiny adjustment I have to sit and wait at least a few seconds to really see what effect it had. These previews look amazing.

Have you tried using Eevee for shader adjustments? A pretty common workflow is get your lighting setup working with Eevee and then switch to Cycles for the final render.

Re: Cycles X

#15

Post by vjeux »

When I was working on a ray tracer, I found that interpolating the color from neighboring points instead of leaving it blank for in-progress elements was a huge improvement for quickly seeing what the scene is going to look like. In the video examples it doesn't seem like they're doing it. I'm interested to know the rationale.

(See "Progressive Rendering" section for an example: https://blog.vjeux.com/2012/javascript/javascript-ray-tracer... )

Re: Cycles X

#16

Post by gmueckl »

ravenstine wrote: post #3

I've kept an eye on Blender for the last 15 years and tried it again recently after having almost exclusively used Maya. It's continually improved in just about every way, is relatively easy to use with just a trackpad, and it performs really well. In contrast, Maya is has more features overall but is... a piece of shit in many ways. It doesn't matter what hardware I've used; it's a rule that Maya has to crash random…

Maya was an amazing piece of software once. It is falling behind only because Autodesk seems to be content to just let it slowly rot.

The funny thing is that there are litanies of complaints about many core Autodesk products that echo the same chorus: the software is poorly maintained, bugfixes are promised "for the next released" (paid upgrade, of course) and yet, they never appear. Customer feature requests are completely ignored and each release feels like it's just a version number bump with a few token changes here and there so that sales can act as if they created a meaningful new release.

Re: Cycles X

#17

Post by wlesieutre »

weinzierl wrote: post #8
ravenstine wrote: post #3

I've kept an eye on Blender for the last 15 years and tried it again recently after having almost exclusively used Maya. It's continually improved in just about every way, is relatively easy to use with just a trackpad, and it performs really well. In contrast, Maya is has more features overall but is... a piece of shit in many ways. It doesn't matter what hardware I've used; it's a rule that Maya has to crash random…

> is relatively easy to use with just a trackpad The last time I tried Blender - which admittedly is a while - it was practically unusable with a trackpad. Has this changed?

One major change is that it now defaults to select with left click, which should help things.

There's also an official Pie Menus add-on that lets you fit more controls in a smaller laptop keyboard. Numpad is the normal way to switch between view directions, but having them in a radial menu keeps it reasonably usable.

Lack of middle-mouse drag could be awkward and I don't know the solution off the top of my head, but I imagine there's something. You need to have both pan and zoom, I'd guess one is via two-finger scrolling and the other adds a modifier key?

Re: Cycles X

#18

Post by bredren »

ravenstine wrote: post #11
bredren wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this feedback. Maya has been around forever. I think I had the initial release crash on me when in the late 90s. I figured it was the warez back then! Would you mind sharing what kind of character work you've done previously (hobby or pro) and what types of topics or projects drive you to use Blender for conceptualization?

Probably not because it was warez. I know people who work with Maya in productions; everybody knows that Maya is crash prone to varying extents. It's the least reliable software I've ever used. It does a TON, and it's otherwise pretty awesome, but it's embarrassingly buggy. I never really got to work with it in a professional space, but before software development I wanted to do character animation and went to school…

:) It was hard to tell what was what back then.

Thanks for sharing those notes on your character animation background.

I'm curious what drove you to be interested in mixing CGI / live action. Jurassic Park, perhaps?

When I was a kid Roger Rabbit and Cool World were amazing to me. JP's CGI seemed different, as though the dinosaurs were real.

Re: Cycles X

#19

Post by brundolf »

valine wrote: post #14
brundolf wrote: post #12

Oh man, I am pumped about the viewport improvements. Whenever I'm working on a scene, tweaking lighting or shaders is really arduous because after every tiny adjustment I have to sit and wait at least a few seconds to really see what effect it had. These previews look amazing.

Have you tried using Eevee for shader adjustments? A pretty common workflow is get your lighting setup working with Eevee and then switch to Cycles for the final render.

Certain shader nodes only work in Cycles. In particular I use the Bevel node a lot for an "edges" effect: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/shader_node...

You can get the difference between the surface normal and the bevel normal and use that as a "sharpness" value to mask things like wear on the corners of objects

Re: Cycles X

#20

Post by mroche »

gmueckl wrote: post #16
ravenstine wrote: post #3

I've kept an eye on Blender for the last 15 years and tried it again recently after having almost exclusively used Maya. It's continually improved in just about every way, is relatively easy to use with just a trackpad, and it performs really well. In contrast, Maya is has more features overall but is... a piece of shit in many ways. It doesn't matter what hardware I've used; it's a rule that Maya has to crash random…

Maya was an amazing piece of software once. It is falling behind only because Autodesk seems to be content to just let it slowly rot. The funny thing is that there are litanies of complaints about many core Autodesk products that echo the same chorus: the software is poorly maintained, bugfixes are promised "for the next released" (paid upgrade, of course) and yet, they never appear. Customer feature requests are com…

Some of us admins in the field like to joke that Autodesk isn't a software vendor, they are a licensing company. And to be honest some of their changes with regards to Named User Licensing is going to be a PITA for many studios.

I've gotten the chance to have a few conversations with some on the Maya team before, and they are great people. But they are fairly hamstrung by a company focused on sales and growth than development, one where M&E is less than 10% of their company revenue[0] (those numbers, which are an increase in revenue, can likely be attributed to the forcing of subscriptions), and having to cover a lot of ground re-architecting an application with a ton of technical and legacy debt. The historical idea of Maya being a Fraken-app exists for a reason.

[0] https://investors.autodesk.com/static-files/749abc95-16be-4c...

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