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Cycles X

code.blender.org

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Re: Cycles X

#101

Post by lumenwrites »

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…

For a complete opposite of Maya, see Side FX Houdini. An incredible masterpiece of software development, keeps getting better every year, the company is extremely competent, beloved by the community, they keep innovating even though they're so far ahead of any other alternative.

I don't know if I have a point to make, I just wanted to gush about my favorite 3D software, and also I'm sad to see what autodesk is doing to Maya, what an absolute disaster. I loved Maya so much when I was a teenager. It was built by a brilliant company (Alias|Wavefront), it could've been so good if it wasn't sold to autodesk.

Re: Cycles X

#102

Post by mkoubaa »

dagmx wrote: post #39
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…

Blender has a lot of things lacking however: * It too is crash happy just in different ways. However Maya scales better with large scenes than Blender does and that's key * Blenders licensing is a deterrent. Very few people want to deal with GPL. * Blender is not good for extensibility if you're looking for performance. The API is unstable and exposed only via Python. Studios need to extend the DCCs and Blender doesn…

I didn't look but I'd be surprised if there wasn't a consulting company offering the last service

Re: Cycles X

#103

Post by regularfry »

blensor wrote: post #10
weinzierl wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I admit I am a bit of a masochist in that area but I am almost exclusively using blender on my laptop for many years and once you get used to it and have setup your keys correctly, it works

It's not the trackpad that gets me, it's the reliance on having a number pad that catches me out. Ok, it's not a reliance per se because you can control the view with the on-screen UI, but it's far less immediate that way.

Re: Cycles X

#104

Post by dpwm »

mathnode wrote: post #82
mroche wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

Autodesk is the Oracle of the professional media world. Adobe is their Microsoft.

I was surprised not so long back to find out just how much of the proprietary 3D market that Autodesk held. It seems like they own pretty much all of the big, studio-oriented 3D packages I had heard of from 10-15 years ago.

> Autodesk is the Oracle of the professional media world.

Autodesk’s reach in the niche of M&E 3D packages seems far more horizontal than Oracle’s in even databases. It is as though they set out to own all of the competition and largely succeeded – and this isn’t even the area that brings in most of their revenue.

Re: Cycles X

#105

Post by mattnewton »

rguetzkow wrote: post #73
edflsafoiewq wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blender is mostly developed by paid devs I think.

I think there are quite a lot more developers contributing to the project than those employed by the Foundation or supported by developer grants [0]. However, the complex changes on the roadmap of Blender's development are planned and implemented by the core team. [0]: https://www.blender.org/about/credits/

Huh, TIL, thank you

Re: Cycles X

#106

Post by jdashg »

RaisingSpear wrote: post #94
birktj wrote: post #23

> Deprecation > OpenCL rendering kernels. The combination of the limited Cycles split kernel implementation, driver bugs, and stalled OpenCL standard has made maintenance too difficult. I am not really up to date on the GPGPU world, but is OpenCL in such a bad shape that it is not really usable? If so that is very sad. Are there any alternative open hardware agnostic GPGPU apis or has CUDA eaten the entire market?

OpenCL is old, and everyone seemingly wants to abandon it, but it's your only option for a bunch of configurations (such as AMD on Windows, even though AMD has pulled all their OpenCL stuff from their website). As someone who's done a fair bit of SIMD programming on CPU, and heard many scream that wide SIMD (like AVX512) is pointless when you have GPGPU, it's certainly eye-opening to see how poor a state cross-platfo…

Vulkan Compute is the alternative, and you should look again if you're serious.

Re: Cycles X

#107

Post by Lichtso »

I wonder why they decided against Vulkan VK_KHR_ray_tracing again. In the original Cycles they did not go for it because of its architectural incompatibility, but now that they are doing a fresh start ...

Re: Cycles X

#108

Post by gmueckl »

nine_k wrote: post #83
gmueckl wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Media & Entertainment being a tiny part of their revenue fits with the general wisdom that the market for general purpose 3D software is virtually non-existent. The software is costly to build and maintain and combined with a small customer base and thus high licencing prices, this is a killer.

For some reason, enough resources is infused into Blender for it to be competitive, even though it does not bring any sales or licensing revenue. I wonder if the market is that small.

The resources that get poured into Blender are coming out of pure desperation. The companies that pay for it have to have some tool that is suitable for their work and supporting Blender is simply cheaper than doing it from scratch.

Re: Cycles X

#109

Post by barneyrubble »

mkaic wrote: post #65
127 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Blender is an amazing project and great 3D production software for being free. However there are many issues that remain unresolved after years. Viewport performance being one of them. There seems to be at least to an extent a mode of development where fun new things get done but old, boring, more critical issues will not. I give all credit to Blender developers for doing the old, boring and important things. It…

Viewport performance is one of the several major improvements demoed in the linked video by Brecht!

Brecht’s videos show off improved rendering. I think the person you’re replying to is instead referring to viewport performance in general: scene complexity and size, undo performance, framerate, responsiveness, that sort of thing.

Re: Cycles X

#110

Post by RaisingSpear »

jdashg wrote: post #106
RaisingSpear wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenCL is old, and everyone seemingly wants to abandon it, but it's your only option for a bunch of configurations (such as AMD on Windows, even though AMD has pulled all their OpenCL stuff from their website). As someone who's done a fair bit of SIMD programming on CPU, and heard many scream that wide SIMD (like AVX512) is pointless when you have GPGPU, it's certainly eye-opening to see how poor a state cross-platfo…

Vulkan Compute is the alternative, and you should look again if you're serious.

Thanks. According to this post [https://community.khronos.org/t/opencl-vs-vulkan-compute/713...], Vulkan Compute seems to be mostly focused on rendering over general compute. This is probably fine for Blender's renderer, but may not be suitable for some compute loads.

Unless something has changed since then, or the post is inaccurate?

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