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Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

blender.org

11–20 of 285 posts

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#11
post #2

> ... Apple has joined the Blender Development Fund as a Patron Member. To find out what "Patron Member" means, it's 120k or more per year[0]. It's the highest corporate tier Blender has. Nice to see Apple supporting open-source. [0]: https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/

> Nice to see Apple supporting open-source.

... in a domain where they have either no products or their own products have clearly failed to obtain traction.

Not going to happen for anything where there's an even reasonably successful Apple product, I think we can be sure of that.

So yes, it is really nice to see Apple supporting Blender but let's not confuse that with open source/libre software in general.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#12
post #2

> ... Apple has joined the Blender Development Fund as a Patron Member. To find out what "Patron Member" means, it's 120k or more per year[0]. It's the highest corporate tier Blender has. Nice to see Apple supporting open-source. [0]: https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/

> Nice to see Apple supporting open-source. ... in a domain where they have either no products or their own products have clearly failed to obtain traction. Not going to happen for anything where there's an even reasonably successful Apple product, I think we can be sure of that. So yes, it is really nice to see Apple supporting Blender but let's not confuse that with open source/libre software in general.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nice to see Apple supporting open-source. ... in a domain where they have either no products or their own products have clearly failed to obtain traction. Not going to happen for anything where there's an even reasonably successful Apple product, I think we can be sure of that. So yes, it is really nice to see Apple supporting Blender but let's not confuse that with open source/libre software in general.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

And: Downvoted whatsoever...

Edit: And it indeed is downvoted whatsoever...

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#14
post #2

> ... Apple has joined the Blender Development Fund as a Patron Member. To find out what "Patron Member" means, it's 120k or more per year[0]. It's the highest corporate tier Blender has. Nice to see Apple supporting open-source. [0]: https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/

> Nice to see Apple supporting open-source. ... in a domain where they have either no products or their own products have clearly failed to obtain traction. Not going to happen for anything where there's an even reasonably successful Apple product, I think we can be sure of that. So yes, it is really nice to see Apple supporting Blender but let's not confuse that with open source/libre software in general.

WebKit, Clang, LLVM

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#15

Wonder if this will lead to a functional iOS port of Blender? Pretty much the whole reason I went with a MS Surface tablet instead of an iPad of some sort, was the lack of Blender.

Would be pretty wild to have a full Blender running on my M1 iPad Pro, though I imagine touch controls are somewhat tricky (maybe pen only?).

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#16
It's great to see Blender get the support. The user numbers seem to be arcing upwards.

https://www.blender.org/news/blender-by-the-numbers-2020/

If you've ever had a passing interest in Blender or 3d modeling I recommend checking out the donut tutorial, which is fast becoming the "hello world" of blender -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPrnSACiTJ4

And check out all the donuts -

https://www.reddit.com/r/BlenderDoughnuts/

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#17
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nice to see Apple supporting open-source. ... in a domain where they have either no products or their own products have clearly failed to obtain traction. Not going to happen for anything where there's an even reasonably successful Apple product, I think we can be sure of that. So yes, it is really nice to see Apple supporting Blender but let's not confuse that with open source/libre software in general.

WebKit, Clang, LLVM

Swift, FoundationDB, Obj-C, Darwin...

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#19
Apple's software and hardware arcs are coalescing into them going all in on AR/VR. Things like LIDAR, Photogrammetry, spatial mapping, USDZ / PBR and friends all come across as pretty marginal novelties on smartphones, but they are all a part of that strategy, and will make much more sense with a headset. They're coming out of the gate with a robust ecosystem.

Blender is obviously a huge component of the software stack.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#20

Apple is getting more serious about 3D and the gaming market, which isn’t surprising considering the market size.

It definitely makes sense.

Recently I had a need for a CAD program and rediscovered how insanely expensive commercial 3D software is for the average person.

Sure, many companies now offer monthly subscriptions, but even those subscriptions are ginormous for the amount of relative value returned. Like, do I really want to pay $220 a month for AutoCAD when I only need to design a part for a non-commercial personal project every so often? I'm sure even a lot of small companies secretly pirate such software, especially if they are relying on something like Solidworks. I really don't know how anyone affords that package.

And yes, there are sometimes free student editions of these packages, but unlike 15 years ago it's tough to get a hold of them without an email from an academic institution the company has verified.

In my case, I was looking at AutoCAD because FreeCAD is... well, pretty terrible as a n00b. From what I can tell it works very differently in many ways from standard CAD applications. It's good for converting between formats, but it's not at all intuitive and seemingly minor actions with nothing but a cube in the workspace can cause it to go into a tizzy and completely freeze.

EDIT: Ultimately I ended up using OpenSCAD.

Commercial 3D software isn't even necessarily better, though. I know I yakked on about CAD, but I have a sort of background in Animation and used Autodesk Maya for many years, which would be the closest direct competitor to Blender. Dear lord, what a disaster of a software package. Granted, I haven't used it since the 2018 edition, but it's astoundingly bad in many areas. The main reason it's so widely used is that it's established and is capable of just about anything. The downside is that, like AutoCAD, the slightest breeze can make it crash unexpectedly. Anyone smart will save their scenes in ASCII format because who knows, something might go wrong during the saving process that makes your scene unable to open when you reboot Maya, and looking through the text-version of your scene may be the only way to fix or recover anything. That's not even all of it. And Maya is also very expensive. Unless you are a student, the only way to use Maya on a hobbyist level is to pirate it.

Having switched entirely to Blender, although there's things about it that I still find unintuitive, it's a breath of fresh air having come from Maya. Unlike Maya, it's rare that anything I do will cause Blender to freeze or crash. The default viewport rendering not only looks better than Maya's "viewport 2.0" but just seems snappier.

What I don't like about Blender is that it tries to do too much IMO. Does Blender really need a video editor and to clutter up the UI with references to it? Not specifically related, but what's with the way that modifiers work? It's kind of like Maya's "history" except it's both better and worse. Unlike Maya, you can actually change the order of how modifiers are applied. But modifiers are really only good for specific things. In Maya, the history of an object is far more generalized.

But overall, I want to see Blender succeed and maybe, just maybe knock things like Maya down a peg, even if it takes another 20 years.

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