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Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

blender.org

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Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#71

Post by planb »

jereees wrote: post #55
defaultname wrote: post #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 sta…

Not to mention the platform wide rollout of spatial audio.

And the text and object detection in real world scenes that is the most underrated feature in iOS 15

Edit: this tweet I just found shows exactly what I meant: https://twitter.com/juanbuis/status/1448686889158983681?s=21

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#72

Post by philovivero »

hallarempt wrote: post #63
xvilka wrote: post #18

Hopefully, projects like Krita[1] and GIMP[2] would get more funding like Blender as well. [1] https://krita.org/en/support-us/sponsors/ [2] https://www.gimp.org/news/2021/07/27/support-gimp-developers...

If Apple gave me 120k a year and made a merge request for a Metal backend for Krita, I wouldn't say no to either, being Krita's maintainer.

^ Can someone get this over to Apple stat? This would be amazing.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#73

Post by concinds »

ksec wrote: post #39
mimsee wrote: 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/

This is especially interesting because Blender is GPLv2. And AFAIK apart from Webkit which for historical reason it is LGPL, all other open source software Apple support are BSD / MIT / Apache. It is also exceptionally rare Apple donate this amount of money to any open source organisation. To the point I would argue this is very non-Apple. There could be some strategic interest for Blender, although I haven't figure…

Yeah, the interests are probably:

1) Attracting pro creators to MacBooks requires having top-tier Blender support and performance on Mac, so Apple's interest is in making it run as well as possible

2) some future AR/VR tie-in

This is very un-Apple-like, but I really, really, really, really hope they keep going in this direction. There's zero reason for Apple to keep being this stodgy. Why aren't they doing "cool nerdy things" anymore? Their built-in apps are fine but why don't they try to make an Apple-sanctioned macOS package manager, with Apple repos and third-party repo support? Don't they understand the incalculable goodwill and excitement that would generate? That by doing this, making Safari a top-tier browser with the best standards support, implementing zero-knowledge iCloud encryption, working with Docker to improve performance, improving Xcode stability, and refreshing Pro Mac hardware minimum yearly even just to keep them competitive, as opposed to letting them languish, like the Mac Pro (2019) and MacBook Pro 16" (2019), they'd more than make up for every bit of illwill they earned with the post-2015 MacBooks and come out ahead of Microsoft with their WSL2 and new Windows Terminal? Apple knows how to be cool to "average people" but they've forgotten how to be cool to nerds, when it used to be effortless for them!

None of this has to do with core strategy. I'm not asking them to open-source macOS here. It's just the basic ability to execute on obvious things that's missing.

For example, in Windows 11 Microsoft really opened up the Microsoft Store, by loosening the eligibility requirements. As a result, it has tone, tons of apps like Creative Cloud, Discord, LibreOffice, VLC, that would never come to the Mac App Store in a million years. That creates pro-user goodwill. So does this Blender news by Apple. I hope Apple realizes how much money they're leaving on the table, because often they don't seem like they give enough of a fuck.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#74

Post by tenaciousDaniel »

cdiamand wrote: post #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/BlenderDough…

I just went through this video earlier this week, and while it assumes a bit of knowledge, the modeling is as simple as possible and I found it to be a very good introduction:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBdGm_d_8XE

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#75

Post by JAlexoid »

striking wrote: post #36
JAlexoid wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Apple wants to permanently remove OpenGL from macOS" - that would be a poor decision.... although, they really don't care for the pro market in any case.

They've already deprecated OpenGL. Drivers on macOS are locked at OpenGL 4.1, which is missing a whole lot of nice features. Not because the hardware doesn't support them, but because Apple doesn't want to keep maintaining OpenGL. And why would they? OpenGL is really unpleasant from a hardware manufacturer's / integrator's / OS author's perspective, it makes app ports for mobile that much harder unless you're using G…

>You're confusing not caring for the pro market with their approach to vertical integration.

Apple knows exactly what they need to do to keep the pro market on MacOSX, they are not interested in doing that at all. And that simple thing is standardization, not exclusive API. So they don't even have to support OpenGL... just not make it even harder for CAD/CAM makers to port their software/features back to MacOSX.

Lack of a good pro device for years already got a lot of pros off Macs, so companies like Autodesk have less and less value in supporting Mac. And the gap in functionality is already massive! Their vertical integration, aka platform lock-in, is impossible for companies that have majority of their customers on a different platform.(and again - Apple knows that)

You know, I'll just switch to Windows to have my designs automatically validated for code compliance... and I'll just stay with Windows for software development as well.

(I'm a software engineer studying structural engineering)

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#77

Post by pitaj »

cdiamand wrote: post #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/BlenderDough…

Anyone know a good intro tutorial for using Blender as a video editor like Premier?

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#78

Post by artificialLimbs »

cdiamand wrote: post #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/BlenderDough…

I uncomfortably poked at blender a few times over the years until this tut by Imphenzia, which made me comfortable in under 2 hours:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jHUY3qoBu8

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#79

Post by criddell »

striking wrote: post #36
JAlexoid wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Apple wants to permanently remove OpenGL from macOS" - that would be a poor decision.... although, they really don't care for the pro market in any case.

They've already deprecated OpenGL. Drivers on macOS are locked at OpenGL 4.1, which is missing a whole lot of nice features. Not because the hardware doesn't support them, but because Apple doesn't want to keep maintaining OpenGL. And why would they? OpenGL is really unpleasant from a hardware manufacturer's / integrator's / OS author's perspective, it makes app ports for mobile that much harder unless you're using G…

Are there Metal compatible renderers on non-Apple platforms?

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#80

Post by my123 »

nitrogen wrote: post #58
striking wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've already deprecated OpenGL. Drivers on macOS are locked at OpenGL 4.1, which is missing a whole lot of nice features. Not because the hardware doesn't support them, but because Apple doesn't want to keep maintaining OpenGL. And why would they? OpenGL is really unpleasant from a hardware manufacturer's / integrator's / OS author's perspective, it makes app ports for mobile that much harder unless you're using G…

Apple could just use the vendor-provided OpenGL (AIUI most of the code is common between Windows and Linux for the major vendors), which e.g. for nvidia still happily supports everything from 1.0 to the present.

> Apple could just use the vendor-provided OpenGL

They are their own GPU vendor nowadays.

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