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Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

blender.org

231–240 of 285 posts

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess some will see this as good news, but further entrenching Metal is just sad in my opinion. So much wasted effort just because they can't admit they lost the standards game and won't move to Vulkan. The generous interpretation is they just don't want to invest into that if it isn't "broken" but the cynic in me can't help but think at least part of the motivation is being different and maintaining the wall aroun…

Vulkan isn't a viable alternative for Apple. Apple wants to give developer an easy to use API to encourage them to use it as much as possible. Vulkan does not offer that.

Why didn't they just build a higher-level API on top of Vulkan then? Surely it's not a lack of developers, interest or resources, is it?

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#232
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a class on Blender in high school (mandatory even!) and it was very popular. A lot of people in our school played with Blender in their free time in the following years.

Why would a Blender class in high school be mandatory??

You probably didn't blink when MS Office was made mandatory at a high school near you. That's obvious, all the tools you need in the world of business. Obviously, that's all you need ...

I used to teach National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) level 1, 2 and a bit more, in IT, in the UK, back in the mid 1990s. The ones I worked with were RSA based which means that they were basically typewriter type exercises that were slightly sexed up to deal with word processors etc.

We had 12 modules to cover. Each student needed three pieces of "evidence" per module. So a module might be word processing or spreadsheet or database. We also had to cover fax (office equipment) and email (as was).

A folder of evidence would end up with roughly 50 sheets of paper, a few letters and prose, some spreadsheets and simple database reports. A few emails and so on.

You were allowed three mistakes. Yes three, across a lot of docs/body of evidence. An example of a mistake is a speling mistake. Another mistake would be not exactly two spaces after a full stop (period). It was awful and generally ended up with quite a lot of the trainers "truing up evidence".

On the other hand, I have an eye for noticing mistakes that is close to legendary.

Soz, waffled on a bit.

If your child was taught rudimentary Blender in school, I hope you'd be pleased.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#233
Autodesk continues to hurt itself in it's confusion. When I was in HS it was super easy to officially get their software as apart of a school. Now they require you to show student id's that many schools don't have, or give scanned documents of your attendance there. You know what students do? Pirate. Or just use blender. Nobody wants to use products they don't know, and by Autodesk being managed by old stupid people they hurt their future business. Same with Adobe. Fire yourselves and replace with engineers.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#234
I used Blender for years in Uni and when I was trying to get my own little game studio going. It was an awesome tool, but (at least at the time) a little overwhelming. Just the amount of things you could do was amazing. And how you could extend it was awesome.

So it makes me very happy to see Apple help fund it.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#235
Blender is truly one of the most incredible pieces of software I’ve ever used in my entire life. The user interface may look daunting at first glance, but it’s actually incredibly intuitive to use and contains a host of amazingly powerful features that I desperately wish would find their way into every other program I use.

For example, absolutely any aspect of the interface can be bound to any key combination simply by right clicking on the control and choosing “assign keyboard shortcut”. You can adjust values, check and uncheck boxes, execute any menu command, trigger any action, and reconfigure it all on the fly in whichever way suits your workflow in that particular moment.

Another example: every internal function is searchable and executable by hitting F3 and typing a fragment of the code path / menu item title / function name into the box provided. Can’t remember how to slide a vertex along an edge? Just hit F3 and type “ve sl” and the function you’re looking for will be right there at the top of the list.

And another example: every input field can derive its value from simple Python calculations, called Drivers. Let’s say you have a 300 frame animation and you want to change the strength of a mesh deformation from 0 to 1 based on the current frame number. Rather than keyframing anything, you could simply enter ‘#frame / 300” into the deformation modifier’s strength input field and Blender will take care of the calculations for you. You can reference other input values by right clicking on that input and choosing “copy data path”, which will copy the internal reference to that particular piece of data to the clipboard so you can use it to power another input’s driver. So for the above example, if you weren’t sure how many frames your final animation was going to be and you didn’t want to have to go back and change the “300” every time you changed the animation length, you could simply copy the data path for the “frame end” input field and use that in the calculation instead, ie ‘#frame / bpy.context.scene.frame_end’ (that may not be the exact correct path, I’m describing this from memory just as an example of the concept). Every variable is exposed and can be referenced by almost any other variable. If your Driver is more complex than a one liner, you can open a fully featured driver editor window which lets you set and name variables within the driver’s scope, describe parametric functions, and tie multiple drivers together across multiple objects.

Everything is extensible, everything is controllable, everything is connected to everything else — the power it gives you is simply unparalleled, I’ve never used any software of any kind that even came close to putting this much raw control into the user’s hand.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#236
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean a comment that listed several open source projects started by Apple?

Where are you getting your information from? None of the projects listed there were started by Apple, all of them are used in successful Apple products, and all of them have been used by both competitors, and the community.

Sorry, I was responding incorrectly to the first child comment of the one linked to

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

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#237
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to share an amazing experience I recently had. I was looking through TV consoles on Crate & Barrel and found one I liked. I was unsure if it'd be too tall for my room (it's an extra 9 inches of height over my current TV stand, which is actually just a coffee table repurposed.) The listing page had a QR code I could scan with my iPhone. I was taken to a page that asked me for camera permissions and I said yes.…

I feel a weird sense of loss for Google Glass. I feel like the controversies that set it back also set back the entire AR space. I wonder what life would be like if I could wear a HUD that showed me an AR overlay. It might bubble up an alert to remind me to drink a glass of water to stay on track for the day. A to-do list might slide in from the side if I tap a button near my temple. A friend calls and their animated…

if companies and govt hadn't broken our trust so often wrt privacy, snooping, data-hunger, their might not have been so many controversies... I think the struggle is good if it stops or slows down these things.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#238
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it will? They didn’t say why they can’t sit through the videos, it might be because they are too slow to get to the point? I don’t really see what value your comment is adding. The parents’ post was reasonable to me.

It was a patronizing lecture. The followup with more patronizing clarified the non-helpful intent.

I think you're the patronizing one in this thread.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everybody used VR headsets all the time, you wouldn't even need a TV console in your room. In fact, you wouldn't need much besides a comfy chair. This whole AR thing is just a transition technology, that will go away with time.

>If everybody used VR headsets all the time You just described Ready Player One, which in some sense is a dystopian nightmare.

With the comfy chair reference, I saw Wall-E. Cartoonish dystopia is still dystopia.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#240
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a patronizing lecture. The followup with more patronizing clarified the non-helpful intent.

I think you're the patronizing one in this thread.

Patronizing is being an ass under the guise of helping. I'm not putting on airs of being helpful.
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