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Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

blender.org

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Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#261

Post by FormFollowsFunc »

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…

There is a bit of a problem in the AR space - the lack of cheap 3D modeling software. Maya is $1,700/year compared to Sketch at $99/year. If Apple releases an AR headset/glasses, developers will need an affordable way to create 3D models.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#262

Post by gradyvuckovic »

cmarschner wrote: post #155

I‘ve spent countless hours learning Blender over the past few months (being completely oblivious of other 3D software to that point), mostly through many excellent Youtube videos like from BlenderGuru, and I think it is the most wicket piece of software I have tried to learn in decades. It makes learning the fundamentals of vi a piece of cake. It has hundreds of features, dozens of property dialogs, and most of all i…

Registered just to reply to ya comment.

I've been using Blender for, ooo, I'd say about 15 years now?

I've got almost every hotkey down to a reflex, explored the software extensively, even written my own plugins for Blender. I've watched it grow over the years and man, has it come SO far.

And let me tell you... I can honestly say 15 years... I still feel like I'm barely scratching the surface.

Blender is just an infinite well of potential power and productivity. The more you put in to it, the more it will give you back.

And every few months the Blender devs put out a new update, making it even better than before. Absolutely amazing tool, would be easily worth thousands a year to me for my professional work and yet it's free. It's a 'must have' for any graphic designer/3D artist/etc in my opinion.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#263

Post by LysPJ »

outworlder wrote: post #105
webmobdev wrote: post #4

Probably just to make sure that Blender remains available for their platform. If popular programs aren't available for their ARM / macOS platform, it can hurt them. Good for Blender.

> If popular programs aren't available for their ARM Not a problem. M1 blender benchmarks were already smoking the x86 Macs, despite the fact Blender was running on M1 with Rosetta. A native build is obviously better of course. But OSX ports are a bigger deal, in general, than the CPU architecture.

In case any readers were wondering, Blender LTS Release 2.93 has native support for Apple Silicon.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#264

Post by bgarbiak »

pradn wrote: post #130
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…

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.…

Yeah, this is more and more popular. Apple has this built in on their product pages, and recently I saw it on Sonos’ website too. You can even preview some cars using AR.

A photo with a new McLaren next to your garage adds a lot of credibility to all of the “honey, I bought a new car” pranks ;)

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#265

Post by sprkwd »

Pulcinella wrote: post #227
drawkbox wrote: post #185

Glad to see Apple supporting more open 3d tools. Apple was huge in getting open standards funded at Khronos for OpenGL ES, WebGL and more. These investments led to lots of great things and innovations. The market for 3d tools is one of the most fixed markets out there and the tools are expensive, that has caused interoperability issues and standards being more proprietary. For instance, COLLADA wasn't great but it wa…

Cinema4D is still ~$100 a month unfortunately. I prefer it’s interface to Blender, even with Blender’s recent UI updates. I don’t think my preference is strong enough to support forking over $100/month, though. The others have a “lite” version or an indie subscription that is significantly cheaper. When you have those, and a lot of other software is is around $10-50 a month, C4D’s pricing is egregious.

Autodesk subs pricing is insane.

https://www.autodesk.co.uk/products

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#266

Post by sprkwd »

mekster wrote: post #96

I'm not a user but I know Blender had existed for quite a while but how is it gaining traction a lot these days suddenly? Is there something that makes it a first choice for many professional users?

- It's cheaper than alternative with no subscription lockin - Faster updates - Quicker bug fixing - now works well in the pipeline - strong ecosystem

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#267

Post by runevault »

barcoder wrote: post #246
runevault wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sculpting mode is worth learning. Grant Abbitt has some great tutorials on that front. Though if you dive too far into that you may wanna look at getting a Wacom tablet or similar. Actually Grant has a lot of good tutorials in general on Blender.

A tablet makes a big difference. Doesn't need to be a Wacom though. There's plenty of very good much cheaper alternatives. A small size is often better as less hand movement is required.

Yeah that was why I said or similar. Maybe should have called it out more, but I got a cheap wacom (non-screen) to learn with though I haven't been doing sculpting lately, need to get back to that.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#268

Post by sfink »

nefitty wrote: post #154
pradn wrote: 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…

The water alert will also mention that you would be better hydrated if you bought ElectroX, the electrolyte drink for serious thinkers. The to-do list will include an item to check out the latest release of Banging Cans, your favorite band. By allowing you to see your friend and his surroundings, you are implicitly allowing through images of the products that are visible, and therefore they will be added to your cloud targeted ad profile.

Not to mention what you won't see. When you drive by protesters about a topic that makes you uncomfortable, your SuperFlow2030 app will blur out the words and images on their signs so they don't disturb you.

The latest safety feature will use facial recognition to highlight anyone you don't know or is not typically in an area, so you can keep an eye on them. Coincidentally, a high percentage of those highlighted people will have a different skin color from you, which deep down in the weights of its classification model is still being used as a handy heuristic even though the developers tried to specifically exclude it.

I, too, wonder what life would be like. Sadly, I don't have to wonder too much, because it appears that it would be like it is now, only more so.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#269

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

zepto wrote: post #241
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I was responding incorrectly to the first child comment of the one linked to > Swift, FoundationDB, Obj-C, Darwin...

Still unclear where your information is coming from. Neither FoundationDB nor Obj-C were started by Apple.

Yep, 50% fail rate there. And arguably even Darwin too, so make that 75% fail rate. I lose.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#270

Post by dagmx »

literallyaduck wrote: post #206
tdrdt wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree I think the reason a lot of big companies are funding Blender is because they use it internally as tool. I can imagine Photoshop is used internally at Apple and they will just pay a license for this. So there is no reason they would start funding Krita or Gimp.

Imagine if companies who heavily used Photoshop funded GIMP at half the license rate, and companies who used Illustrator funded Inkscape at the same half license rate. Donating to LibreOffice at half the rate you pay to office 365. The free alternatives would surpass the paid versions.

That's a lot of ifs. You'd also need to have people in influential positions in the project.

Let's not sugar coat that GIMP and Blender both went to great lengths to eschew industry workflow and UI/UX norms. they both only started shifting to more familiar paradigms when grassroots movements within their user communities pushed hard for it.

Development time and money are only half the battle. Project leadership and politics are an unquantifiable effort.

Blender for example has been capable of great things for a long time. Its surge in popularity was largely down to giving up the ideologies of its unique workflow.

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