Blender 3.x roadmap

#1

Post by homarp » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 11:00 AM UTC

Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#2

Post by supernes » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 11:13 AM UTC

Great to see they're working on Metal support for the viewport (and Vulkan, of course). Apple took their sweet time coming onboard as a sponsor, but now that they have I hope it will give the developers all the support they need to work out the issues.

Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#3

Post by Tomte » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 11:20 AM UTC

I do understand that this a roadmap for the 3.x series and not for the very first 3.0 release, but oh boy, is that a lot!

Improvements across the board. Is there even a subsystem that doesn't have big plans? Apart from physics, and that seems to be subsumed into Everything Nodes.

Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#4

Post by mdrzn » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 11:32 AM UTC

That's A LOT of updates to do! Great roadmap tho, I only recently started learning Blender and I'm amazed at the capabilities it has.

Can't wait for it to get even better.

Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#5

Post by andrepd » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 11:34 AM UTC

> The general guideline will be to keep Blender functionally compatible with 2.8x and later. Existing workflows or usability habits shouldn’t be broken without good reasons – with general agreement and clearly communicated in advance.

Oh boy. How I wish so much that other software developers would follow this principle... It seems nearly every software I use and rely on has to change its appearance and interface every 6-12 months, breaking familiarity for no objective reason, and simply because "it looks better" to look at (and not necessarily to use!) to the subjective eyes of someone.

Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#6

Post by atoav » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 11:46 AM UTC

I especially like that they plan to decouple Time from Frames. That could lead to extremely cool ways to deal with time in the future (e g. automating speed changes via keyframes to slow down or speed up time globally.

Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#7

Post by moffkalast » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 11:46 AM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #5

> The general guideline will be to keep Blender functionally compatible with 2.8x and later. Existing workflows or usability habits shouldn’t be broken without good reasons – with general agreement and clearly communicated in advance. Oh boy. How I wish so much that other software developers would follow this principle... It seems nearly every software I use and rely on has to change its appearance and interface ever…

Well blender just did that exact thing going from 2.7 to 2.8 recently, although it was at least somewhat justified. But now that they've reworked it it doesn't make sense to do it again any time soon.

Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#8

Post by doctoboggan » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 11:47 AM UTC

Blender is such an amazing tool. I have a side business where I create 3d printed jewelry with my customer's fingerprints on it in gold and silver (https://lulimjewelry.com) and I use Blender on the backend for all of the jewelry creation.

I run blender headless in a docker container on google cloud run. When needed I invoke it with an image and have a blender script "engrave" that image on the jewelry and output an STL file.

It is incredibly flexible to script in python, although its not very "pythonic". The UI is quite stateful (edit mode, object mode, which items are selected, etc) and you have to keep track of that state in your program. But once you get around those issues you can do quite a lot, and its all a free program!

Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#9

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 11:50 AM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #5

> The general guideline will be to keep Blender functionally compatible with 2.8x and later. Existing workflows or usability habits shouldn’t be broken without good reasons – with general agreement and clearly communicated in advance. Oh boy. How I wish so much that other software developers would follow this principle... It seems nearly every software I use and rely on has to change its appearance and interface ever…

[deleted]

Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#10

Post by peytoncasper » Thu, Oct 28, 2021, 11:52 AM UTC

doctoboggan wrote: post #8

Blender is such an amazing tool. I have a side business where I create 3d printed jewelry with my customer's fingerprints on it in gold and silver ( https://lulimjewelry.com ) and I use Blender on the backend for all of the jewelry creation. I run blender headless in a docker container on google cloud run. When needed I invoke it with an image and have a blender script "engrave" that image on the jewelry and output a…

I just wanted to say that your process sounds incredibly awesome. I was curious, what type of instance do you have running behind your Cloud Run job?

I know rendering can be quite heavy on a CPU, but it sounds like you're running a series of commands to generate a model instead