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Blender 3.x roadmap

code.blender.org

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Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#91

Post by jedimastert »

winternett wrote: post #77
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…

Blender is amazing for the 3D rendering it can do, and for the fact that it is free... But it is intimidating to people who don't learn it inside and out from a production standpoint when they are doing a lot more than just importing simple objects. But I kind of wish they had a "Blender Light", without all the features and config options, and with a less complex UI... I've been using Panzoid to do certain things, bu…

> But I kind of wish they had a "Blender Light", without all the features and config options, and with a less complex UI

I get what you're talking about, sort of an "iMovie" to Blender's "Final Cut Pro". I think 2.80 actually did a ton of work in that regard, if you've seen it since then. It could definitely be simpler though, and with the UI programming the way it is I suspect it wouldn't take all that much internal change.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of the reason it's as intimidating as it is is because the main aim for buy in for now is studios who favor the power user maximal interfaces of Cinema 4D and Maya and the like

Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#92

Post by valine »

uxcolumbo wrote: post #44
rogual wrote: post #41

I love Blender, but have been stuck on version 2.7 due to what I can only describe as some sort of icon dyslexia. For 2.8, all the Blender icons were replaced with monochromatic ones. This is a very popular trend and a lot of programs are replacing their icons in this way, so it's obviously fine for most people, and I realize this is probably a niche accessibility need I have. But, to use the new icons, I find I have…

So there is no way to mod the tool bars so you can show the old icons?

I mean you could always swap out the assets and rebuild. The icons are compiled into the binary so there’s no easy way to swap them out without recompiling blender.

Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#93

Post by prox »

moron4hire wrote: post #82
prox wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The add on market is really growing, and something like Fluent Power Tools add an amazing array of hard surfaces modeling, and easy to use.

Oh yeah. To be clear, I still love Blender. It's just that some of these changes (like different icons, moving property fields to different places, changing the default keyboard shortcuts), seem like they're coming from the wrong place. It can get hard to search for information about doing specific things in Blender and making sure the video you end up finding (cuz it's always a video, sigh ) matches the version of B…

I feel you, that does happen. My search usually adds the version number, to weed out that post from 2006 from Blender 2.25 :)

Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#94

Post by daniel-thompson »

rogual wrote: post #41

I love Blender, but have been stuck on version 2.7 due to what I can only describe as some sort of icon dyslexia. For 2.8, all the Blender icons were replaced with monochromatic ones. This is a very popular trend and a lot of programs are replacing their icons in this way, so it's obviously fine for most people, and I realize this is probably a niche accessibility need I have. But, to use the new icons, I find I have…

I too cannot deal with monochromatic icons. FYI, 2.9 did (re-)introduce color to many of the UI icons, which made it much easier to use for me than 2.8.

Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#95

Post by matthew_kuiash »

rogual wrote: post #41

I love Blender, but have been stuck on version 2.7 due to what I can only describe as some sort of icon dyslexia. For 2.8, all the Blender icons were replaced with monochromatic ones. This is a very popular trend and a lot of programs are replacing their icons in this way, so it's obviously fine for most people, and I realize this is probably a niche accessibility need I have. But, to use the new icons, I find I have…

Wow! I thought it was just me. I find it incredibly difficult to read icons. Even small design changes throw me - the most annoying was the change in speaker icon across versions of Windows. The bigger the icon the less of a problem it is but those fiddly toolbar icons throw me all the time. I have mentioned this to a few folk but honestly thought I was on my own.

Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#96

Post by DiggyJohnson »

scotty79 wrote: post #85
runevault wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question I always ask myself as an outsider, is this actually weird and outdated, or is it something that, once you get used to, actually makes people able to work more optimally. Sometimes those power tool design decisions are just bad old decisions, sometimes they really do enable the user. Look at Vim, not for everyone, but if you are willing to learn to invest in its crazy, specific style of user interface pe…

There's always path to making things more approachable no matter how powerful they are. You could alter vim in a way that people who have years of expeirience of computer use and browser use know at least how to quit goddamn thing without googling it. Or maybe even create short text, save it, open it again, move blocks of text around. For an average person vim has 100% less utility than the notepad. The power of vim…

Is that a problem, or just reality? One thing I think of a lot these days is the "domain community and the beginner problem". Specifically, many communities I'm tangentially related to seem to overcompensate for beginner comfort at the risk of missing the entire depth of the domain.

I do not see it as a problem that Vim doesn't supply the features you're describing, though I do understand where you're coming from. I am affirmed in my view when we remember that vim runs in a terminal emulator, and the features you're describing are non-trivial to implement in that environment.

I don't mean to sound pedantic, but I don't see this as a problem at all. As it relates to Vim, or many other tools and domains. If Vim was incentivized to increase the size its user-base, I may agree, but this is not the case.

Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#97

Post by smoldesu »

IceHegel wrote: post #57

Biggest thing I’m waiting for is metal support for the cycles render engine. It’s only CPU on Apple Silicon, which is a waste on Pro/Max chips.

...or Apple could bite the bullet and just support the open, next-generation standard everyone is using. Metal is silly, if it's 'superior' to Vulkan, then at least give developers the option. Sadly it's another App Store situation, where you're forced to entrench yourself if you want basic functionality. It feels like MacOS is the new Linux, with how little software actually works on it now and how bad the performance overhead can be in many apps...

Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#98

Post by wlesieutre »

sydthrowaway wrote: post #83
doctoboggan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I partner with a casting house. And the metal is actually not 3D printed. How it works is the design is printed in wax first, this wax is then used to make a plaster mould into which the molten metal is cast.

can ender 3 print wax?

No, you'll want an SLA printer rather than FDM. Something like an Elegoo Mars.

Though there's a bit of an issue going on in that space right now where the company that makes the controller boards for the affordable consumer models has decided to DRM lock their file format and require all of these printers to use their proprietary slicer (Chitubox), locking out the generally better liked open source alternative (Lychee).

If that's an issue for you, you might be able to find an older model that hasn't been updated to recent firmware, but personally I'm waiting on any resin printers until we see how this shakes out. There was some noise about Chitu hearing the community and creating an SDK, but Lychee didn't sound very excited about it.

EDIT - actually it looks like someone has created a lost wax casting filament for FDM printers. Look for "MoldLay". But in terms of printing detail, for small jewelry type projects resin printers are still going to be the better choice.

https://filament2print.com/gb/lay/645-moldlay.html

Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#99

Post by runevault »

scotty79 wrote: post #85
runevault wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question I always ask myself as an outsider, is this actually weird and outdated, or is it something that, once you get used to, actually makes people able to work more optimally. Sometimes those power tool design decisions are just bad old decisions, sometimes they really do enable the user. Look at Vim, not for everyone, but if you are willing to learn to invest in its crazy, specific style of user interface pe…

There's always path to making things more approachable no matter how powerful they are. You could alter vim in a way that people who have years of expeirience of computer use and browser use know at least how to quit goddamn thing without googling it. Or maybe even create short text, save it, open it again, move blocks of text around. For an average person vim has 100% less utility than the notepad. The power of vim…

You can't always build something that lets you act like a beginner and gradually transition to the power user version, or at least people haven't always found ways to make that work. The UX challenge of allowing both experiences in the same app, especially with the ability to gradually move from one to the other, is very very complex.

Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#100

Post by wlesieutre »

winternett wrote: post #77
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…

Blender is amazing for the 3D rendering it can do, and for the fact that it is free... But it is intimidating to people who don't learn it inside and out from a production standpoint when they are doing a lot more than just importing simple objects. But I kind of wish they had a "Blender Light", without all the features and config options, and with a less complex UI... I've been using Panzoid to do certain things, bu…

You might be interested in the "Blender 101 (Application templates)" item in this roadmap:

> Being able to configure Blender for personal workflows is a key Blender target, part of the 2.8 project.

> To bring configuring even one step further, .blend files can be used to replace the standard startup file – creating ‘custom versions’ of Blender this way. These templates will allow to completely configure UI layouts, define custom keymaps and enable add-ons to run at startup. A smart Python scripter can design complete new applications this way, using vanilla Blender releases. As prototypes the team will release a couple of simple templates: a video-player review tool and the 100% dumbed down ‘Monkey Blender’.

> A template used this way will be called “Blender Application Template” or just “Blender App”. Planning is to have this working as beta for Blender 3.1, after extensive testing and reviews by contributors and module teams.

I think the bigger issue you're going to run into with "make Blender but simple" is that the subset of features that you want in a simplified blender is a different subset from what other people want. You want to do rigging on imported object files, but for somebody else rigging is a feature that would get cut out completely. They're just trying to model a doughnut and a coffee mug and do a still render of it, or at most animate the camera moving around the scene.

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