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Blender 3.x roadmap

code.blender.org

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Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#111

Post by [deleted] »

daniel-thompson wrote: post #94
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.

[deleted]

Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#112

Post by scotty79 »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #96
scotty79 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's only a problem if you want more people to use the power and great ideas of vim. If not then it's not a problem at all. Just reality.

Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#113

Post by scotty79 »

runevault wrote: post #99
scotty79 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree it's hard. Though my claim is that lack of will is more of a factor than complexity of way.

If any of vim great ideas ever enters shared intuition about computers it won't be due to development of vim.

Ability to gradually transition between beginner user towards power user is natural way all modern software is written. That's why you have menus and can point things with mouse and often drag stuff around, and have a cursor and a text box where cursor keys and home and end and delete and backspace and shift works. And you have hints and indications of keyboard shortcuts. Plenty of stuff is discoverable.

You start with shared understanding and build upon that.

Some legacy UIs like Blender evolve and adapt to broadening shared intuition others like vim fail to.

Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#114

Post by doctoboggan »

g19fanatic wrote: post #39
doctoboggan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah you can also have it print the python command called for every action you take in the GUI

Could you point me to some documentation for this? This has been the only hindrance for me to automate things without digging into the documentation myself

You can either switch to the "scripting" tab or just add/change any window to the "Scripting > Info" window. I personally change the animation timeline window to the info window on the main "Layout" tab since I don't do animations.

Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#115

Post by doctoboggan »

myrealusername wrote: post #43
doctoboggan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rings are printed in wax and then a plaster mould is made using the wax. The gold or silver is cast using the plaster mould. I don’t do any of it myself, I have a casting partner who can do it for me. You can also find online services like shapeways to do it as well but they charge a lot mire than the real casting houses. Some casting houses I’ve worked with were the back ends to shapeways themselves.

Could you provide the names of some of the casting houses? I've only used Shapeways for some personal projects, but would love to have some more options. Nice shop, BTW.

Sure, send me an email and I can make some introductions. (jack @ domain I posted in my original comment) The casting houses I work with are in the LA jewelry district. I contrasted them to other "online services" because these are more old school business that like to do business over the phone and receive payment via cash/check. You also don't know what the piece will cost until its cast since they charge by weight of the final piece. Most of the casting houses also do not do wax printing or polishing, so you will have to find other people to do each of those steps. Luckily the jewelry district has people who do everything it just take a bit more work to coordinate it all.

Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#116

Post by doctoboggan »

chrisweekly wrote: post #38
doctoboggan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I am running it on the lowest level instance, (1 CPU, 512 memory). And I dont actually do any rendering on this instance, just the STL generation. I use Threejs to display/render the STL once its done.

Cool setup; have you posted more about it?

No, but I have been meaning to one of these days.

Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#117

Post by raxxorrax »

supernes wrote: post #2

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.

I have a macbook air with M1 and blender is extremely fast (emulated x86). If only macs had sensible keyboards so the hotkeys would be easier (not a mac fan, just got it for free). Highly recommend a Numpad though it is a pinnacle of input technology.

But even older hardware can use blender without even needing a good GPU as render previews have become quite fast. If you create models for real-time rendering, an older PC without some super GPU is quite enough to work with.

Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#118

Post by ralusek »

hjaarnio wrote: post #103
ralusek wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, except that you CAN instance collections. You can do linked imports of collections and you can do linked duplicates of collections. And I understand the difference conceptually, but what I'm saying is that the distinction always ends up being arbitrary to me from and actual usage point of view. If I've made a wall or a tower out of mesh data directly, or a collection of objects, it makes no difference to me in r…

You're correct in saying there's no real difference between objects and collections, but there is a meaningful distinction between mesh data and objects, in the object just being a container for the mesh. The modifiers, including array, actually work on the underlying mesh data, not the at the object level, and produce a mesh object as an output. As such, the array modifier does not utilize instancing but actually co…

Thanks for the tips, although I did know those. Instancing/array is just one functionality. What if I'd like to throw on a lattice to tweak one instance to fit somewhere better? What if I'd like to use the curve modifier?

The point is, the fact that you can do instancing through the workarounds means that there isn't a technical barrier to doing any of this. You say that it would introduce footguns to the UX, but I consider the workarounds to be footguns.

Re: Blender 3.x roadmap

#119

Post by hjaarnio »

ralusek wrote: post #118
hjaarnio wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're correct in saying there's no real difference between objects and collections, but there is a meaningful distinction between mesh data and objects, in the object just being a container for the mesh. The modifiers, including array, actually work on the underlying mesh data, not the at the object level, and produce a mesh object as an output. As such, the array modifier does not utilize instancing but actually co…

Thanks for the tips, although I did know those. Instancing/array is just one functionality. What if I'd like to throw on a lattice to tweak one instance to fit somewhere better? What if I'd like to use the curve modifier? The point is, the fact that you can do instancing through the workarounds means that there isn't a technical barrier to doing any of this. You say that it would introduce footguns to the UX, but I c…

But there is a technical barrier, which stems from what the 'instancing' actually is on the technical level; uploading only one copy of the geometry to the GPU, and rendering it in multiple places, which you can't do if you want to use separate modifier stack for different copies (since modifiers are done on CPU beforehand). The instancing features are ways to set just that kind of instancing up, and as such fundamentally incompatible with separate modifiers between instances of the same geometry.

But yes, I do see the use case for collection level modifier stacks, I just don't think implementing those is exactly as trivial as you figure it out to be. Not impossible either of course (for example by doing some sort of copy-on-write thing if the geometry is modified), but it'd be introducting a different kind of copying mechanism with significant performance differences, which smells a bit footgunny to me

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