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Watchtower – Blender Studio

studio.blender.org

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Re: Watchtower – Blender Studio

#41

Post by digisign »

archerx wrote: post #12
cardanome wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly before the 2.8 I would have agreed that there was a little bit too much friction but now I think they strike the right balance and I really, really hope they never again change the UI except for minor tweaks. Easy to use and intuitive should not always be the most important goal. Productivity and not breaking existing users work flow are also very underrated aspects. I think the right comparison would be vim…

So baby duck syndrome and you rather use the bike without the seat? Good luck with that after any amount of time/distance. The other programs have lasted decades and have been used to make thousands of movies and games for good reason. Because they work very well with the minimal friction and have PROVEN reliability.

As someone with no "dog in the hunt" you sound entitled.

I'm sure there is still room for improvement however.

Re: Watchtower – Blender Studio

#42

Post by wccrawford »

throwpupper wrote: post #28
doctoboggan wrote: post #2

Blender is such an amazing open source tool. It used to have a reputation (along with GIMP) of having a steep learning curve, but that is definitely no longer true. They recently (v2.8) did a major UI/UX overhaul and its now very easy to use. Its also completely scriptable in python. I used blender on google cloud platform for my startup ( https://lulimjewelry.com ) where I digitally engrave my customers fingerprints…

This person posts an identical comment in every single Blender thread to promote his startup. Check their post history. I am just wondering, is such a consistent plugging allowed on HN? To me it lowers the quality of the discussion and their posts are often voted to the top on all Blender related posts.

I read it and wondered if "recently" really still included 2.8? That was quite a while ago now.

Re: Watchtower – Blender Studio

#43

Post by Tomte »

throwpupper wrote: post #28
doctoboggan wrote: post #2

Blender is such an amazing open source tool. It used to have a reputation (along with GIMP) of having a steep learning curve, but that is definitely no longer true. They recently (v2.8) did a major UI/UX overhaul and its now very easy to use. Its also completely scriptable in python. I used blender on google cloud platform for my startup ( https://lulimjewelry.com ) where I digitally engrave my customers fingerprints…

This person posts an identical comment in every single Blender thread to promote his startup. Check their post history. I am just wondering, is such a consistent plugging allowed on HN? To me it lowers the quality of the discussion and their posts are often voted to the top on all Blender related posts.

Copy-pasting the identical comment certainly isn't, dang told me so when I was once re-using a comment I made earlier for another thread.

I think it's cool what doctoboggan has done with Blender, I feel it's okay to mention it in every Blender thread, but he should actually post a fresh comment.

And then it's up to us users if we feel it's become a bit stale. Downvoting exists.

Re: Watchtower – Blender Studio

#44

Post by boogies »

kmeisthax wrote: post #29
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I will try Blender 3 but I doubt massive strides have been made to improve the UI/UX since 2.8 Well the left mouse button is now select rather than the right mouse button, for starters.

Half of me is wondering why they ever thought RMB-select was a good idea, and the other half of me thinks not having RMB-select is some kind of sacrilige.

> not having RMB-select is some kind of sacrilige

Blender still does have it as an option, in fact one of the few that are displayed front and center before you start editing when it first starts up.

Re: Watchtower – Blender Studio

#45

Post by aceazzameen »

archerx wrote: post #20
onion2k wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been doing 3D for about a decade and a half You have a lot of inertia to overcome. That's 15 years of muscle memory and expectations built using different UIs, different paradigms, and different ideas to achieve the same result. You need to factor the fact you're going to be thinking "But I could do that much more easily in !" a lot. It's possible that you won't ever overcome those thoughts. Forgetting is a lo…

If blender is so great why can I jump between many different 3D programs without much friction, why was I able to learn other 3D apps a long the way without much friction? I have been trying to use Blender since at least 2003 and each time it refused to stick and was happy to stop using it. Sure it does everything but excels at nothing.

I can relate with you. It's been quite difficult for me to unlearn old afforfances and learn Blender. Because Blender is free and quite capable at what it does, it's training a whole new generation on how to use 3D software. And people are producing work expertly and quickly with it. Because of this and being open source, Blender is going to be the future. You and me, we just need to spend more time with it and unlearn what we previously learned.

Re: Watchtower – Blender Studio

#46

Post by joeld42 »

archerx wrote: post #4

I'm always told how blender is amazing and there seems to be some impressive tech under the hood, the simulations look amazing and some stuff produced with it looks great but every time I try to use it, it is incredibly frustrating, like it's close but still so far away when it comes to the UI. I have been doing 3D for about a decade and a half, I have made intros and virtual sets for TV shows so I have some experien…

have you tried b4artists (https://www.bforartists.de/)? It's a fork of blender designed to make it easier to use. I'm not sure how good it is because I bit the bullet and got used to blender but I know how you feel.

IMHO, the thing that makes it hard is that everything, everything is context dependent. A lot of operations depend on where your mouse is, both what panel it is over and even how far it is from the objects. Which is weird and counterintuitive. Once you learn it, conciously or unconciously, it's very powerful -- dragging to scale something in blender "feels" a lot more accurate once you latch on to the idea that where you start the drag matters. I'm not sure that tradeoff is worth it, but they have been putting a lot of work into the UI and it is improving. At least they finally let go of right-click select by default.

Re: Watchtower – Blender Studio

#47

Post by rogual »

kmeisthax wrote: post #29
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I will try Blender 3 but I doubt massive strides have been made to improve the UI/UX since 2.8 Well the left mouse button is now select rather than the right mouse button, for starters.

Half of me is wondering why they ever thought RMB-select was a good idea, and the other half of me thinks not having RMB-select is some kind of sacrilige.

IIRC they thought it would be intuitive to have left-click "place the cursor", just like a word processor. That meant "select object" had to go somewhere else, and ended up on RMB.

Re: Watchtower – Blender Studio

#48

Post by twobitshifter »

archerx wrote: post #11
doctoboggan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am assuming you’ve used the UI since the 2.8 upgrade? Have you looked into the “industry compatible” key maps that you can switch to in the settings? I’ve used Rhino, Cinema4d, Maya, solid works and blender and while they all have their pros and cons blender doesn’t stand out as significantly worse in my opinion.

I have used the 2.8 "upgrade" but it was still a pain and things were much faster and easier to do in 3Ds max. Blender relies too much on shortcuts. With 3D max you can do almost everything with just the mouse and in blender that is not the case. I have used 3D max, Maya, XSI, Houdini, Modo, Unity, Unreal Engine 3/4/5 and all of these seemed intuitive and I never felt frustrated by them unlike blender. At this point…

I think in conclusion your hope is that blender would become more mouse driven than it is now? Unfortunately at this point, this is akin to people asking for better mouse support in eMacs. It won’t be high priority because of the community preference for using shortcuts. Whether shortcuts are faster or not in all circumstances, they’re now second nature to the serious users and the keyboard interface is seen by them as one of the great strengths of the software.

Re: Watchtower – Blender Studio

#49

Post by dagmx »

poulpy123 wrote: post #26
archerx wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If blender is so great why can I jump between many different 3D programs without much friction, why was I able to learn other 3D apps a long the way without much friction? I have been trying to use Blender since at least 2003 and each time it refused to stick and was happy to stop using it. Sure it does everything but excels at nothing.

Many people are using blender so maybe it's you and not the software?

Prior to Blender 2.6, Blender used to really go out of its way to be different in every way.

With blender 2.7 and 2.8 they made lots of concessions to have more familiar interfaces.

The thing is, most every other 3D app uses the industry standard control scheme. Blender is different.

That means switching between Maya , Houdini, Max etc is fairly easy on your muscle memory. Pulling up Blender is a very rough context switch.

2.8 made it a lot better, but using the Maya keymap makes working in the Blender way kind of tricky, so you're still stuck in this weird hybrid.

Blenders great, but it definitely isn't as easy to switch between apps.

Re: Watchtower – Blender Studio

#50

Post by DonHopkins »

hwers wrote: post #24
doctoboggan wrote: post #2

Blender is such an amazing open source tool. It used to have a reputation (along with GIMP) of having a steep learning curve, but that is definitely no longer true. They recently (v2.8) did a major UI/UX overhaul and its now very easy to use. Its also completely scriptable in python. I used blender on google cloud platform for my startup ( https://lulimjewelry.com ) where I digitally engrave my customers fingerprints…

Right now is honestly a great time to get into 3D stuff with blender and threejs etc. They've been brewing in adolescence for like a decade but it's all suddenly really mature and exciting right now (and mobile GPUs have caught up nicely). If anyone finds themselves asking "where the heck are the low hanging fruit anymore?" (like I did recently) the answer is in 3D content for the web and other places. It's a much mo…

The wonderful thing is that since Blender is totally scriptable in Python, and Python is the lingua franca of machine learning, you can seamlessly and efficiently use Blender to do all kinds of cool things with machine learning and AI!

Both creating ML-enhanced content creation and editing tools of course, but also synthesizing images, videos, 2D and 3D content for ML training.

For example, you can use using GPU-accelerated ray tracing and procedural character animation in photorealistic environments to train body tracking and pose estimation networks, since you get the precise "ground truth" and pixel-perfect semantic segmentation for free without enlisting Mechanical Turk to tediously and unreliably annotate millions of video frames.

And you can use randomization and retexturing to plug in different body types, skin tones, hair styles, clothing, etc, to train it to work with diverse sets of people, in a wide range of environments, camera angles, and lighting conditions.

BlenderAI : Artificial Intelligence in Blender:

https://download.blender.org/documentation/bc2008/BlenderAI....

Blender for AI Devs, pt. 1: Overview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtRxC9HPGd0

Blender pipeline to generate images for deep learning (BlenderProc) - Maximilian Denninger:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AvY_iS6xQA

>Using blender to generate realistic images for ML training:

>This is a two parts talk. It is based on the papers "3D Scene Reconstruction from a Single Viewport" presented at ECCV 2020 and the "BlenderProc" paper. The speaker is the main author of both papers. This is the recording of part 2.

>Recording of part 1:

https://youtu.be/cGGm3Vjdp8s

>References to everything covered in the talk:

https://www.reddit.com/r/2D3DAI/comments/jbkjdy/references_f...

>Lecture abstract: We present BlenderProc, which is a modular procedural pipeline, helping in generating real looking images for the training of convolutional neural networks. These can be used in a variety of use cases including segmentation, depth, normal and pose estimation and many others. A key feature of our extension of blender is the simple to use modular pipeline, which was designed to be easily extendable. By offering standard modules, which cover a variety of scenarios, we provide a starting point on which new modules can be created.

>arxiv:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01911

>git:

https://github.com/DLR-RM/BlenderProc

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