I’d really like to see something like blender come for the 3D CAD industry, at the moment it feels like the only people who would lose out are AutoDesk. The amount of money that flows in and out of 3D cad (as subscription and then value created) having a first class open source kernel and tooling, would be giving big industrial players freedom to modify and tailor to their needs as well as smaller / hobbyists get sta…
Blender 5.0
41–50 of 377 posts
Re: Blender 5.0
#42What’s the consensus on the future of this type of 3D tool? Especially for video animation/CGI in movies/tv/ads? Seems like in 10 years AI will basically make it pointless to use a tool like this at least for people working on average projects. What do folks in the industry think? What’s the long term outlook?
Directors spend a LOT of effort trying to keep continuity and that's the weakest part of AI. What blender and other CGI software gets for free is continuity. The 3D model does not change without explicitly making it change. Until we get AI which can regenerate the same model from one scene to the next, the use of AI in CGI will be severely limited.
Re: Blender 5.0
#43I’d really like to see something like blender come for the 3D CAD industry, at the moment it feels like the only people who would lose out are AutoDesk. The amount of money that flows in and out of 3D cad (as subscription and then value created) having a first class open source kernel and tooling, would be giving big industrial players freedom to modify and tailor to their needs as well as smaller / hobbyists get sta…
Same, but I don't think it's possible without a large and sustained investment into a free geometric modelling kernel, which can probably be only done by a government. Parasolid is powering practically every major CAD system. Its development started in 1986 and it's still actively developed. The amount of effort that goes into those things is immense (39 years of commercial development!) and I don't believe it can be…
Fornjot has been attempting this: https://www.fornjot.app
It's going to be years or decades before it's competitive though. Also, it looks like they switched to keeping progress updates private except to sponsors, which means I don't actually have any easily-accessible information about it anymore which is sad.
Re: Blender 5.0
#44Re: Blender 5.0
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use Plasticity to model for 3D printing. Having to worry about polygons in Blender is really annoying.
So model using the NURBS tools?
Re: Blender 5.0
#46I’d really like to see something like blender come for the 3D CAD industry, at the moment it feels like the only people who would lose out are AutoDesk. The amount of money that flows in and out of 3D cad (as subscription and then value created) having a first class open source kernel and tooling, would be giving big industrial players freedom to modify and tailor to their needs as well as smaller / hobbyists get sta…
FreeCAD is the front-runner for me. KiCAD was also a meh ECAD FOSS alternative 7-8 years ago, now it is by far the tool of choice for regular ECAD designs. I can see FreeCad getting there by 2030.
It seems like it has lots of capability but still "punch your monitor" levels of difficulty just trying to do the most basic stuff.
Re: Blender 5.0
#47What’s the consensus on the future of this type of 3D tool? Especially for video animation/CGI in movies/tv/ads? Seems like in 10 years AI will basically make it pointless to use a tool like this at least for people working on average projects. What do folks in the industry think? What’s the long term outlook?
If you don’t work in the industry, you have zero chance of accurately evaluating whether or not, or how, it will be impacted by any new technology. The fact that it “seems easy” is a great flag that it probably isn’t.
Really no one can predict the future.
Re: Blender 5.0
#48I’d really like to see something like blender come for the 3D CAD industry, at the moment it feels like the only people who would lose out are AutoDesk. The amount of money that flows in and out of 3D cad (as subscription and then value created) having a first class open source kernel and tooling, would be giving big industrial players freedom to modify and tailor to their needs as well as smaller / hobbyists get sta…
You're on point that there's a tremendous amount of money captures by Autodesk for CAD software that could be better directed at the open source community instead.
Software like OpenSCAD and FreeCAD are obviously not suitable for much commercial work, and have very irritating limitations for hobbyist work, in my mind a big part of that is the UI and Blender has a good and established UI at this point so I'd love to see the open source CAD that provides an alternative to vendor lock in come from a Blender add-on instead of a separate program.
I am no expert but as I understand it the primary difficulty with developing good alternatives to commercial CAD software lie in the development of an effective geometric kernel.
It seems to me that if a developer of an opensource CAD program develops it as a Blender add-on they can effectively outsource the remainder of the development efforts to the Blender community while focus can be made on the CAD kernel itself.
Re: Blender 5.0
#49What’s the consensus on the future of this type of 3D tool? Especially for video animation/CGI in movies/tv/ads? Seems like in 10 years AI will basically make it pointless to use a tool like this at least for people working on average projects. What do folks in the industry think? What’s the long term outlook?
I recently used WAN to generate a looping clip of clouds moving quickly, something that’s difficult to do in CGI and impossible to capture live action. It worked out because I didn’t have specific demands other than what I just said, and I wasn’t asking for anything too obscure.
At this point, I expect the quality of local video models (the only kind I’m willing to work with professionally) to go up, but prompt adherence seems like a tough nut to crack, which makes me think it may be a while before we have prosumer models that can replace what I do in Blender.