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Blender 5.2 LTS

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Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#41

Post by jambalaya8 »

cheschire wrote: post #12
unshavedyak wrote: post #3

For those of you who get value out of Blender please consider donating: https://fund.blender.org/ :) It's a wonderful project. Even small amounts help. Thanks!

Done. I was feeling bad for saying how often I used blender without paying a cent not 20 seconds earlier in this very thread. Then I saw your message. The fact that Apple Pay is an option made it take only another 20 seconds for me to throw some money at a great project.

One of my adopted "kids" I taught years ago picked this up at 17. He is 26, now. He "borrowed" the software to start (fair enough; it was a friend's license and not used at the same time), and didn't pay for a copy of Blender until he had a career path in mind and used Blender regularly.

A monthly thing makes no sense; just letting hobbyists dabble until they are in a place to pay used to be a lot more normal. They ought to make the entry for paying a bit less heartburn-inducing, though.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#42

Post by wpm »

azalemeth wrote: post #36
maqp wrote: post #28

What's the ideal route for someone familiar with 3ds Max to learn Blender? I feel a bit stuck with my proprietary skillset.

I "grew up" using Cinema 4D. Likewise I just find that the UI of blender is for whatever reason _incredibly_ not intuitive for me. I also don't really like the fact that everything is a youtube video nowadays; I guess it's easier to monetise for the kind people who make tutorials but when I learnt 3D modelling as a teenager (in ~2005 with a desire for 3D printing!) C4D just intuitively "clicked" and they had a lot of…

Maybe this'll get me torched but one of the more useful things I've had an LLM do is generate a little tutorial for Blender. Though I'm coming in with zero 3D modeling experience, and the tutorial was for the basics, what I got (and this was with a local quantized Qwen, I'm sure the big boys would've done a better job) was fairly workable.

My issue was yes, it's always a YouTube video, and also always for shit I didn't want to do. I don't want to make a donut. I don't want to model a coffee cup, I want to make something else.

It was full of little errors here and there (the human crafted ones are too because the Blender UI changes so often), but since it had gotten me started and "in" the UI I could usually figure it out myself or use a search engine to find what I was looking for.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#43

Post by embedding-shape »

Gigachad wrote: post #34
embedding-shape wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do tiny projects in Blender and just trudge through the horrible experience of having to look up a bunch of stuff. I also moved from 3ds Max to Blender, but back in the Blender 2.7 days, I'm sure it's easier today. Basically take whatever you'd do in 3ds Max normally, commit to doing in in Blender and prepare to Google/Ask an LLM "I can do X in 3ds Max 2025, how can I do the same or equivalent in Blender 5.2?" A LOT.…

IMO it’s probably better to start following at least one tutorial video which will walk you through most of the common actions and UI.

Different minds learn best different ways I suppose, I could never go through a "tutorial video" for any visual programs, always done it "the hard way" by basically looking up action by action. But again, YMMV of course.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#44

Post by sm-silversight »

embedding-shape wrote: post #30

> Node-powered physics Ah man, been waiting so long for this, finally! The integration with sound to geometry nodes is also great and will be a lot of fun for music videos. Every day Blender inches closer to Houdini, and I for one am very happy about it :) Really like the polished changelog notes they've done for quite some time as well, used to be a huge hassle to actually understand what changed and it's a breeze n…

>Blender inches closer to Houdini

Yeah but the distance is crossing the atlantic. I saw this as a blender user who glimpsed houdini a bit.

Damn that's a cool program.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#45

Post by p-e-w »

zuInnp wrote: post #39

I am using Blender since my Master thesis in 2017. It is impressive how much has happened. Also giving some money to them because they don't get that much donations (if you compare it to Thunderbird for example).

Wait, Thunderbird is getting more donations than Blender?

I was under the impression that Thunderbird is on life support, while Blender is everywhere.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#46

Post by embedding-shape »

sm-silversight wrote: post #44
embedding-shape wrote: post #30

> Node-powered physics Ah man, been waiting so long for this, finally! The integration with sound to geometry nodes is also great and will be a lot of fun for music videos. Every day Blender inches closer to Houdini, and I for one am very happy about it :) Really like the polished changelog notes they've done for quite some time as well, used to be a huge hassle to actually understand what changed and it's a breeze n…

>Blender inches closer to Houdini Yeah but the distance is crossing the atlantic. I saw this as a blender user who glimpsed houdini a bit. Damn that's a cool program.

> Yeah but the distance is crossing the atlantic

Indeed, a far way to go. But I also remember discussing the Blender UI/UX with people back in 2.5 days, and we were all like "Yeah, the UI is something else, but it is what it is, maybe some day" and look at it now, it's a night and day difference. I have no doubt in Blender's ability to continue iterating over decades to reach something amazing, they've already proven this clearly :)

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#47

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

jqbd wrote: post #40
azalemeth wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I "grew up" using Cinema 4D. Likewise I just find that the UI of blender is for whatever reason _incredibly_ not intuitive for me. I also don't really like the fact that everything is a youtube video nowadays; I guess it's easier to monetise for the kind people who make tutorials but when I learnt 3D modelling as a teenager (in ~2005 with a desire for 3D printing!) C4D just intuitively "clicked" and they had a lot of…

Maybe you're biased by children's ease of learning - neural plasticity?

No. C4D was magic and very intuitive. The UI was very good and made it easy to safely explore without causing damage.

I don't remember the last time I used a software package as smooth and clean and tidy as C4D.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#48

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

jijijijij wrote: post #13
phren0logy wrote: post #2

I don't use Blender, so my admiration is from a distance but: Wow - what an impressive project. At least if I understand it correctly, this is a real pro-level piece of free and open software that's equivalent to thousands and thousands of dollars in closed-source commercial software.

It's not just incredibly powerful software, it's also incredibly fun and intuitive to use (once the UI has clicked with you). There are still some areas where commercial competitors got edge, but Blender covers a wider base, is the more complete/universal software already. Lot's of people prefer Blender's UI. It's also rapidly developing, the competition is not. I am pretty sure it will become industry standard at so…

> I am pretty sure it will become industry standard at some point.

I remember people saying this in 2004.

Blender is widely used in "the industry" (whatever that industry is). What is has really accomplished in terms of "the industry standard" has, from my POV, been preventing a proprietary system from becoming the standard. That's what happened in the DAW space, where ProTools was the industry standard, and it has taken 20 years to get to the point where that hegemony is no longer as solid as it once was (thanks, Ableton!)

There are several different choices for all the things Blender does, but the existence of a FLOSS tool that does them (and does them well) prevents any of the proprietary ones from being "the one".

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#49

Post by Matumio »

embedding-shape wrote: post #43
Gigachad wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it’s probably better to start following at least one tutorial video which will walk you through most of the common actions and UI.

Different minds learn best different ways I suppose, I could never go through a "tutorial video" for any visual programs, always done it "the hard way" by basically looking up action by action. But again, YMMV of course.

Yes, but I think for Blender specifically this is the hard way.

After a video tutorial I always concluded that I had a few really clumsily ways to work around my lack of knowledge. Some workflows really need an expert demonstration, or you won't even know what is possible. (I do pause the videos to look up the docu.)

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#50

Post by kdheiwns »

The most impressive thing about Blender is how it feels like early 2000s-era creative software. And I mean that in a good way (blender was actually awful back then, but it's great now)

It opens instantly on my computer. It's fast. It's lightweight to the point my fans don't even spin up no matter what I do. It's customizable. It does everything I want to do and it never gets in the way of me trying to do my job. Meanwhile Photoshop these days randomly shows fucking popups about features and begs me to use its cloud scam, it's slower than it was 20 years ago without offering significantly better features, and the UI has somehow gotten worse when it was fine before. Blender does everything right. All I want is someone to take Blender's design philosophy and make a 2D image editor for desktop. Or hell, everything. I'm sick of bloat and BS in every damn app these days.

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