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Blender 5.2 LTS

blender.org

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Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#131

Post by neutronicus »

tjoff wrote: post #74
pilgrim0 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blender does open in a blink, it is scary how good it is. I share the exact same perception as yourself. In comparison, sometimes I need to use Fusion 360, and its performance is abysmal. I wish I could do parametric design in blender

CAD Sketcher add-on adds parametric design to blender. Haven't used it but probably not ready for real use.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92QmjS-xDaI https://hlorus.github.io/CAD_Sketcher/ Though people are so eager to be locked into Fusion 360 I will never understand. Especially when Freecad is so much better than it used to be.

Replicating Parasolid in OSS is hard

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#132

Post by bigyabai »

socalgal2 wrote: post #125

I love that Blender exists and I donate to it at a high-ish $$$ level monthly. That said, I can't help but feel something is wrong with 3D asset creation in that becoming an expert at Blender or 3DSMax, Maya or literally any other 3D creation software, it's a multi-month if not multi-year project. There are 1000s upon 1000s of options buried all over in nested upon nested options. Maybe AI will solve this. You ask fo…

One benefit of Blender is that it does lean pretty hard into separating distinct workflows. When you're using it on a team, you can teach people one tab at a time, and let them explore sculpting or texturing if that's their skillset.

It did take me ~5 years to get comfortable with the majority of Blender's features, but I made decent contributions to a small project before then. Solo stuff is much harder since you have to play the one-man-band by yourself.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#133

Post by kg »

socalgal2 wrote: post #125

I love that Blender exists and I donate to it at a high-ish $$$ level monthly. That said, I can't help but feel something is wrong with 3D asset creation in that becoming an expert at Blender or 3DSMax, Maya or literally any other 3D creation software, it's a multi-month if not multi-year project. There are 1000s upon 1000s of options buried all over in nested upon nested options. Maybe AI will solve this. You ask fo…

> It (3d asset creation) practially hasn't changed much since ~1995.

I don't think this is strictly true, not only are there new approaches to modeling like mudbox and such, but the nature of the assets people are creating is meaningfully different in 2026 than it was in 1995. The polycounts are orders of magnitude higher, the way you texture and shade the models is different, etc.

And then the actual hardware being used to render the finished assets is very different - it's much faster, it has dedicated acceleration for rasterization and ray/path tracing, etc. Fewer compromises are necessary to deliver your 3D assets to the viewer than back in 1995 and it's cheaper to deliver them.

It's true that a lot of the fundamentals haven't changed though. I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#134

Post by bigyabai »

KPGv2 wrote: post #110
keyle wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's had a lot of money put through it since its early days, with quirky shortcuts and quirky features. Imagine if they made Gimp good, this would be what blender became in 3D. They've done it right, with a foundation and it appears to run like clockwork. Feature wise it now rivals with some pretty expensive alternatives. Open source; can win!

> Imagine if they made Gimp good, I have a vague recollection that twenty years ago GIMP paid some designers to come up with a great UI, but once the design was ready, GIMP was like "nah we don't like that" and kept their bad UI. I do image stuff so rarely that GIMP is fine because it's free. But its UI is so bad. I don't know about now, but I remember a few years ago someone pointed out that GIMP had over a million…

For minimal edits, Pinta does the job IMO: https://www.pinta-project.com/

Gimp still has a lot of good features that I find myself crawling back for, on bigger projects. But Pinta has that good ol' fashioned Paint.NET feel to it that a lot of people still strive for.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#135

Post by 10000truths »

socalgal2 wrote: post #125

I love that Blender exists and I donate to it at a high-ish $$$ level monthly. That said, I can't help but feel something is wrong with 3D asset creation in that becoming an expert at Blender or 3DSMax, Maya or literally any other 3D creation software, it's a multi-month if not multi-year project. There are 1000s upon 1000s of options buried all over in nested upon nested options. Maybe AI will solve this. You ask fo…

A lot of those options are necessary complexity, not incidental. 3D modeling and animation are just very complex series of tasks, you can't condense the options much without sacrificing functionality for some critical workflow. The only way to satisfy both:

a) Having lots of options

b) Making those options discoverable for beginners

is with some kind of nested categorization scheme. Any UI you create to render that will naturally converge onto a high-fan-out tree-like menu.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#136

Post by somat »

tredre3 wrote: post #98
robertoandred wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t call Blender’s UI particularly great either. The assumption that you have three mouse buttons and a separate number pad is pretty crazy.

Three buttons mice have been the standard for well over 20 years. I'll give you that when blender was first released, three button mice were not common. Those assumptions are only crazy if you're an Apple user or a laptop user who uses a touchpad to 3d model.

As a tangent, the single greatest thing about my Lenovo laptop that I was not looking for when I bought it was that it has three physical buttons for the touchpad(or that pointer thing if you use it). I love X11 style middle click paste. So that middle button elevates it to the best feeling laptop I have ever used.

A note on that pointer thing, I don't use it much, instinctively going for the pad and as such sort of dismissed it. Until I was trying to use the laptop in moving vehicle where the pad was useless due to bouncing but the pointer, rock solid. I totally get it now. lesson: Touch screens sort of suck anyway but are really terrible in moving/bouncing vehicles.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#137

Post by kbolino »

Jaxan wrote: post #57
p-e-w wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, Thunderbird is getting more donations than Blender? I was under the impression that Thunderbird is on life support, while Blender is everywhere.

Market size is different: everyone needs a mail client, but not everyone needs 3d modelling.

The audience may be larger, but I don't feel like it's anywhere near "everyone". Personally, I don't know anyone who still uses a dedicated email client except in specific institutional settings. I haven't touched one outside of a corporate office myself in 20 years. Webmail has been good enough for longer than many people have been using computers.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#138

Post by maccard »

agumonkey wrote: post #118
maccard wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Games are still almost completely maya. At a studio I worked in, we had a handful of people who used blender but would export to maya because of all the tooling we had for maya.

was this all builtin maya features or a lot of commercial extensions for game artists ?

It’s stuff like “we enforce a naming convention for all bones”, or “we do a coordinate flip” or “limit number of material references”. It’s all bespoke custom stuff that exists in every studio but is slightly different, and project specific.

I’m not an animator but I do know that mayas rigging support is second to none; we’re often working on characters with 100+ bones and 200k triangles being driven by said bones. The standards stay standard for a reason when working at that complexity.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#139

Post by robertoandred »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #120
robertoandred wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laptops have been outselling desktops for decades, and the idea that Apple users are some quirky tiny minority has been false for just as long. Blender’s UI just makes bad assumptions.

It makes assumptions that people doing serious 3D work are not on a laptop and can afford a keyboard with a numpad. Those aren't really bad assumptions.

They are silly assumptions, especially for an open-source project trying to gain mindshare.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#140

Post by mohamedkoubaa »

socalgal2 wrote: post #125

I love that Blender exists and I donate to it at a high-ish $$$ level monthly. That said, I can't help but feel something is wrong with 3D asset creation in that becoming an expert at Blender or 3DSMax, Maya or literally any other 3D creation software, it's a multi-month if not multi-year project. There are 1000s upon 1000s of options buried all over in nested upon nested options. Maybe AI will solve this. You ask fo…

A future where everything is very easy to learn is kind of dystopian
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