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Blender 5.2 LTS

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Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#141

Post by diamondtea »

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…

As both a Photoshop and Blender expert (used both professionally for many years), almost all of it is heuristic/technique (memorizing what/where things are) not unlike learning kitchen utensils and the locations of the drawers they’re in.

So it’s

1) knowing what you even need to do in the first place to make the sphere, or swap the texture, or delete the lights, or etc.

2) where that tool is and how it works

Then later you can get into hotkeys and what your workspace looks like, and you can develop more of a command of things. Just start very goal oriented and pretend you’re staying in an Airbnb in a foreign country - you just need to figure out how the stuff works and where they are.

Hope that helps! Oh yeah and then there’s the typical OS level menus like saving, exporting - you probably natively know how to do that stuff already. So you can also use Blender to convert say glb to fbx and so-on, while making little edits you might need.

Be obsessed with your project so you have to use these things.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#142

Post by bluefirebrand »

robertoandred wrote: post #139
bluefirebrand wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you want them to do about it, exactly? 3D artwork is a complex activity that requires a lot of keys to have a useful keybinding setup. Some of those keys are going to be the numpad

Go look at Blender's default keybinds and tell me what you would change so the numpad wasn't really necessary. If you can simplify their keybinds I'm sure they would love to see your PR.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#143

Post by Animats »

diamondtea wrote: post #141
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…

As both a Photoshop and Blender expert (used both professionally for many years), almost all of it is heuristic/technique (memorizing what/where things are) not unlike learning kitchen utensils and the locations of the drawers they’re in. So it’s 1) knowing what you even need to do in the first place to make the sphere, or swap the texture, or delete the lights, or etc. 2) where that tool is and how it works Then lat…

> almost all of it is heuristic/technique (memorizing what/where things are) not unlike learning kitchen utensils and the locations of the drawers they’re in.

Then, in the next release, they move.

Yesterday's Blender experience: for some reason, mouse pans stopped working. Zoom and orbit still worked, but pan didn't. No idea why. Had to quit and restart.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#144

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

BadBadJellyBean wrote: post #54
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I started with blender and then tried C4D. Never got the hang of it. Familiarity is really a strong factor.

You probably used the newer UI which is almost nothing like the old, pre-Blender UI. The newer UI sucks.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#145

Post by -0_0- »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #65
kdheiwns wrote: post #50

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. Mean…

IMO, Adobe suite peaked somewhere around CS1/CS2 (which ran happily on my single core 2Ghz iMac G5) and it’s been downhill ever since. A variant of CS2 that’d been feature frozen (aside from smaller technical improvements like wide gamut support) and ruthlessly optimized and bug-fixed up until present day would be vastly preferable to the trainwreck that is CC.

As a kid with no cash but a lot of passion, I spent months cobbling together a fully working version of Photoshop 7 (pre-CS days) from various files extracted from free demo and upgrade installers. Technically did nothing illegal and ran that single version for a good 18 years across various PCs, eventually powering a large media company's output with it (in fact there's a very good chance anyone reading this will have seen some of my Photoshop work given the reach of that company).

The main reason I never upgraded was that it was FAST, and until Adobe started rolling out AI features around 2020 there were almost no notable additions made to Photoshop other than new versions seemingly getting slower and arguably uglier. To this day I'll still occasionally boot up the old Photoshop 7 if I don't need to use content-aware fill, and I'll marvel at how zippy it feels.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#146

Post by ColdStream »

mohamedkoubaa wrote: post #140
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

I think it is more an attempt at a difficult task. Easy to pickup the basics but having lots of room to grow.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#147

Post by jamesfinlayson »

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…

I'm glad it's not just me - I do game modding in my spare time and I figured out how to use Hammer to make maps - it took a day or two but I figured it out.

I wanted to make some models too but when I downloaded Blender and looked at a tutorial to create a cube and I just thought... why is this so complicated? It looks easier now (I was probably looking at doing it close to 20 years ago) but back then it seemed crazy that there was a long tutorial just to create a cube.

I played with a simpler modelling program called Anim8or (https://www.anim8or.com/) and it was quite nice to use though - I could create shapes and drag the vertices and it all seemed quite intuitive.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#148

Post by diamondtea »

Animats wrote: post #143
diamondtea wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As both a Photoshop and Blender expert (used both professionally for many years), almost all of it is heuristic/technique (memorizing what/where things are) not unlike learning kitchen utensils and the locations of the drawers they’re in. So it’s 1) knowing what you even need to do in the first place to make the sphere, or swap the texture, or delete the lights, or etc. 2) where that tool is and how it works Then lat…

> almost all of it is heuristic/technique (memorizing what/where things are) not unlike learning kitchen utensils and the locations of the drawers they’re in. Then, in the next release, they move. Yesterday's Blender experience: for some reason, mouse pans stopped working. Zoom and orbit still worked, but pan didn't. No idea why. Had to quit and restart.

Blender - or any super successful FOSS - feels to me like stumbling upon amazing vehicles and technology left behind in the fields in a post-war environment.

Who knows who made this thing, or where it was made. I discovered it, let’s see how it works.

You start twisting knobs and the damn thing turns on! You fly it around a bit, you get a ton of use out of it, maybe you reverse engineer it, fork it, make your own version.

Eventually a corporate knock-off hits the market and you buy one. They solved all the little problems and painted it with clear coat.

But there’s something missing, and I come crawling back to the field - where I keep finding all these interesting machines

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#149

Post by ColdStream »

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.

Yes, but open source will never work!!!

That is 1000 proof pure distilled sarcasm.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#150

Post by orbital-decay »

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…

> If you compare 3DSMax 1995 to Blender, with few execptions, you'll find them very recognizable.

Workflows from 1995 have basically nothing in common with modern ones, everything is completely different and specialized in a lot of ways.

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