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Blender 5.2 LTS

blender.org

201–210 of 211 posts

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#201
post #42

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 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…

"Torched"? Nah, not at all. But the donut tutorial is famous for a good reason. A donut is basically a torus, which is one of the basic shapes that Blender gives you, so you're starting from a shape that's nearly right — and then the tutorial teaches you how to deform it slightly so that it looks less perfect and therefore more "real". Which means that you're learning the process of modeling. That same tutorial then teaches you the process of texturing, of lighting... By going through the process of crafting an object you don't actually care about, you learn the steps involved in crafting the ones you do care about.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#202
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 wish Autodesk had a Creative Cloud equivalent: imagine a 50€ / month subscription that gives access to all Autodesk apps, it would have sold like hotcakes. By remaining expensive proprietary tools, they lost the new generations of developers who learned 3D with Blender and Houdini Apprentice and who will naturally continue to use them once they become professionals, so the customer base will keep shrinking.

[deleted]

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im on the engineering side of everything! But yep.

how are things in this industry ? are you doing low level cpp ? python glue code ?

The people writing the tools in maya are writing python. Most people on the game itself are writing C++. On a project with 30 engineers or so, you might have one, maybe two people writing “low level” c++, everyone else is writing “high level” gameplay code (in c++).

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of those options are necessary complexity, not incidental. I believe this is false. I believe we just haven't figure out how to do it. I know it's not the same but if you give a sculpture a piece of clay they do not need 10000 options to mold it. Even a carpenter or wood smith don't need that many options. I'm not saying I have the answer. I learned 3DSMax in 1995 and write extensive plugins for both 3DSMax a…

That exists. It's called ZBrush ( https://www.maxon.net/en/zbrush ). But ZBrush can't replace Blender.

Right on. And for all people's whining about it's UI and terminology being too confusing, it was designed for traditional maquette sculptors and it was hugely successful in helping them move into working digitally.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#205
post #201
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Torched"? Nah, not at all. But the donut tutorial is famous for a good reason. A donut is basically a torus, which is one of the basic shapes that Blender gives you, so you're starting from a shape that's nearly right — and then the tutorial teaches you how to deform it slightly so that it looks less perfect and therefore more "real". Which means that you're learning the process of modeling. That same tutorial then…

Perhaps, if the object I do care about crafting requires that process. I'd rather just learn the process I need when I need it, not waste my time doing a bunch of nebulous "this might be useful later" or conceptual stuff. Blender is an immensely flexible and well-featured tool. If I'm using it for 2D animation, making models for 3D Printing, or video editing, being able to make a donut is quite frankly, useless.

The donut tutorial is fine, but it is an error to believe it is appropriate or useful for everyone. Probably best for people who have more vague goals like "i want to be good at blender" and not "I have this very specific thing in my head that I want to make and none of the free models out there are close enough."

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#206

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 disagree. In the past ~20 years, more and more 3D assets have been created as very high-poly models and high-res textures first (via sculpting, photogrammetry and baking) and the optimization process was pushed to much later stages. I'm quite sure it was not the case in 1995. It's just like programming. We do have better tools and abstraction laye…

in 3d we have "blinns law", someone else probably has a better definition but basically it says that we keep adding complexity and details to a scene until it takes about an hour to render a frame. that being about as long as any artist is willing to wait to see their work. so even though a computer today could render toy story 1 in faster than real time, toy story 5 probably rendered per frame as about the same amount of time as toy story 1.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#207
Blender SYCL Back End question, is there any potential there to get Polaris and Vega iGPUs/dGPUs working for GPU accelerated Cycles rendering via SYCL? And so AMD's abandoned Polaris and Vega for ROCm/HIP support but what about SYCL and that Accelerator ecosystem that's more cross platform in the same manner that OpenCL once was with regards to GPU compute!

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nope. I started with old school blender.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#209
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.

A quick AI Google search and some fact-checking later, and yeah. At least as of 2 years ago, Thunderbird was getting 3x the contributions that Blender was. It just goes to show you how badly managed Thunderbird is, since Blender is doing so much more with the money. I'm more and more disappointed with Mozilla all the time.

Isn't this because thunderbird contributions are not ring-fenced but go to mozilla?

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nope. I started with old school blender.

I'm referring to C4D. If you used it after Blender, then you probably used the newer C4D UI.
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