Cycles X

Cycles X
code.blender.org

In contrast, Maya is has more features overall but is... a piece of shit in many ways. It doesn't matter what hardware I've used; it's a rule that Maya has to crash randomly when doing basic things. I used to be able to just open the Hypershade, but with Maya 2020 merely opening it causes the entire application to crash.

So I've decided to ditch it for Blender. I'm not doing character animation anymore, but I still enjoy modeling and rigging some things I want to conceptualize in 3D space, as well as create 3D printables, and Blender is absolutely up to the task.

It kind of baffles me how little interest the motion picture and television industries have had in Blender. Big studios are still using Maya, which I know also crashes for them and has performance issues. They could pour all their money into improving Blender and eventually not have to pay Autodesk anymore for licenses for poorly managed software that seems to rarely receive bug fixes.

I mean, I recognize that its the "graphics pipeline", but there's all sorts of performance discussion points. You want the data to be in a particular form as it traverses the graph. The various bits of the graph want to be "pipelinable", and parallelized if possible (possibly executing on a 'Remote' GPU). The data may-or-may not be local to a certain location. (Ex: data in DDR4 will need to be transferred to GPU, and back. Or if you're in a render-farm situation, you may need to TCP-send the data to the remote computer before that computer can move forward with its rendering).

And of course: all of those need to be balanced out with the featureset of the underlying program. Anyone can make a fast "sphere-only" renderer/raytracer, but Blender supports many different types of meshes, NURBS, and other features, which is probably the bulk of the complexity.

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The depreciation of the OpenCL kernels is a bit sad, but understandable to anyone who has actually worked with OpenCL vs CUDA vs ROCm. The OpenCL kernels in Blender are particularly weirdly coded, so throwing them away might be the best option.

Do you see a push away from Maya and 3DS max for a more platform agnostic modeling environment? Blender seems to be mentioned all over the place for beginners. From what I am hearing on podcasts, Unreal Game engine is making a big push into film/animation production in addition to its impressive game credits. As long as you can export an FBX file UE4/5 should be a great pipeline, or do I have it wrong?

With Blender, it's not only a matter of learning the key combos, but it even has on-screen controls by default so you can at least use that. Maya used to have something similar, but they pretty much got rid of it. It's possible to configure Maya to make it easier to use with a trackpad, but the configuration for doing so is horribly obtuse and messes with mouse usage.