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Blender 5.2 LTS

blender.org

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Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#121
post #90

Slightly Off topic: For those working inside the industry, Is the professional space still dominated by 3D Studio Max and Maya? I just checked Lightwave 3D and Cinema 4D is still getting updated. Just found out Zbush got bought by Cinema 4D. And Foundry decided to wind down development of Modo. A lot of these names were big in late 90s and early 00s. I am wondering if everything is still pretty much the same. Speakin…

Nuke, Fusion and Houdini are the de-facto for animation and still very heavily used.

I've worked in the animation and currently the VFX realm.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#122

Look at that wow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqfLYIJMv7I

holy. this is a pretty cool video. I am learning how to use AI to vibe coding blender videos and this is like very good!

How well do agents interact with blender? Do they modify files directly or through an API/mcp?

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#123
post #108

Blender is certainly a great software, but there are still remains of bad UI choices, for example how zooming works https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/644/why-does-the... They improved the UI already, but maybe they could improve it a little bit more. And this is not the only frustration, I constantly have to ask around for little things like that. Also important to know, but late blender versions don't supp…

Blender is one of the most infuriatingly un-intuitive UIs I've ever experienced. It's always having to be used with it in one screen, a myriad of guides/forums/etc on the other.

Do you have a preferred 3D (polygon) modelling/graphics tool where you feel like you don't need to keep up guides and forums?

I've been hearing this complaint since Blender 2.48 twenty years ago, where it might've had some merit. But even then you could still pick it up in at most a few weeks with focused study, and the biggest non-intuitive (in terms of adherence to things like OS guidelines etc) and Blender-specific features and workflows remain the same to this day, and the interface overall is remarkably consistent and effective once you get used to it.

The only thing I can see that comes close to doing the same thing in terms of a general/integrative/swiss-army-knife-of 3D content creation suite are to this day Autodesk Maya and 3ds max, and maybe increasingly UE and Unity. I wouldn't exactly say you can just "intuitively" click around in any of those and high-quality results come out by default. Other software may be better at specific things and perhaps offer a more focused UI for some subset of tasks, sure, but at that point you're using the wrong tool sticking with Blender.

But in basically all cases, as soon as you're doing anything moderately complex, you're constantly referring to the manual/LLMs/tutorial videos. This stuff is just difficult, man, and most of the difficulty is even orthogonal to the software itself!

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#124

As someone who spent quite some time (>1000hr) in Houdini, I really wonder what's the secret behind Blender's rendering engines and why SideFX failed to catch up. Cycles are so much faster than Karma on my machine. Eevee can get impressive results in real time while Houdini's real time viewport is bare bone.

Cycles is getting direct code contributions from all major hardware vendors.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#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 for or sketch what you want and it does the 3000 steps to create it for you.

There just has to be a better way than what we have now. It (3d asset creation) practially hasn't changed much since ~1995. If you compare 3DSMax 1995 to Blender, with few execptions, you'll find them very recognizable. Yes, there are amazing features that have been added but still. It's quite a slog to get good at, not just artistic good, that's a whole extra level of training, I just mean good at knowing where and how to use the software.

I wish I had an idea for how to make it easier.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wow, did not expect blender to be 32 years old, thanks for correcting me. but still, they were open sourced about 1 year apart. I still think having a bigger user base is a good reason for the difference

That's relevant to why it historically had bizarre UX issues, like ctrl+s being the shortcut to erase the scene and start a new one: it predated most of those conventions, and has its own UI tooling. It's also always been designed to use three mouse buttons, coming from the Unix world, which used to be problematic when not everyone had a mouse with a clicky scroll wheel. It's come an absurdly long way since I first d…

UI standardization, CUA, X11, Motif date from the late 80s.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#127

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 ?

I have not tried building custom solutions in Blender, but Maya is built for custom solutions. The entire thing is a C++ engine and then the UI you see is built from scripts, scripts you can fork and edit. (or it was as I haven't actually used Maya in a while). And of course they there are plenty of examples of customizations or custom UIs included to help get started.

Note: Blender might have this too. I haven't tried. But, my impression so far is Blender didn't start this way and trying to add it in after the fact is difficult. Maya stays clean because any UI feature needs to buildable from scripts. By enforcing that rule on themselves, they keep it customizable.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#128

This on a M5 Max machine with 40 core GPU and 48GB ram is pretty fast. Preview cycles directly on the canvas without much delay. Can't say the same on my older M1 Ultra machine. Blender has come a long way and is very impressive how it is evolving in such a good way.

I worked on a short this past year, primarily on an M1 Pro 32GB. This was mostly compositing a single visible model into a scene and modeling shadowcatchers, lighting, holdouts, etc. Modeling was typically fast, but I was surprised at what tanked render times and how there was little ability to debug what that was. A modifier here, a filter in the compositing graph there, and something that started as a 10s/frame ren…

Can’t render a scene from a command line? Should be doable for anything running on Unix. Need to have the assets available however.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I have not tried building custom solutions in Blender, but Maya is built for custom solutions. The entire thing is a C++ engine and then the UI you see is built from scripts, scripts you can fork and edit. (or it was as I haven't actually used Maya in a while). And of course they there are plenty of examples of customizations or custom UIs included to help get started. Note: Blender might have this too. I haven't tri…

oh yeah i remember how maya was architectured so well, and from the start indeed. i don't know the innards of blender but the python layer seems powerful.. yet afaik there's no derived computed attributes like $ball.x = $feet.x / 2 or that would require using some 2nd class objects (transformators or something like this), quite un-ergonomic.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#130

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…

Why does it have to be easier? It’s like asking for soccer to be easier so you can play in the World Cup.
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