Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thunderbird did manage to buy out K-9.
Oh did it? I remember using K-9 on my Android phone years ago and being pretty happy with it.
Yes, K-9 has been shut down and Thunderbird for Android is what used to be K-9.
Blender 5.2 LTS
171–180 of 211 posts
Re: Blender 5.2 LTS
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-specifi…
To answer the question at the top, yes there are countless suites that are instantly resumable even after months away. I used to teach Blender (v3) and I think I could find my way around but the overhead isn’t worth it. I’m also though in a privileged position to be able to afford more, smaller commercial tools.
CAD: MoI (cool kids nowadays use Plasticity, but that is taking on similar feature creep - in any case I own and use both)
SubD modelling: nothing has ever beat Silo. And silo still gets updates, but the workflow is the same. Cheetah3D is also in the same boat.
Rendering (I do products, not character/CGI): Maverick. Fastest path tracer in the world, perpetual license, rivals Vray for product viz. if you’re currently using Keyshot - switch now.
Texturing: 3Dcoat or Marmoset Toolbag 5
What most of these have in common is either the workflow is super intuitive, or you have at least 15 years of training material readily accessible that still applies to the software today as it did back then.
Overall it’s a choice between a kitchen sink pipeline (Blender, Rhino) vs a specialised one. If I were to teach again, I would still use Blender in the classroom, and I fully support the project. My brain just works better with smaller, focussed tools.
Re: Blender 5.2 LTS
#173[dead]
Re: Blender 5.2 LTS
#174I 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.
that feels like the opposite analogy though - filleting a fish to the precision of a Michelin starred kitchen might be hard, but knives in general are easy to use, even for a beginner.
Re: Blender 5.2 LTS
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. T…
So you're on the engineering side of the animation pipeline ?
Re: Blender 5.2 LTS
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
There is a popular mcp interface but having them write blender scripts is also pretty usable.
Re: Blender 5.2 LTS
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. T…
So you're on the engineering side of the animation pipeline ?
Im on the engineering side of everything! But yep.
Re: Blender 5.2 LTS
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
How well do agents interact with blender? Do they modify files directly or through an API/mcp?
There is a popular mcp interface but having them write blender scripts is also pretty usable.
Nice. I'm currently slowly studying how Godot works and I'll next try to see if there is a usable workflow for designing assets in blender and using them in Godot.
Re: Blender 5.2 LTS
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ha…
I spent a lot of time in a… not-quite-legitimate version of PS 7 too. Feels almost like a rite of passage for many of us of a certain age.
And yeah, 7 was quite efficient and zippy, basically just 6 with a few new features and compatibility with newer OSes (first version to run natively on OS X for example). Ran it on a 400Mhz G3 without issue, which would be futile to even attempt with modern versions.
Re: Blender 5.2 LTS
#180I 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 w…
well if you looked at blender 2 days, UI was really "user-hostile" level difficult/un-intuitive
I think about blender 4? there was a big UI overhaul here