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Blender 5.2 LTS

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Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#181

Post by throw0101d »

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…

> There are 1000s upon 1000s of options buried all over in nested upon nested options.

As the old saying: everyone needs just 20% of the features, but it's a different 20% for teach individual.

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#182

Post by mghackerlady »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #126
redwall_hp wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, but those are for simple tasks. Much like vi or emacs, the keybindings are esoteric and historical but so much of what makes the tools great is reliant on on said historical and esoteric behaviour that changing any of it becomes an exercises in futility

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#183

Post by mghackerlady »

KPGv2 wrote: post #107
viccis wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started pre-1.8, in the C-key era. Haven't used it in many years so looking at it every now and then is genuinely shocking to me how much it's progressed. I remember a family member who worked at a triple A game dev studio giving me a tour and when I talked to the 3D modeler guys there and told them I used Blender they stifled a chuckle. To be fair, it was a very rudimentary tool back with UI flows invented by and…

Yes, I remember fumblefutzign around in 2000 or 2001, and I can't believe its current state. I'm a writer, not an artist, so I doubt I'll ever get back into it, but I'm so happy to see where it's at.

If you have the time, taking some time to learn the basics, even just for fun, adds a neat skill to your toolbox. You never know when you might have a use for it. Even if you don't, sometimes learning a new creative tool gets the idea juices flowing

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#184

Post by mghackerlady »

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.

I feel like a project to make an adobe CS competitor, limited in scope to those early versions like CS1 or 2, could really get off the ground. I suspect for 99% of users, things added since the CS1/CS2 days aren't really used enough that not having them becomes a dealbreaker

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#185

Post by mghackerlady »

robertoandred wrote: post #91
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…

I wouldn’t call Blender’s UI particularly great either. The assumption that you have three mouse buttons and a separate number pad is pretty crazy.

Those are, and at the time of blenders creation were, assumptions that should be made for workstations. Things objectively work better with more buttons

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#186

Post by mghackerlady »

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.

Realistically, who among blenders target audience doesn't have 3 button mouses or a numpad? Numpads have been standard on desktop keyboards since the 80s, and any mouse sold today can at least kinda do middle click by clicking in the scroll wheel. Even a lot of laptops have numpads, and clever use of multitouch can emulate a middle click.

Mostly unrelated, but jesus christ you people are uberfocused on mindshare without stopping to think about who your product would actually be useful for

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#187

Post by mghackerlady »

ksec wrote: 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…

I know games at least are still predominantly done in Maya. That's starting to change, with newcomers having learnt blender and anything indie-adjacent using blender for years, but large AAA studios have used Maya for so long switching still isn't worth it

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#188

Post by mghackerlady »

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.

I really hope a similar revolution comes to photo and video editing. While there are plenty of really good FOSS video editors (including the one blender has), none of them are truly professional level. For photo editing, the GIMP is pretty much there, but it's old and crusty and maintained by a handful of people

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#189

Post by mghackerlady »

bigyabai wrote: post #134
KPGv2 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine if they made Gimp good, I have a vague recollection that twenty years ago GIMP paid some designers to come up with a great UI, but once the design was ready, GIMP was like "nah we don't like that" and kept their bad UI. I do image stuff so rarely that GIMP is fine because it's free. But its UI is so bad. I don't know about now, but I remember a few years ago someone pointed out that GIMP had over a million…

For minimal edits, Pinta does the job IMO: https://www.pinta-project.com/ Gimp still has a lot of good features that I find myself crawling back for, on bigger projects. But Pinta has that good ol' fashioned Paint.NET feel to it that a lot of people still strive for.

For even more minimal edits, I still use xpaint

Re: Blender 5.2 LTS

#190

Post by dmsehuang »

gchamonlive wrote: post #122
dmsehuang wrote: post #100

Earlier 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?

I have not started with blender yet. So far, my experience is with manim. and claude is actually not bad at it. give it a prompt and it can come up with a good scene design and then translate it into manim code. I still need to tweak the layout of the texts and the pace of the video and other "taste" part. I am thinking to apply similar strategy to blender. but I need to learn the basics of blender first.
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