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Blender 5.0

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Re: Blender 5.0

#251

Post by flohofwoe »

omnicognate wrote: post #130
porphyra wrote: post #85

Blender is really an amazing case study of open source software. Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche. It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete. Meanwhile, in other niches, Microsoft Office still beats open source office suites like LibreOffice; Photoshop isn't about to give up its crown to GIMP; Light…

> Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche. I can think of a few more: Git obsoleted an entire category of commercial software seemingly almost overnight, VSCode has become by far the most widely used IDE (not entirely open source, though), TeX still dominates mathematical typesetting AFAIK (as it has…

> I can think of a few more: Git obsoleted an entire category of commercial software seemingly almost overnight

Hmm, what commercial software would that be? Visual SourceSafe (lol)? ;)

Git mostly replaced SVN, and that is free and open too. But in scenarios where specialized version control software (like Perforce) is needed, git (and git lfs) breaks down too, and quicker than SVN does - e.g. for versioning large binary files git has actually been a massive step backwards and without a real solution showing up in 2 decades.

Re: Blender 5.0

#252

Post by [deleted] »

porphyra wrote: post #85

Blender is really an amazing case study of open source software. Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche. It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete. Meanwhile, in other niches, Microsoft Office still beats open source office suites like LibreOffice; Photoshop isn't about to give up its crown to GIMP; Light…

[deleted]

Re: Blender 5.0

#253

Post by amelius »

porphyra wrote: post #85

Blender is really an amazing case study of open source software. Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche. It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete. Meanwhile, in other niches, Microsoft Office still beats open source office suites like LibreOffice; Photoshop isn't about to give up its crown to GIMP; Light…

> FreeCAD isn't even in the rear view mirror of Solidworks.

I'm curious, what are the main points where it's lacking? I hear stability is one of them, but what about features?

Re: Blender 5.0

#254

Post by keyringlight »

buster wrote: post #195
rr808 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Office is dying. Most grads we get only know Google docs and avoid Office. Most of our docs are on wikis or email now.

But, in my experience enterprises are moving to office365. Ten years ago I would have bet on the Google suite but it looks like Microsoft is winning this game in the corporate world. Google gets all the private users, Microsoft the companies. So, no, sadly, MS Office is not dying. I wish it would.

What I've occasionally seen pointed out for a whole range of separate microsoft software is it's not the merits of on individual bit of software that gets enterprises to use it, it's the M365 package deal of all of them, and once you're in that ecosystem then you might as well use it. Teams is the common example where this comes up, where it's shortcomings are well known but the costs of licensing and setting up an alternative can't get over the threshold.

Re: Blender 5.0

#255

Post by flohofwoe »

jsheard wrote: post #92
porphyra wrote: post #85

Blender is really an amazing case study of open source software. Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche. It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete. Meanwhile, in other niches, Microsoft Office still beats open source office suites like LibreOffice; Photoshop isn't about to give up its crown to GIMP; Light…

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, Blender has done far better than most open source software but Maya is still very much the industry standard. I don't think we can realistically say that Maya is beaten until Blender is battle-proven to the same degree, on the most demanding real-world production workloads (think Pixar/Weta), which for now it hasn't been.

> open source software but Maya is still very much the industry standard

IMHO that's only still true because large studios can't afford to move their entire highly customized production pipeline which they had built around Maya for nearly three decades to any other tool (Blender or not), even if they desparately want a divorce from Autodesk. Autodesk basically has them locked in and can milk them until all eternity or the studios go bankrupt.

I bet that the next generation of CGI and game studios will be built around Blender (and not based on the quality of those tools, but because of Autodesk business practices).

(edit: somehow my brain switched Adobe and Autodesk - forgiveable though because both use the same 'milking existing customers' strategy heh)

Re: Blender 5.0

#256

Post by andybak »

mkaic wrote: post #196

I think some of the coolest changes in this release are on the nodes side of things — they added Closures (kinda like lambdas!), Bundles (tuples/structs, I guess?), and Repeat (loops!) (already was in Geo Nodes, now it's in Shader Nodes too). Blender nodes have come a long way over the past decade and it's incredibly satisfying to see the care with which they have been developed. Blender's node editor is my personal…

I just wish there was a nice text based representation. I hate dragging boxes around the screen.

Re: Blender 5.0

#257

Post by jl6 »

wongarsu wrote: post #235
jl6 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TeX is arguably the only application amongst these, as opposed to tool (and that’s debatable). OSS definitely dominates in tooling, but successful open source end-user applications are rarer.

Where do you draw the line between tool and application? Even the qualifier "end user" application doesn't seem obvious to me. Is Photoshop an end user application or a tool for artists?

It’s debatable. Everything is layered, and one layer’s application/product is the higher layer’s tool/platform.

In the context of understanding where and why OSS is dominant, I think the tool/app distinction is whether the thing solves a software problem or whether it solves a business problem.

Through that lens, Photoshop is an application, while VSCode is a tool.

Re: Blender 5.0

#258

Post by elcapitan »

t_mann wrote: post #242
elcapitan wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think that in this audience OpenSCAD would be an option. I only do occasional design for some things to print, and I'm always happy to come back to my OpenSCAD text files that I can actually read and understand within minutes, rather than having to try to remember the correct click path through some giant graphical CAD software.

Fully agree that text-based CAD is the obvious path forward. But OpenSCAD won't cut it, it just lacks too many features, starting from basic fillets to more fundamental things like relative object positioning. Check out CadQuery, it's much more ergonomic and future-proof.

I've found that most of my additional feature needs are covered by the BOSL2 library, tbh. It's also a pretty compact core, so being rather limited to me is a good thing. I think I looked at CadQuery a year ago or so, but quickly went back to OpenSCAD.

Re: Blender 5.0

#259

Post by [deleted] »

flohofwoe wrote: post #251
omnicognate wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche. I can think of a few more: Git obsoleted an entire category of commercial software seemingly almost overnight, VSCode has become by far the most widely used IDE (not entirely open source, though), TeX still dominates mathematical typesetting AFAIK (as it has…

> I can think of a few more: Git obsoleted an entire category of commercial software seemingly almost overnight Hmm, what commercial software would that be? Visual SourceSafe (lol)? ;) Git mostly replaced SVN, and that is free and open too. But in scenarios where specialized version control software (like Perforce) is needed, git (and git lfs) breaks down too, and quicker than SVN does - e.g. for versioning large bin…

[deleted]

Re: Blender 5.0

#260

Post by blacklion »

crote wrote: post #118
porphyra wrote: post #85

Blender is really an amazing case study of open source software. Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche. It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete. Meanwhile, in other niches, Microsoft Office still beats open source office suites like LibreOffice; Photoshop isn't about to give up its crown to GIMP; Light…

> I wonder what will be the next category of open source to pull ahead? KiCad, for PCB design. They have been making massive improvements over the last few years, and with proprietary solutions shutting down (Eagle) or being unaffordable (Altium) Kicad is now by far the best option for both hobbyists and small companies. With the release of KiCad 5 in 2018 it went from being "a pain to use to, but technically suffici…

KiCAD becomes better and better, but one limitation embedded into its DNA is very annoying: one project - one schematic - one PCB.

It is very kludgy and cumbersome to split project into several PCB (for example, stack of PCBs connected by backplane or headers, like Arduino & Shield for it) and/or to have variations of the PCBs for one schematics, like TH and SMD variants of the PCB for exactly same schematics.

Even in my very modest almost-electrical (as opposed to electronic) projects I need one or another from time to time.

As far as I understand it is limitation which is not easy to fix, because all architecture of KiCAD is based on this 1-1-1 principle.

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