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Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

blender.org

271–280 of 285 posts

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is highly extensible through plugins, mostly written in Python, though, unfortunately, lower layer operations are only exposed in C++. Other than cycles all the plugins are written in python—there is a C++ api generated at the same time as the python one but afaict only cycles uses it. Haven’t done any blender stuff in quite a while so I could be (hope I’m) wrong. Though, with a little gumption, it isn’t all tha…

When looking (briefly) at the API documentation, I was mostly interested in mesh manipulation - and there it says "Currently, for more advanced features such as mesh modifiers, object types, or shader nodes, C/C++ must be used." ( https://docs.blender.org/api/current/info_overview.html#inte... )

Yes, but those require rebuilding Blender. They're not expressed as plugins

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#272

Its great to see that Blender is slowly but surely becoming an industry standard. I was talking to my younger brother about this the other day. He and his girlfriend have just finished Uni. My brother is trying to get into a career with CG for film, and his girlfriend into graphic design. Its not great for my brother as he does have to learn a few tools like Maya and the like, but 90% of his work has been in Blender,…

Photoshop is no longer an industry-standard design tool, at least in digital. Most designers I know and work with use Figma, which is a browser-based collaborative design tool. It also has an unlimited free plan, which is great for students!

Photoshop was never really a standard for the kinds of work Figma is used for. The closest Adobe historical products would be Illustrator, or the now defunct, Fireworks.

Adobe doesn't really have a product to compare to Sketch or Figma. The closest currently is Xd but it's only a partial replacement

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#273
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Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#274

I‘ve spent countless hours learning Blender over the past few months (being completely oblivious of other 3D software to that point), mostly through many excellent Youtube videos like from BlenderGuru, and I think it is the most wicket piece of software I have tried to learn in decades. It makes learning the fundamentals of vi a piece of cake. It has hundreds of features, dozens of property dialogs, and most of all i…

Sculpting mode is worth learning. Grant Abbitt has some great tutorials on that front. Though if you dive too far into that you may wanna look at getting a Wacom tablet or similar. Actually Grant has a lot of good tutorials in general on Blender.

I‘m more interested in geometric structures / architecture, so the sculpt mode isn‘t very useful as I realized today (after watching a video about it). This is all about taking a sphere with lots of vertices and pushing them around. I‘m looking for a way to fill gaps in meshes and deal with relative simple low-poly geometries. Ideally with semantics (a thing is placed on a floor). What should I use for that? Are there plugins thatbpush Blender towards CAD (which I know nothing about)?

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#275

I‘ve spent countless hours learning Blender over the past few months (being completely oblivious of other 3D software to that point), mostly through many excellent Youtube videos like from BlenderGuru, and I think it is the most wicket piece of software I have tried to learn in decades. It makes learning the fundamentals of vi a piece of cake. It has hundreds of features, dozens of property dialogs, and most of all i…

Registered just to reply to ya comment. I've been using Blender for, ooo, I'd say about 15 years now? I've got almost every hotkey down to a reflex, explored the software extensively, even written my own plugins for Blender. I've watched it grow over the years and man, has it come SO far. And let me tell you... I can honestly say 15 years... I still feel like I'm barely scratching the surface. Blender is just an infi…

Thanks, the fact that you registered just to answer means a lot to me :-)

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#276
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Metal is the reason Vulkan exists That seems to give way too little credit to Mantle. Which was released in 2013 and became the basis for Vulkan.

Please re-read my parent comment. A few weeks after Apple announced Metal at WWDC Khronos members met for the first time ever to kickoff then project to replace OpenGL. I don't believe that is a coincidence. Maybe Metal was the straw that broke the Camel's back, maybe not. I also noted that AMD donated Mantle as the starting point which is why Vulkan didn't take 5 years to finalize. In any case claiming that Apple is…

> Please re-read my parent comment.

I just said that it's severely overstating the case.

> In any case claiming that Apple is somehow at fault for not adopting Vulkan doesn't make sense.

Why not? They could have adopted Mantle instead, for example. It came out a year earlier. Or it could have replaced Metal with Vulkan later (as it is often a reasonable choice to replace your custom solution with the industry's standard). Or it could have chosen to officially support Vulkan alongside it.

Apple has lots of money in the bank, and with that, lots of options.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#277
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel a weird sense of loss for Google Glass. I feel like the controversies that set it back also set back the entire AR space. I wonder what life would be like if I could wear a HUD that showed me an AR overlay. It might bubble up an alert to remind me to drink a glass of water to stay on track for the day. A to-do list might slide in from the side if I tap a button near my temple. A friend calls and their animated…

The water alert will also mention that you would be better hydrated if you bought ElectroX, the electrolyte drink for serious thinkers. The to-do list will include an item to check out the latest release of Banging Cans, your favorite band. By allowing you to see your friend and his surroundings, you are implicitly allowing through images of the products that are visible, and therefore they will be added to your clou…

I definitely had a naive little image in my mind of how things would be, but I see where you're coming from. I think one of the things that would push monetization techniques like the ones you mentioned would be if the hardware doesn't have enough compute power to process video, audio, etc. Having to be tethered to a cloud would make it more feasible to do those sorts of intrusive things, ie how Alexa picks up audio but Amazon servers process it.

Although speculative cyberpunk is usually dystopic and oppressive, it fascinates me how much of those predictions have come through or are in the process of occurring. I think the major breaking point will be climate refugees moving toward cities, which could lead to megacities, which have notoriously been imagined as highly populated by an impoverished class of people.

Thanks for the little dose of reality. I hope we can nudge our future by starting these sorts of conversations.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#278

Its great to see that Blender is slowly but surely becoming an industry standard. I was talking to my younger brother about this the other day. He and his girlfriend have just finished Uni. My brother is trying to get into a career with CG for film, and his girlfriend into graphic design. Its not great for my brother as he does have to learn a few tools like Maya and the like, but 90% of his work has been in Blender,…

Photoshop is no longer an industry-standard design tool, at least in digital. Most designers I know and work with use Figma, which is a browser-based collaborative design tool. It also has an unlimited free plan, which is great for students!

To the best of my admittedly very limited knowledge, Figma is used for a different purpose (mostly) than Photoshop. Still, its worth recommending anyway, on the off chance thats actually what she should be using

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#279
post #94

The "problem" I have with Blender is that I can use it about once or twice a year, and of course every time I forget how it works (or the UI has been updated to include an even bigger maze of options). It would be great if Blender had an API on which someone could develop a more beginner-friendly UI. (Curious to know if that happens to be the case).

Check out bforartists, it's pretty much what you're describing.

https://www.bforartists.de/

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Metal is by far a much friendlier API than Vulkan Sure, but that was hardly the point of Vulkan in the first place. The point is to have cross-platform 3D grahipcs, but since Apple never gave a shit about anything cross-platform, they chose to write their own stuff. And if they actually did care, they could have modeled the same API as they have with Metal, but over Vulkan, so the engine is the same but the API is…

Well you can use Vulkan over Metal with MoltenVK, so that point is a bit moot. Opinion time: WebGPU will become the standard graphics API to target for cross-platform. gfx-rs/wgpu already works over Vulkan/Metal/D3D12/D3D11/OpenGL/WebGL & WebGPU in browsers. Much better than simply Vulkan, unless performance is your primary sticking point.

How is the point of Apple pushing Metal instead of Vulkan when the change request submitted to Blender is not using the MoltenVK stuff you're talking about? If anything it proves my point
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