Apple Joins Blender Development Fund • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#281

Post by runevault » Sat, Oct 16, 2021, 10:40 PM UTC

cmarschner wrote: post #274

runevault wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ther…

You can sculpt stuff you made with geometry, you don't have to start from the sculpt sphere. But yes if you only want things to be fairly geometric sculpting is less useful, but if you want to make things like broken pillars it makes creating those effects easier.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#282

Post by yreg » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 2:56 PM UTC

southerntofu wrote: post #259

yreg wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a mandatory "informatics" class in all years (age 6 to 18). At start we learned how to use computers and programming in logo. Age 10 was HTML. Then there was a year for OpenOffice, a year for 3D graphics in Blender (I think when we were like 14). We had some lessons on vector graphics in Inkscape. Some lessons on audio editing in Audacity. We learned some Unix basics. Later we returned to HTML and learned CSS.…

Wow, where's this school with such program? Back in my day, we had BASIC programming on TI calculators. Younger (french) children i meet don't even have programming lessons, they're just taught how to use Microsoft Office and laposte.net webmail... just enough tech proficiency to be efficient wage-slaves, but no political/technical reflections.

I went to an experimental public school in Slovakia. We were allowed to diverge somewhat from rules ministry of education prescribes for the ordinary schools. So the teachers had more freedom in doing whatever they wanted. Usually it worked well, but sometimes it didn't.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#283

Post by cma » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

user-the-name wrote: post #116

progbits wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess some will see this as good news, but further entrenching Metal is just sad in my opinion. So much wasted effort just because they can't admit they lost the standards game and won't move to Vulkan. The generous interpretation is they just don't want to invest into that if it isn't "broken" but the cynic in me can't help but think at least part of the motivation is being different and maintaining the wall aroun…

Vulkan isn't a viable alternative for Apple. Apple wants to give developer an easy to use API to encourage them to use it as much as possible. Vulkan does not offer that.

Nah they want lock in, in the Epic Suit Epic used almost none of their libs but had to use Metal to function, and they were about to extract leverage by pulling a dev license for desktop. All POSIX and Vulkan/OpenGL and they could have stayed safe.

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#284

Post by neop1x » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 4:55 PM UTC

drawkbox wrote: post #185

Glad to see Apple supporting more open 3d tools. Apple was huge in getting open standards funded at Khronos for OpenGL ES, WebGL and more. These investments led to lots of great things and innovations. The market for 3d tools is one of the most fixed markets out there and the tools are expensive, that has caused interoperability issues and standards being more proprietary. For instance, COLLADA wasn't great but it wa…

Except for OpenGL deprecation on Mac and forcing devs to use their proprietary Metal instead of cross-platform Vulkan...

Re: Apple Joins Blender Development Fund

#285

Post by southerntofu » Sun, Oct 24, 2021, 10:06 AM UTC

yreg wrote: post #282

southerntofu wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, where's this school with such program? Back in my day, we had BASIC programming on TI calculators. Younger (french) children i meet don't even have programming lessons, they're just taught how to use Microsoft Office and laposte.net webmail... just enough tech proficiency to be efficient wage-slaves, but no political/technical reflections.

I went to an experimental public school in Slovakia. We were allowed to diverge somewhat from rules ministry of education prescribes for the ordinary schools. So the teachers had more freedom in doing whatever they wanted. Usually it worked well, but sometimes it didn't.

Oh experimental schools are so cool usually. Too bad after a few years the ministry usually comes in and tears down everything because the experiments were so successful [0].

If you ever write about your experiences there and what worked and what didn't, i'd be very interested in a link to the post! :)

[0] For example in France, the public ministry of Education has been running test programs with "Montessori" education techniques for several decades (the techniques are >100y old). All of these experiments have been strong successes, and that's precisely why they were never implemented globally. The government doesn't want people to get too smart.. they'd rather have docile wage-slaves who bow before the flag.