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Blender 5.0

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Re: Blender 5.0

#291

Post by mroche »

jsheard wrote: post #271
mroche wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> on the most demanding real-world production workloads (think Pixar/Weta), which for now it hasn't been. Super small nit (or info tidbit), but it doesn't take away from your overall message regarding production and scene scale. Pixar does not and has not used Maya as the primary studio application, it's really only used for asset modeling and some minor shading tasks like UV generation and some Ptex painting. The ac…

Good to know! > Presto, which is an in-house tool Pixar has developed > Dreamworks is similar with their tool, Presto, IIRC. I guessed that's a typo though and yeah, the Dreamworks animation tool is called Premo.

> I guessed that's a typo though and yeah, the Dreamworks animation tool is called Premo.

Bah, I thought I proofread that! Yes, super late night typos strike again...

Re: Blender 5.0

#292

Post by WillAdams »

jiggawatts wrote: post #230
WillAdams wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you been tracking https://fornjot.app/ Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30597061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30825429 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32295690

I haven't heard of fornjot, but that's not a surprise because I haven't been involved in the CAD field for a very long time (decades). My thinking is to approach the problem from a fundamentally different angle. There's already constructive solid geometry (CSG) kernels, triangle mesh kernels, and NURBS-based kernels. Their mathematical foundations are very different, which results in wildly different behaviour and ca…

I've been working on a quite simplistic tool which currently just supports writing out DXFs and moving tools in lines and arcs for a 3D preview in OpenPythonSCAD --- I _think_ I can envision what you are describing, and it sounds very interesting, and might be an approach I'd want to look into for 4th and 5th axis work --- do you have any texts/references which you could share/point to?

Re: Blender 5.0

#293

Post by [deleted] »

bigyikes wrote: post #109

What does Blender do differently that makes it such a successful open source product? It’s powerful and pleasant to use. Even the release marketing page is beautiful and well-made. I like open source as much as the next guy, but outside of developer tools there is little that comes close to Blender in terms of utility and UX. Is it funding? Specific individuals? Are there PMs and designers? Whatever it is, it’s worki…

[deleted]

Re: Blender 5.0

#294

Post by Kye »

embedding-shape wrote: post #262
Kye wrote: post #163

This reminds me of a Reaper changelog: lots of small quality of life changes each for a small percentage of users that add up to an overall massive improvement. It's not as splashy as huge feature releases but ultimately leads to better software.

This though has huge feature releases, biggest one seem to be a complete overhaul of the video editor, among others. Just so people don't get the impression that your comment is actually about the Blender 5.0 release :)

Reaper did sneak in a whole notation editor once inside a massive list of changes. Normally a $300 addon for DAWs.

Re: Blender 5.0

#295

Post by wongarsu »

jl6 wrote: post #257
wongarsu wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So if we turn the clock back ten years, Visual Studio (the behemoth sold by MS to C# and C++ developers) would be an application, wouldn't it? It solves a clear business need, otherwise why would businesses pay so much money for it (more than for Photoshop). MSSQL and Oracle DBMS clearly solve business problems, they have slick UIs and sale people with powerpoint decks. Perforce P4 is an application that solves business needs for creatives (and also comes with P4V for a slick UI and costs photoshop-level money)

But at the same time Visual Studio is in the same category of software as VS Code, Oracle DBMS in the same category as postgresql, Perforce P4 in the same category as git. Surely that can't be it?

I'd agree in a heartbeat that developers are better at solving problems for developers. The less disconnect there is between developer and customer the better development goes, and the disconnect doesn't get lower than building developer tooling. But those things aren't any less apps or more tools than the things artists or technical writers or accountants use

Re: Blender 5.0

#296

Post by nirvdrum »

Fabricio20 wrote: post #144
1220512064 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK how they compare to professional CAD tools, but I've heard good things about FreeCAD and OpenSCAD. I know that some people use Blender for CAD work, and there are even some extensions to make it easier, but I'm dubious that the representation of meshes that Blender uses are well-suited for CAD applications.

I tried FreeCAD and the user interface is so unintuitive and things just have constraints that block you from doing the most basic things from the get-go that I just gave up in 10m, like sibling. SCAD is scripted/programmer CAD, I like the concept and have used for a few things but it's quite a learning curve to do anything more than a cube with some funny edges! Dune3D is currently my go-to for 3d-printer related pa…

Have you tried since the 1.0 release? There were quite a few improvements that were locked behind weekly builds for a long time. AstoCAD[1] might be another option for you. It's basically FreeCAD with a streamlined UI.

[1] -- https://www.astocad.com/

Re: Blender 5.0

#297

Post by neutronicus »

polishdude20 wrote: post #41
gehsty wrote: post #26

I’d really like to see something like blender come for the 3D CAD industry, at the moment it feels like the only people who would lose out are AutoDesk. The amount of money that flows in and out of 3D cad (as subscription and then value created) having a first class open source kernel and tooling, would be giving big industrial players freedom to modify and tailor to their needs as well as smaller / hobbyists get sta…

Onshape has blown me away with its browser interface and how quick it all loads. And as long as your projects are public, it's free.

OnShape is just another skin over Parasolid (closed-source geometry kernel sold by Siemens) like SolidWorks, VectorWorks, and others I forget.

So it doesn't really represent meaningful progress towards FOSS CAD because ultimately it uses the same proprietary, expensive library to do the heavy lifting as most of its competitors.

Re: Blender 5.0

#298

Post by mijoharas »

WillAdams wrote: post #290
mijoharas wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was somewhat excited about it, but one feature I wanted for the thing I was doing at the time was importing an svg, which it didn't support at the time (and from a cursory github search still doesn't support?). It's a shame, because it looks really nice. Maybe I'll check it out for the next thing I do where that's not a requirement. Might be a shame since I've finally learnt how to (basically) use freecad now!

Importing an SVG will require support for Bézier curves, which is a tough lift mathematically.

looks like they've got some support for bezier's internally (and they allow exporting SVG's) so I assume the building blocks should be there? I definitely have no idea, and haven't looked into it though.

Re: Blender 5.0

#299

Post by nirvdrum »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #72
nickthegreek wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how long ago did you try? the recent advances have turned me into a believer as a hobbyist compared to the first time i checked it out.

I tried it this year. Not in too much depth, but I tried Fusion and FreeCAD for the first time this year for 3D printing and found I was getting much further much faster on Fusion. I'm sure I could grind harder and learn more and make FreeCAD work, but I'm not sure why I'd bother.

If all you're looking to do is produce a design the quickest way possible, then sure Fusion often wins. Just as there was a time where buying Maya made more sense than using Blender. But, FreeCAD offers other niceties, like being able to work offline, using an open file format, performant non-web UI, generally avoiding vendor lock-in. And Autodesk already did a major rug pull with Fusion360 licensing once.

I mostly design functional 3D prints. I've found FreeCAD 1.0 fixed most of the annoyances I ran into and I'm pretty productive with it. But, I didn't come into it with an expectation of a SolidWorks or Fusion clone. I learned the tool with its own idioms and it seems pretty straightforward to me. It's not perfect by any means and I've run into the occasional bug. To that end, I've found reporting bugs with reproducible steps goes a long way to getting things fixed.

I'm not sure what it is about CAD in particular, but I find everyone wants the "Blender of the CAD world" while skipping over the decade of investment it took to get Blender where it is. For a long time, discussions about Blender were dominated by complaints about the UX. If we didn't have folks willing to work past a hit to productivity in order to make an investment into Blender, we wouldn't have the amazing open source tool we have today. FreeCAD has all the expectations of a high quality open source CAD tool with hardly any of the investment. Just getting people on /r/freecad to file issues is surprisingly challenging.

By all means, if you're happy with Fusion and don't mind the licensing, have at it. I'm sure there's functionality in there without an equivalent in FreeCAD. I'd personally rather not have my designs locked up in Fusion and see FreeCAD as the best option for me, even if it suffers from the challenges of open source UI design.

Re: Blender 5.0

#300

Post by MayeulC »

Fabricio20 wrote: post #146
gehsty wrote: post #26

I’d really like to see something like blender come for the 3D CAD industry, at the moment it feels like the only people who would lose out are AutoDesk. The amount of money that flows in and out of 3D cad (as subscription and then value created) having a first class open source kernel and tooling, would be giving big industrial players freedom to modify and tailor to their needs as well as smaller / hobbyists get sta…

If you are looking for a tool that handles constraint based CAD for mostly like 3d printing your stuff, give Dune3D a try (on github), it's currently my go-to to keep a workflow similar to what I used to have on Fusion360, it's lightweight, open source and pretty damn good. The author also develops a EDA/circuit board designer called Horizon EDA.

Ah, interesting, it looks like Dune3D is based on solvespace with opencascade: https://docs.dune3d.org/en/latest/why-another-3d-cad.html

I was going to suggest solvespace. It is very barebones, but was much easier to use than FreeCad for me. It also has constraints in 3D space, which I use a lot: https://solvespace.com/index.pl

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